Chapter Two
“Where is Ned?”
Beatrice woke with the question already leaving her mouth.
For one bewildered moment, she saw only an unfamiliar ceiling and the dull glow of a fire she had not lit. Then memory returned in fragments. Rain. A man’s cold voice from above. Ned’s thin cries beneath her cloak. Her own body giving way before she could command it to remain upright.
She pushed herself up too quickly, and the room tilted. Her fingers caught at the coverlet.
“He is here, lamb.” Martha’s voice came from the chair near the hearth, tired but blessedly steady. “In the cradle, just there. Fed, warm, and asleep. You have been senseless since half past one.”
Beatrice turned at once.
Ned lay in a dark wooden cradle near the fire, wrapped in clean linen and sleeping the solemn, bottomless sleep of a child finally permitted to be comfortable. His cheeks had a little colour again. One small hand had worked free of the blanket and rested beside his face.
For several seconds, Beatrice could do nothing except look at him.
He was warm. He was still here. No one had taken him while she lay unconscious in a stranger’s house.
“Who fed him?” she asked.
“The physician came. Meade, his name is. An older gentleman, a quiet sort of man. He asked after the child’s age, his feeding, and how long he had been out in the cold, then had the sense not to ask questions that were none of his concern.”
“A physician.” Beatrice looked towards the door as if scandal itself might be listening on the other side. “That is another person who knows we are here.”
Martha’s mouth pressed into a practical line. “He examined the boy, pronounced him underfed but sound, and left instructions for a pap boat with goat’s milk. Mrs Alder had it prepared within the hour. Ned took it like a little gentleman who had waited all his life for a properly managed supper.”
“How many people in this house know I am here?”
Martha lifted one hand and began to count. “Two footmen. The housekeeper. His Grace. The physician. The cook, who supplied the milk. A scullery maid, who heated it and a stable boy, I believe, who was sent for the physician’s horse.”
“That is eight people.”
“Eight people who can place a lady and a baby under the Duke of Ravenshaw’s roof before dawn, yes. I did not choose the number, my lady. I am merely reporting it.”
“Eight is considerably more than none.”
“None left us when you knocked upon a duke’s door at midnight in a thunderstorm.”
Beatrice pressed her fingertips to her brow. Martha was right, which was often her most inconvenient quality. The moment they had crossed Ravenshaw’s threshold, secrecy had ceased to be a matter of intention. It had become a matter of luck.
Helena had exhausted her store of good fortune.
The thought came so suddenly that Beatrice had to close her eyes.
She saw her sister’s face as it had been in the final week, pale and hollow and still trying to smile when Ned made his first small sound.
She heard her father across the breakfast table, speaking of the child as one might speak of a misplaced parcel. She lowered her hand.
“Has the duke asked for the baby?”
“No.”
“Has he asked for me?”
“Not yet.” Martha hesitated, and that pause troubled Beatrice more than a longer explanation would have done. “He asked for more information about the letter.”
Beatrice went still.
Helena’s letter was no longer in her possession.
She had given it to Ravenshaw in the entrance hall with rain on the paper and desperation in her hands.
The last thing Helena had written. The last instruction she had left.
Beatrice had carried it through mud and darkness like a relic, only to place it into the keeping of a man who appeared to regard human distress as a breach of household order.
“Martha, that letter was the only piece of Helena I carried out of that house.”
“I know, my lady.”
“I gave it to a stranger.”
“You gave it to the man your sister told you to find. That may be a narrow distinction at present, but it is still a distinction.”
She accepted the cup Martha offered. The broth inside was thin and salted, and her hand shook once before she steadied it. The first swallow reminded her body that it had been asked to endure more than pride could pay for.
“Drink slowly,” Martha said. “The physician said you were nearer to a proper collapse than the sort ladies are accused of performing for attention in drawing rooms.”
“I did not faint.”
“You fell senseless in the arms of a duke. I was present. Whether we call it fainting, collapsing, or leaving the conversation with unusual drama is a question for people with leisure.”
“I prefer to think of it as a temporary loss of verticality.”
“Call it what you please. Your knees had their own opinion.”
Beatrice almost smiled, and the impulse startled her. There seemed something wrong in finding humour here, in a borrowed room with Helena deceased, Ned hidden, and a duke downstairs who might yet decide that compassion did not suit the management of his house.
She drank again, more carefully.
The room was plain, though not neglected. There was a fire, clean sheets, a sturdy cradle, and a chair Martha had clearly claimed after long suffering. None of it looked welcoming by nature. It had been made serviceable because someone had ordered it to be so.
“This room is warmer than I expected,” Beatrice said.
“By command, I should think. The fire was built high, the sheets had been warmed, and Mrs Alder brought a warming pan at three in the morning and did not comment on the hour.”
“She did that for a stranger?”
“She did it for the problem His Grace carried up from the entrance hall. I cannot speak to her affection, but her competence is beyond reproach.”
Beatrice’s fingers tightened around the cup. “And the duke? Has he been here?”
“He looked in once, near four.”
Beatrice went still despite herself.
“What did he want?”
“To make certain you were breathing, I suppose. He stood in the doorway, looked first at the cradle, then at you, and left again without a word.”
“That is oddly reassuring.”
“I thought so. A man who checks upon a sleeping baby at four in the morning is either very controlling or more concerned than he wishes to appear. Either way, he is paying attention.”
“Or he wished to know whether the scandal beneath his roof had survived the night.”
Martha gave her a look. “You are very determined to make the worst of him.”
“I am determined not to make the best of him too soon.”
“That may be wise. It may also be exhausting.”
“Trust has a cost, Martha.”
“So does distrust, my lady. You are too tired to be spending both.”
Beatrice looked towards the cradle. Ned slept on, safe for the moment because a man with a fearful reputation had allowed a fire to be lit, a physician to be summoned, and goat’s milk to be warmed. It was not enough to make him kind. It was enough to make him difficult to dismiss.
“What do people say of him?” she asked.
Martha’s expression changed.
“Nothing comfortable.”
“Comfort is not the first thing one expects from a duke.”
“No, though one does hope for a little of it when one has arrived at his house with a baby and no other refuge.”
“Tell me.”
Martha glanced towards the door, then lowered her voice.
“They say he cuts people off without a backward glance. Relations, tenants, old friends, anyone who disappoints him. They say he can ruin a man’s credit with one letter and a lady’s prospects with one cold remark.
They say he has lived away from society so long that London cannot decide whether he is mad, monstrous, or merely too proud to care what is said of him. ”
Beatrice absorbed this with the unease of a woman finding a locked gate where she had hoped for a road.
Helena had sent her here.
Helena, who had trusted too easily. Helena, who had believed a man when he had spoken of forever. Helena, who had died before Beatrice could ask why the name Ravenshaw had been left like a command at the bottom of a letter.
“And what do you say?” Beatrice asked.
“I say he carried you up the stairs with the baby still in his arms. When Mrs Alder reached for the child, His Grace told her to leave him where he was. Then he stood there until the physician came, looking like a thundercloud that had taken human form.”
The image should not have comforted her, but it did, a little.
“That tells me he is strong,” Beatrice said. “It does not tell me he is trustworthy.”
“No. But a man who holds on when he could put you down deserves a provisional measure of credit.”
A knock struck the door.
One sharp rap, followed by silence.
Beatrice’s pulse answered before she did. There was no shuffling uncertainty in the sound, no servant’s careful deference, no polite inquiry. It had the same quality as his voice from the staircase: possession before permission.
Martha rose. “That will be him.”
“How can you tell?”
“No servant in this household knocks as though he owns the door.”
Martha smoothed her apron, glanced at Ned, and took her place near the window. She would have to be carried out before she missed what came next.
Beatrice set the cup aside and drew herself higher against the pillows. Weakness pulled at her limbs, but pride, by long habit, took command.
“Come in.”
The Duke of Ravenshaw entered.
He was dressed now in dark wool, severe and immaculate, with a cravat tied so precisely that it seemed less a fashion than a warning.
His expression had been restored to the same cold arrangement he had worn in the hall, though fatigue lingered faintly beneath it.
He looked like a man who had slept little, resented the fact, and blamed the intrusion rather than the night.
He carried Helena’s letter in one hand, but his gaze went first to the cradle.
It was brief. So brief that Beatrice might have missed it had she been less desperate for any sign of what sort of man he was. Then he looked back at her, and the room seemed to settle around his authority.
“How are you feeling, Lady Beatrice?”
“I am surprised you asked.”
“I am capable of courtesy.”