Ash blinked. “The chophouse it is, then. Let me get on a clean shirt.” He gestured to a few ink stains on the white linen.
“Oh don’t. I’m probably covered with ink myself. In fact, you ought to do something about your hair. Make it messier.” She pulled at the strand that had come loose from its pin. “That way we match.”
Ash gave her the sort of laugh that was really just a smile and an exhale. She felt her cheeks heat. Forced awkward friendliness was even worse than forced awkward civility and Verity wanted to run back down the stairs and hide in her study. “I’m covered in cat hair,” he said. “If that helps.”
“That’ll have to do,” she said with the air of making a great concession. “I’m impressed that you’ve used your manly wiles to get the cat to come close enough to leave hair on you.”
“I haven’t. She just likes to sit on all my furniture when I’m out. When I’m in, she perches on the bookcase and stares at me.” Sure enough, there was the cat, staring at them from atop the bookcase with an expression of concentrated malevolence. “I think she’s making up her mind whether to murder me or let me pet her. My strategy is to pretend that I haven’t noticed that she’s there. I think she’s a bit depressed about finding my rooms more comfortable than the street this autumn and consoles herself by acting like we’re enemies.”
“A sound plan.”
“All right,” he said, and slipped into his coat. “Chophouse or oyster room?”
“Ooh, oysters.”
Ash shrugged into his coat while Verity attempted to wrangle her hair into a pin. “No matter how many pins I use in the morning, it’s all over my shoulders by the afternoon. I could use five hundred pins with quite the same result. I think my hair simply opposes order. It’s anarchical.”
“It’s not all your hair,” Ash said, digging through his pockets. “Just that one strand. It’s the Jacobin wing.” He held out a hairpin.
“When did you start carrying those in your pocket?” she asked, recalling that this was not the first time he had produced a timely hairpin.
A very faint blush darkened Ash’s cheekbones and Verity felt her lips curl upward in response. “I find them all over the house,” he said. “You ought to consider what conditions you’re subjecting your hairpins to if they’d rather plummet to their death than work for you. Here,” he said, lifting a loose tendril of hair. “You expect your pins to do the work of subjugating the masses. It’s oppression. Your hair clearly wants to be free.”
“I think you’ve lost track of which party is the oppressed working class—the pins or my hair.”
“Both, Plum,” he said, and leaned close to pin the loose strand of hair in place. “There. That’ll do.”
She expected him to step back, but he stayed where he was, one hand still on the side of her head, his expression grave but wanting. This, she realized, was not about her. Whatever had stopped him from kissing her again had nothing to do with the strength of his feelings for her. He wanted to, body and soul. And he knew she wanted the same. But he was holding back, for whatever reason, and she needed to respect that. She needed to let him know that she was his friend, kisses or no. For God’s sake, he had lost two-thirds of his closest friends in the past month alone; the least she could do was assure him that he wasn’t going to lose her, no matter what.
“Come, Ash,” she said, stepping back and flashing him as bright a smile as she could. “Say good-night to your surly cat and let’s go out to supper.”
“Can’t do that,” Ash stage-whispered. “Then she’ll know we’ve noticed she’s there.”
“Silly me.”
The oyster room was crowded with people having supper before heading to the theater, so Ash and Verity had to make do with a small table in a dark corner.
“Do you think Nate could have written it?” she asked without preamble, trusting Ash to know she referred to the Perkin Warbeck book. “There are parts where the handwriting is terribly like his. And since he left, my letters to the writer have gone unanswered.”
“Ordinarily I’d say your brother is capable of anything, but perhaps not writing a three-volume novel that more or less upholds hereditary rule. All bad handwriting has a way of looking the same. However . . .” He tapped his fingers on the white linen table cloth. “He may have written the explicit scenes. I ought to have recognized his writing myself.”
“Why wouldn’t he have just told me?”
“Presumably because you would have insisted on knowing who wrote the rest of the book. And say what you will about Nate, but he’s not one to spill another person’s secrets.”
She held up her glass of wine and he tapped his against it in a silent salute to Nate.
After they had eaten and there was nothing left on the table but dishes of empty oyster shells, and the main room had more or less cleared out except for a handful of men and some women Verity supposed were prostitutes or courtesans, Ash cleared his throat. “Lady Caroline Talbot thinks I’m her brother’s natural son. She hasn’t said it in so many words, but she’s hinted strongly.”
“Is this some odd fancy of hers?” she asked hopefully, because from the look on Ash’s face he did not think being related to his lady botanist would be a good thing.
“No,” he said, with a grim shake of his head. “I’m afraid not. I keep thinking I ought to be glad to have blood family. To know where I came from. But I’m really not.”
She slid her hand across the table and took his. “You don’t need to be.”
“I wish I had never gone there. I feel like fate or God took away Roger and Nate and instead gave me these awful people. Well, she’s not awful. But that house.” He visibly shuddered.
“You don’t need to go back. It doesn’t matter that you might be related to them. In fact, that’s all the more reason to wash your hands of them, since they hardly did right by you.”
“But that’s just it. She didn’t cast me off. She’s hardly ten years older than us. And—” He picked up his wineglass, saw that it was empty, and grimaced. Verity shoved her still-full glass across the table at him and he promptly downed it. “Her brother—my father?—hurts her. I saw the bruises. And her father is either an invalid or a recluse. Plum, there’s an actual duke lurking in the attics while his son rampages about. I don’t think she has any family that isn’t demonstrably horrible. And I don’t have any family at all, so it seems I ought to at least try to be her family.”
She squeezed his hand hard. “You do have a family. And, look, Ash, you aren’t getting rid of me. I don’t have any lung conditions and I’m not in any danger of needing to flee the country to avoid criminal charges. You’re stuck with me. Understand?” He nodded but she squeezed his hand harder and lowered her voice. “It doesn’t matter if we don’t go to bed together. That’s a minor detail.” That was a lie, but she’d make it the truth if it was what Ash needed. “You’re my friend and I’m yours and that’s how it’s going to be, no matter what.”
He looked relieved, and she wondered how badly she had managed their friendship if he could have cause to doubt it. But he squeezed her hand back.
Feeling thoroughly farcical, Ash pulled the brim of his hat lower over his forehead. He arrived early at Cavendish Square and positioned himself behind a tree in the park across the street. If Lady Caroline timed Ash’s visits to coincide with the absence of her brother—Lord Montagu, Ash had learned—then it stood to reason that one might catch a glimpse of the man leaving the front door of Arundel House sometime after ten. He didn’t have to wait long. At half past ten the door was flung open by a footman and out came a tall man in a many-caped greatcoat. Even from Ash’s vantage point of several yards away, he could see that Lord Montagu had the same straight nose and firm jaw as his sister, the same dark hair, the same eyebrows that cut like slashes across the face.
This, Ash thought grimly, was how he would look in a few decades. There was no denying the family resemblance. It had been one thing to see his features echoed in the face of
a woman and to understand that there was probably some family connection between them. But recognizing those same features on a man, a man of approximately his own size and build no less, he could no longer ignore the significance of the connection. This man, who was presently shouting at his coachman, this man who left bruises on the wrists of his sister, was perhaps his own father. It was not a welcome thought. Ash far preferred to imagine that he had no family at all.
After the carriage was out of sight, Ash crossed the street and knocked on the door as usual. The footman, who a moment before had been pale and trembling, was now all calm efficiency as he sought his mistress.
“I saw Lord Montagu,” he said after Lady Caroline had presented him with today’s specimen.
“Did he come see you?” the lady asked, leaning forward urgently.
“I—no, why would he do that?” Ash responded in confusion. “I watched him leave from across the street.” He was not going to admit that he had been hiding behind a tree like a character in a pantomime.
“I see.” She sagged in relief. “Don’t do that again. I beg of you. He mustn’t catch sight of you. Please don’t arrive before a quarter past eleven. In fact, perhaps you shouldn’t come around at all. It was foolish of me to even consider it after realizing . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Does he resent the time you spend on your plants and your studies so very much?” he asked, trying to make sense of Lady Caroline’s distress. “Or is it that he wouldn’t want you to spend time with a man?”
“Oh, both of those things, certainly. But also—” She shook her head. “I can’t explain. He’s used to getting his own way, and when he doesn’t, he is quick to assign blame elsewhere. He blamed his wife for a good many things, and after she died, he found it convenient to transfer that blame to me.”
She spoke with a cool, neutral tone, but her hands shook as she turned over the pages of the herbarium. The purple half-moons that were always beneath her eyes seemed darker than they had the previous week. She looked up and caught his eye. He wasn’t certain what she saw there, but when she spoke it was in a tone of resolve. “Mr. Ashby, do you have a scar on your left forearm? You didn’t answer me last week.”
Ash sighed. Lady Caroline spent her days in obvious terror of her brother and literally tiptoeing around her father; it was only natural for her to wish she had a family member who did not make her quake with fear. She might be looking for stray family members, but Ash was not. He had surrounded himself with exactly who he pleased, and had created a sort of secondhand family. He did not want or need any connection with the people who had abandoned him. “I agree that there’s a family resemblance,” he said as gently as he could. “It seems likely that I’m an illegitimate relation of yours. But I don’t seek to profit from the connection, I assure you.” He let his gaze stray meaningfully to her wrists, where beneath the lace of her sleeves, traces of the bruises her brother left still lingered. “And I know it isn’t my place to say so, but Lord Montagu would perhaps retaliate against you if he knew you had sought out a baseborn relation. I would hate to be the cause of any harm to you.”
Something about this must have been dreadfully amusing, because she let out a burst of stunned laughter. “No, no, you quite misunderstand. Scar or no scar, Mr. Ashby?”
Ash tried to ignore her, tried to ignore the spot on his arm that seemed to pulse with awareness. He dipped his pen in the inkwell and drew a faint line on the page, but the ink blotted, marring the paper. There would be no drawing today, he already knew that. And he would not return to this house, to this woman whose life was so fraught that she sought ghosts from the past. He glanced at the delicate cup-like flowers of the specimen he would never get a chance to draw. Primula auricula, Lady Caroline’s feathered handwriting neatly stated; this specimen had traveled from high in the Apennines. He would miss coming here, miss hearing tales of flowers that bloomed in lands he would never visit.
“Fine,” Ash said, laying down his pen. He might as well get this over with, figure out how he was connected to this lot. Then Lady Caroline would perhaps have some peace of mind, and he could walk away with a clear conscience. “Before I give you an answer, I want to know who you believe me to be.” His mind snagged on that. He knew who he was and where he belonged, and nothing this woman could say would alter that. He cleared his throat. “Or, rather, who you believe has a scar on his left forearm. I think you could tell me that in the spirit of fairness.”
“Fair,” she repeated with a little laugh. “Would that fairness entered into the question of who belonged to this family.” She passed a hand over her eyes. “My eldest brother died over twenty years ago. He left a son. That child suffered a fall when he was four years old, severely breaking his arm. I believe it is called an open fracture, and there is no question but that it would have left a scar. The last time I saw the child was only hours after his injury.”
Ash did his best to brush off a memory of unguents and plasters, an arm burning hot as an oven. “What was that child’s name?”
“James.”
Ash let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding. He had half expected to hear a name that tugged at his memory the way the stairs, this garden, and Lady Caroline’s face all persisted in doing. “I have never been called James.”
Lady Caroline raised her eyebrows, but didn’t ask precisely what other names Ash had been known by, which was fortunate because Ash couldn’t have told her. He suspected he had repeatedly been removed from homes immediately after a seizure, when his memory was shot through with holes, with the result that the people at his next lodging called him whatever they pleased. The only reason John Ashby stuck was that it was under this name that he was sent to school.
“Neither was he,” Lady Caroline said. “We called him—”
“Don’t.” He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to risk finding out that all along he had a true name, a true identity that had been thrown away as surely as he had been.
“Do you have the scar, Mr. Ashby?” she whispered. “I quite understand if you’d prefer not to have anything to do with this family. Truly, I sympathize. But my father is very old and infirm, and he doted on y—on his grandson, and—”
“Please,” he said, holding his hand up to stop her from going on. Ash’s head was spinning and he didn’t know how to make sense of half her words. A duke doting on a bastard grandchild? A child who had been reared in the duke’s own household for the first years of his life?
“You don’t know what this means,” she insisted.
“It means there’s yet another bastard sired by a profligate nobleman.” It was a story that repeated itself every day across all the continents of the world. “And that he was cast aside to make his way in a world that treats bastards unkindly. I did well for myself despite your family’s treatment of me, and I don’t wish to be claimed now.”
“Oh, no,” Lady Caroline said, shaking her head. “You quite misunderstand.”
“I think I understand perfectly well,” he said, trying to mask his impatience.
“My brother married your mother.”
Ash blinked. “I’m sorry—”
“Your mother was Lady Eleanor Carstairs, the youngest daughter of the Earl of Staffordshire,” she added, as if this would clear things up. “She died when you were an infant. Your father died shortly thereafter.”
Ash gripped the edges of the table. “You’re telling me that I was legitimate?” Nothing, nothing at all, of the early part of his life, what little he knew of it, made sense if he were legitimate. If he hadn’t been a cast-off baseborn child, then he didn’t know who he was. And then, all at once, the rest of the lady’s words slotted into place. “If my father was your eldest brother, that makes me . . .” Before the words had quite left his mouth, the swirling mass of confusion in his mind coalesced into something that took an appalling shape. “No, certainly not.” He rose to his feet and stepped back from her, his chair squeaking loudly against the conservatory f
loor. “I’m not getting caught up in this. I’m going home, and I won’t return here.” He was halfway to the garden door. His pen and ink remained on the table and he wasn’t going back to get them. He took another step. “If anyone ever asks, I’ll deny this entire conversation.”
“Understandable. But before you do that, you perhaps will consider that you are the only thing standing between my brother and a dukedom. With that title will come a good deal of power and money and I know to a certainty that he’ll use both to do harm.”
His hand was on the door; all he had to do was push it open and walk through. But even as he felt the cool brass of the handle he knew he couldn’t. Lady Caroline was asking for his help. Help only he could provide. And Ash—whoever he was—wasn’t someone who could turn down a request for aid. He turned around, still leaning against the closed door.
“How came I to be sent away?” There were likely a dozen other questions he ought to be asking but that was all he could think of: why had he been sent away that first time, the abandonment that set in motion all the subsequent abandonments. The patchwork of memories that came before Roger, the constant disorientation, the sense of recovering from each seizure in a new and foreign place—none of that made sense if he had been the legitimate heir to a dukedom.
“That was entirely my doing, I’m afraid.” He stared at her. “You told me once that you didn’t think I would leave a child to die. After your father—my elder brother—died, you were all that stood between my other brother and a title. You survived the fall down the stairs but I was afraid you wouldn’t survive the next attempt. I had no choice but to send you away.”
“Attempt,” Ash repeated, not wanting her words to mean what he thought they might.
“Attempt on your life. I saw him push you down the stairs with my own eyes.”
A Duke in Disguise Page 11
