“My lady,” Ash said gravely. “I cannot let you leave unless I know you have someplace safe to go.” There was a quality to Ash’s voice that Verity hadn’t expected to hear, a note of affection and warmth that she hadn’t expected Ash to feel towards this strange woman, and which was at odds with the formality of his language.
“My brother left for the country this morning, so there is no immediate danger. I feared that he might have visited you on his way out of town. But I see he has not, so I will be on my way.”
“My lady. Aunt.” He laid his hand on her sleeve. “Visit your solicitor. I beg of you.”
Verity watched as the two of them stared at one another. Ash’s jaw clenched and his aunt looked up at him in confusion. “But, the terms of our arrangement,” Lady Caroline said incomprehensibly. “Your month is not up.”
“This has to be stopped, and now. Send me the time and direction and I’ll go with you to the solicitor.” He looked miserable. Verity did not know what they were talking about, but it certainly wasn’t a mere visit to a family solicitor. Something was happening that was beyond her comprehension, something that made Ash look more morose than she had ever seen him. He must have sensed her gaze on him, because he met her eyes and frowned. “I wish it could be otherwise,” he said, and she didn’t know whether he was speaking to her or to himself.
Lady Caroline left, and Verity and Ash stood two paces apart on the shop floor, he regarding her with a look so bleak that she knew they were both about to get their hearts broken.
“I’ve been lying to you,” Ash said. He ought to have rehearsed what he’d say to Verity, how he’d explain both the truth and why he waited to tell her. But every time the thought bubbled to the surface of his mind, he refused to think about it. He thought he’d have more time, even as he knew that no amount of time in the world would have made this easier.
“Ash,” she said gently. “Just tell me what’s going on.”
He wished she wouldn’t be gentle. She was going to be furious with him and he didn’t think he could stand to see her affection transform into anger right before his eyes. “I told you that Lady Caroline believed me to be her brother’s son. That much is true. But my parents were married at the time of my birth. And my father was the Duke of Arundel’s oldest son.”
She went absolutely still before his eyes. He wasn’t even certain she was breathing; she certainly wasn’t blinking. “Does she have evidence?”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“This is what you were talking about when you said your uncle had to be stopped. You weren’t talking about murdering him, but disinheriting him.”
“My aunt believes any future wife of his will be in danger. I’m more worried that he’ll murder my aunt.” Verity stared at him. “I know she’s almost a stranger, but I’ve grown fond of her. I don’t know if it’s because of some inherited sympathy for one another, but for whatever reason I can’t stand to let this man harm her.”
“You don’t need to explain to me why you don’t want to stand idly by while innocent women are killed,” Verity said slowly. “I think I know you well enough to understand that.”
“But you see what this will mean for me,” he said. “For us.”
She hadn’t. He could see the dismay fall across her face like a veil as she understood. “Quite,” she said at length. “How long have you known, Ash?”
“I only found out a week ago.”
“The day you kissed me,” she said wistfully. “That was the first thing you did after finding out, Ash?”
“Being with you was the one thing I wanted, the one thing I wouldn’t be able to do . . . after.”
“Bollocks, you couldn’t.” There it was, that flash of anger he had been waiting for. “Utter bollocks.”
“I know I ought to have said something, but I wanted this month so damned badly and I thought you did too. I thought . . .” He had harbored the shadow of a hope that somehow none of it would matter to her, that they would find a way. But that hope had started out flimsy and feeble, nothing he could really convince himself of. Now, standing in front of her, truth out in the open, he knew it for the lie it had always been.
“You think I wouldn’t have wanted to be with you if I knew the truth?” Her fists were balled at her sides.
Oh God, she was going to make him spell it out. “There’s no future between us. You wouldn’t marry anyone, let alone a duke. Don’t even pretend to tell me you’d consent to that.”
“Of course I wouldn’t. But there’s a middle ground between marriage and just fucking off out of my life forever, Ash. Christ, give me a little bit of credit, will you?”
“What would that middle ground look like? I visit you here, on my way to my seat in the House of Lords? Everyone you know refers to you as the Duke of Arundel’s mistress? You fall pregnant and I—no, Verity. No, there isn’t a middle ground.”
“There’s friendship, Ash. There’s everything we’ve been to one another for more than ten years. If you think I’d throw that away and disclaim you just because your parents happened to be married and one of them titled, then you don’t know me at all.”
“A pox on friendship. I’m in love with you, you stubborn ass, and I don’t know how to undo that!”
“Nobody is asking you to, you thick-headed idiot!”
It was entirely plain that she was not hearing him. “I ought to go before we have a row.”
She threw her hands up in a gesture of frustration that he had seen her use dozens of times when exasperated during a quarrel with Nate. “Bit late for that! By all means go. You were planning on leaving for good, after all.” She shook her head and went upstairs, and he resisted the urge to go after her, to try and make things right. This couldn’t be made right.
An hour later he stood at the front door of Arundel House.
Chapter Fourteen
“Dear Miss Plum, I have these five years been married to a man most would account a most excellent husband. He is neither cruel nor miserly. However, after reading a treatise written by a learned gentleman, he has become a proponent of free love, which he claims is what the Creator must have intended in a perfect a state of nature. He says he wishes to lie with other women, and I am free to do as he does, but I do not wish to dally with other men. It seems I have no say in this and I know not what to do.”
“Dear Miss Plum, My wife has lost two stone and I no longer like the look of her bosoms, please advise.”
In response, Verity wrote a four-page tirade on the merits of spinsterhood, the urgent need to reform divorce law, and the benefits that would devolve to all by banning men from the public sphere. She feared this would not be a suitable answer to either correspondent, nor to their spouses, but she found it moderately cathartic.
She supposed that she ought to be grateful for having work to distract her, but she felt singularly ill-equipped to answer these letters. In fact she could not imagine anyone less suited to advising people on their families, friendships, and attachments than she, who had in the span of a month lost the two people who mattered most to her. The house echoed with an emptiness that felt like failure, a mirror of her own cold heart. When she went to the shop, Nate’s absence was an almost palpable loss.
Ash’s absence, though, was vague and inchoate; she felt his loss not in any particular room but in her entire being. There was nowhere she could go to be rid of the thought of him. He was a part of her, but now he was gone; it was as simple as that. Hard work ought to be the best medicine for this ache, but work was yet another place from which Ash was absent. She did not want to sit at her desk knowing he would never walk into the room. She worked anyway, though, and after a week the sharp sting of loss had mellowed to the dull nagging pain of an old injury.
Ash had neither called on her nor written since he had left the previous week. Based on what she read in the papers, he had been very busy indeed: three days after he left, the newspapers reported that a man purporting to be the Duke of Arundel’s legitimate g
randson had brought a suit against his grandfather and uncle for the income of properties associated with the entail and the will of a Talbot ancestor. This, Verity gathered, was the solicitor’s strategy for ensuring that Ash’s identity was settled before the present duke’s imminent death.
Portia called on Verity after the first piece about Ash appeared in the papers. Verity told Nan to send her away: she was in no state for either curiosity or sympathy. The following day’s post brought a letter from Portia; Verity, in a fit of self-pity and feeling entirely unequal to the basic requirements of friendship, threw it into the fire unread. When, a few days later, Portia called once again, Nan put her foot down. The older woman would not send such a fine lady away, and in such foul weather too.
“She can stay in her carriage. I’m sure she has a warm brick at her feet,” Verity said sulkily.
“She was just standing there, her poor bonnet ruined and her cloak soaked straight through. I had to let her in.”
Verity glanced out the window and saw nothing but an expanse of gray. “And now she’s dripping onto my shop floor, I suppose.” She sighed. “Send her up.”
Nan nodded. “I’ll have tea and cakes sent up as well.”
From the moment Verity informed Nan that Mr. Ashby would be seeking lodgings elsewhere, an assortment of cakes and biscuits had begun appearing at all hours. “Broken hearts are best mended with a sweet tooth,” Nan had said, despite Verity insisting that she did not have a broken heart and that this was not even a proper maxim anyway. She ate the sweets nonetheless, and they didn’t make anything worse, at least. Cake had never made anything worse.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Verity said when Portia, sodden and blue lipped, walked into the room.
“Of course you don’t,” Portia said from between chattering teeth. “Did you think I came for gossip? What do you take me for? I came to see if you wanted company.” She peeled off her wet cloak and frowned at her sodden bonnet.
Verity stood in silence for a moment, regarding the woman who was her only friend this side of the Atlantic. “You’d better sit by the fire. I’m behaving churlishly but I warn you I have no intention of stopping.”
“Of course you don’t. When are you going to see him again?” Portia extended one ruined slipper towards the fire.
Verity let out a bitter laugh. “When? Never, if he has his way.”
“Nonsense.” Portia turned sharply towards Verity. “You can’t toss someone from your life after being in one another’s pockets for ten years.”
“Tell that to Ash. He has all manner of high-minded ideas about not sullying my honor with an improper connection.”
“What about a proper connection? I will admit that I don’t expect it to do me any harm to have my close friend become a duchess, so I’m hardly unbiased.”
“You can’t be serious. You’re mad if you think I’d agree to anything of the sort. I’m perfectly content in this house, eating cakes and publishing magazines and dirty books about Perkin Warbeck. I do honest work that I’m very good at. Being a duchess does not sound in the least interesting, even if it weren’t against all of my principles.”
“Perkin Warbeck?” Portia asked, her features almost comically distorted by consternation. “Is he all the rage these days? First Amelia, now you, after having gone a good thirty-five years without ever hearing anyone speak his name aloud.”
“All I know is that I like him more than anyone else in my life at the moment.” Then Verity realized what Portia had just told her. “Do you mean to say Amelia has developed an interest in Perkin Warbeck?” Verity schooled her face into a semblance of mild curiosity.
“All summer and well into the autumn she was knee deep in books about the man. I think she meant to write a biography. I tell you, I despair of the girl.”
“He must be a very fashionable topic,” Verity said faintly. Any other time she might be gratified at possibly identifying her anonymous author, but today she had other concerns. “I do beg your pardon, Portia. I’m taking out all my frustration on you because I haven’t anyone else to be surly to.”
“That’s why I came, you absurd creature. Well, not for you to be rude to me, but because I’m well aware that Ash is your closest friend, and that you’re without support at a time when you need it. Did you think I stood about in the rain for my own amusement?”
Verity shifted, uncomfortable with the idea that Portia had gone out of her way. “You must know it’s going to cause a great deal of scandal. I wouldn’t have thought you’d want your name caught up in scandal so close to Amelia’s debut.”
“This is an emergency.” Portia spoke with such gravity that Verity was momentarily taken aback. When Verity failed to respond, Portia frowned. “I’m not keeping a balance sheet, you know. I’m not writing stood about in rain, jeopardized Amelia’s debut in red ink under your name. There’s no tally of your debts. There aren’t any debts at all. You don’t owe me.”
“I know—”
“I don’t think you do. People help those they care about. That’s a good thing. That’s why you sent Nate away.”
“That’s not what he believes. He only went to humor me. And it turned out he needn’t—”
“Precisely,” Portia said brightly, as if congratulating a pupil. “You did it for one another. Accepting help doesn’t make you weak.”
“I don’t need a remedial course in friendship, Portia.”
Portia gave her a look that plainly said that she thought this was precisely what Verity needed. “Friends ease one another’s burdens. We get all tangled together, and sometimes you don’t know whether you’re helping a friend for their own good or for yourself because it’s all the same in the end. You can’t separate it out neatly.”
But Verity had to separate it out. She had to know that she stood on her own two feet, that she was ultimately her own mistress.
“Come now,” Portia went on. “You’ve been going to bed with him, no? Surely you know that sooner or later he would have insisted on marrying you.”
“I don’t think he would have. He knows my stance on that topic. He was around when . . .” She gestured around the room, the house, the walls that held memories of exactly what it looked like when a woman’s identity dwindled into nothingness.
“Do you think that falling in love with you is part of his sinister plan to subjugate you?”
“No, of course not, but marriage—”
“We’re not talking about marriage, but about friendship. Marriage can be just one form that friendship takes.”
“It’s the shape of a shackle,” Verity protested.
Portia broke into a laugh. “Good lord, you’re just like your brother. So dramatic.”
Verity blushed. “I know that not all marriages are terrible. But it can make otherwise decent men into tyrants.” She thought of Ash’s offer to help in the shop, thought of his endless offers of tea and cheese, and had to admit it was hard to see the seeds of despotism there.
“If the best you can say about Ash is that he’s decent, and if you think he secretly has the soul of a tyrant, then I can’t imagine why we’re having this conversation in the first place. Surely you can see that, which is why you love him.”
“Tell me, Portia,” Verity said a moment later, “is there any chance that Ash’s suit will fail?”
When Portia hesitated, Verity knew a mad flutter of hope. Her antipathy towards marriage would be a moot point. They might at least have a way forward if Ash were not the duke’s legal heir. She could be friends and lovers with someone who was not the next in line to a dukedom. With a duke she could have nothing.
Portia frowned sympathetically and Verity wanted to fling her teacup across the room. “An exceptionally slim one. Apparently, Lady Caroline’s diaries are rather specific and the solicitor has been very busy collecting statements. There’s almost enough evidence to establish Ash’s progress from Arundel House in London to a foster family in Wisbech to a village called Ashby to a school in Kin
g’s Lynn.”
“This is all circumstantial,” insisted Verity, still clinging to that idiotic scrap of hope. “And surely the duke’s surviving son has many allies in positions of power.”
“True.” Portia’s frown deepened. “Powerful men with titles and money don’t often turn on one of their own. They close ranks.”
Verity shuddered at the thought of Ash becoming one of those men.
Portia sighed and continued. “But Ash’s father was one of their own, too, and a gross injustice was done to him. He’s still fondly remembered by many.”
After Portia left, Verity returned to her desk and retrieved the tirade on divorce law and the perfidy of men, balled it up, and threw it into the fire. Then she answered both questions as honestly as she could. She did not know, she wrote, how affection was meant to endure all life’s vicissitudes. The person to whom one bound one’s life at twenty could not be, in any meaningful sense, the same person at forty. The best one could hope for was that each person might alter and grow in ways that fit together, and for any changes falling outside those parameters to be met with reason and charity. Love, marriage, friendship, indeed any tie that bound people together, was a constant exchange of promises, of sacrifices freely made, of favors one didn’t need to ask for. Each of these was an opportunity for failure, and it was a wonder so many marriages worked out as well as they did, but an even greater wonder that anyone, especially women, chose to marry at all. The explanation, she wrote, had to be that people possessed either a delusional degree of optimism or a flinty determination to pay any price for even the bare chance that their union might be one of the successful ones. Or, perhaps, it was a combination of the two, because there might not be a difference between hope and stubbornness.
It was an utterly unsatisfying answer, both to write and probably for those who had mailed her their questions. But it was the best answer she could give them, and it might also be the best answer she could give herself.
A Duke in Disguise Page 16
