The Banished Duke (The Notorious Dukes #4)

Prologue

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Rain whispered against the windows in a steady rhythm, the only sound piercing the silence that cloaked the estate.

Firelight flickered in the hearth, casting long shadows on the stone walls.

Duchess Claire Russell stood alone near the blaze, her delicate frame wrapped in a shawl, eyes fixed on the flames as memories stirred like embers in her chest.

Behind her, soft footsteps broke the stillness.

"When will Father return?"

Claire turned from the fire.

Benjamin stood in the doorway, tall now in a way that still startled her, his shoulders broadening past the frame of childhood.

Twelve years old, and already his father's son — the same dark eyes, the same quiet way of watching a room before stepping into it.

He was not afraid. He was not a child asking for comfort.

He was a boy who had been counting the days.

She crossed the room and put both hands on his shoulders, the way Anthony would have done.

"Soon."

It was a lie she told for him, and perhaps for herself.

Benjamin held her gaze a moment longer than she expected. Then he nodded — once, the way his father always had — and turned back toward the corridor. She listened to his footsteps fade along the passage. He had not believed her. He had only chosen not to press.

Two months, and no word. No letter. Anthony was leading a campaign on the continent and that was the whole of what she knew, because that was his way — silence kept her safer than knowledge, he had always said, and he had never once been persuaded otherwise.

Tonight she would have given a great deal for knowledge.

The knock came a little before eleven.

The man on the step was young and soaked through, and the cloak he was pulling straight bore the insignia of the Crown. He bowed before he spoke.

"Your Grace. Sir Edmund Hamilton. Forgive the hour."

"My husband—"

"I have no news of the Duke himself. I am sorry." He did not come in until she stepped aside for him. "I have been sent ahead of a warrant."

The word went through her like cold water.

"A warrant."

"It will be at your gate by morning. I could not in conscience let it arrive before somebody had told you." Hamilton's jaw worked. "They are using the word treason, Your Grace. I do not know on what evidence and I was not permitted to ask. I know only that it has been signed."

"That is impossible."

"I have said so. It made no difference to anyone." He reached into his coat. "Before he vanished the Duke gave me this. He said it was for your eyes and no others."

The envelope was small and worn soft, sealed with Anthony's signet, creased the way a thing is creased when a man has carried it a long while against his chest.

"Take the boy and go tonight," Hamilton said. "That is the whole of my advice and I am aware it is worth very little."

"I will not run."

"No." Something tired moved across his face. "No, I did not imagine you would."

He bowed again, and went out into the rain, and did not wait to be dismissed.

Claire stood a long time with the letter in her hand before she broke the seal.

My dearest Claire,

I have made a grave mistake — one that shames me more than words can say. Not in honor. Not in duty. But in judgment.

In the months before I left, Earl Harrington came to me as a friend.

He spoke of reform, of concerns at court, of men who feared the direction the Crown was taking.

I listened. I believed him a patriot speaking honestly to another patriot, and I answered him honestly in return — about the campaign, about the council, about decisions I would not have made in their place.

Every word I gave him in confidence has been turned. My correspondence has been altered. Letters I wrote in trust read, in his hands, as plans of treason. The Countess has sworn before witnesses that I confided to her my intent to betray the Crown.

I was not a traitor, Claire. I was a fool. I believed an honest man's words could not be made into weapons.

I swear to you on our son's name that I never betrayed my country. I only trusted the wrong man.

I write this from a place I dare not name, and I do not know when I may return. But I will. Protect our son. Protect our name. I will come home and I will make this right.

Forever yours,Anthony

The paper shook. She put her hand flat on the mantel to stop it and it did not stop.

She had been afraid since the knock. She had not been afraid like this. This was the fear of a woman who has just been shown the shape of the thing coming toward her house and has counted, in the same moment, exactly how many people stand between it and her son.

One. And she was standing at the fire in her shawl.

◆◆◆

Benjamin had left his door open a hand's width.

He had gone up when she sent him, and he had not gone to bed, and by the time the voices below had stopped he was sitting on the boards in the dark of the upper passage with his knees drawn up, listening to a house that had gone entirely quiet.

His mother's step came into the hall.

Then she said a name.

"Harrington." It came up the stairwell very clearly, because she had not meant anyone to hear it. "That snake. He will pay for it."

Benjamin did not move.

He did not know the name. He knew the sound of his mother's voice when it had something underneath it, and this was not crying, and it was not the voice she used for servants or for guests or for him.

He turned the word over in the dark and put it somewhere, the way a boy does with a thing he does not understand and knows he is not meant to have.

Then the hall went quiet again, and after a while he went to bed.

◆◆◆

He woke to the front door coming off its hinges.

Afterward he could never put it in order.

There were boots on the stair, a great many of them, moving fast. There was a lamp in his face and a hand in his hair and then a hand on his arm, and the cold of the passage stones through his nightshirt because nobody had let him find his boots.

There was a man's voice above him saying something about the boy that was not addressed to the boy.

He remembered the banister going past his cheek.

He remembered his mother's voice from somewhere below him — not words, only his name, once, the way she said it when he had gone too near the water.

He shouted back. He was quite certain he shouted back, though he could not afterward remember making any sound at all.

Then there was the doorway, and the rain coming in level across the step, and the yard full of horses and lamps and men in the Queen's colors, and his mother being taken across it in front of him with her shawl gone and her hands held.

She turned her head as they put her into the carriage.

She found him across all that light and all those men, and her hand came up — not far, because they had hold of her, but up, reaching out over the yard toward him.

Benjamin put his own hand out and there was a great deal of rain and forty feet of wet stone between them and neither of them lowered it.

She said something.

He could not hear it. The horses were going and the men were shouting and the rain was coming down on the roof of the porch above him, and not one sound of it reached him. But he watched her mouth, and he had watched that mouth his whole life, and he knew it the way he knew her step in a passage.

Do not be afraid, my love. All will be well. Mama will keep you safe.

Then the door was shut on her, and the lamps went past, and the carriage turned out of the yard.

Benjamin began to cry.

He did not decide to. It simply arrived, all of it at once, and he stood barefoot on the stones of his own house with his hand still half up in the air and wept in front of thirty men.

The one beside him looked down.

"Men do not weep, boy." He said it without any particular cruelty, which was somehow worse. "I imagine that is one thing your traitor of a father found the time to teach you."

"My father is a hero."

Something moved at the corner of the man's mouth.

"We shall see what he is."

Benjamin dragged his sleeve across his face, once, and put his arm back down at his side.

Then he lifted his head and looked at the man, and went on looking at him, and did not look away first.