The Duchess’ Little Miracle (The Brooding Dukes #5)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

“It is a rather grim structure, Your Grace,” Jameson said, pressing his spectacles up his nose as the carriage swayed to a halt. “Though I suppose one cannot expect architectural splendor from an institution of this... nature.”

William looked at his solicitor, Jameson, for a long moment before answering.

His linen collar was slightly damp from the humidity inside the carriage, and his fingers kept twitching against the lock of his briefcase.

The man looked even more exhausted and nervous than William felt, his shoulders hunched as though he expected the brick walls of the orphan asylum to collapse on them both.

It was a tedious habit of Jameson, letting his face show every minor worry before a meeting.

“What were you expecting?” William asked. “Blenheim? Were you expecting a grand rotunda? Perhaps a marble fountain in the courtyard to welcome the orphans? It is a charity house in the middle of a damp field. Good god, Jameson.”

Jameson shifted as he tried to adjust his neckcloth. “I only worry given the… fickleness of this situation.”

“How did you even become a solicitor?” William muttered, his eyes narrowing slightly at the man’s fidgeting. “How you managed to pass your law examinations with such a fragile disposition remains an absolute mystery to me, and to think you’ve been doing this for almost twenty years.”

“Do I seem nervous, Your Grace?”

“You are sweating more than a thief at a hanging, and we have not even crossed the threshold. If you lose your composure before we see the headmaster, they will double whatever price they intend to ask of us.”

“We are not yet sure they are asking for anything.”

William scoffed. “I did not travel eight hours to be made a fool of.”

He did not wait for Jameson to find a reply, nor did he wait for the footman to lower the steps. He rolled his eyes, pushed the carriage door open himself, and stepped down into the cold drizzle.

The damp air hit his face, and William stood by the wheel for a moment, forcing a slow breath into his lungs to steady the irritation building from his lower stomach.

He absolutely despised long travel, and this particular journey had dragged on for over eight grueling hours, leaving his lower back stiff and his patience entirely worn thin.

It was exactly why he had snapped just now.

Hours of confined space, matching Jameson’s jittery breathing and watching him fiddle with that briefcase, had made the entire situation utterly intolerable.

Every muscle in William’s body pricked with annoyance at the wasted day, the miserable weather, and the sheer inconvenience of it all.

Still, he tried not to let his temper get the best of him before he even knew what he was dealing with. Flattening his expression, he adjusted his cuffs and prepared to face whatever mess waited inside.

The wet gravel crunched under William’s boots as he crossed the courtyard, Jameson walking a step behind him, seeming to have regained his composure.

The orphan asylum’s doors were oak, weathered gray by decades of winters.

Jameson knocked once, and then the door opened.

William stepped into a drafty entrance hall that smelled strongly of damp wool, boiled cabbage, and cheap lye soap.

A young woman in a wool shawl was already waiting near a sputtering oil lamp. Her hands were tucked tightly into her sleeves, and the moment William’s towering figure blocked the doorway, she froze, her chest hitching in an involuntary breath of alarm.

“Your Grace,” a voice chimed from the shadows of the corridor.

An older woman stepped forward, her black skirts rustling sharply against the floorboards.

She had iron-gray hair, a severe posture, and just as her eyes locked onto William, she lowered it almost immediately.

William didn’t speak. He simply stood there, dripping rainwater onto the floor, his green eyes tracking her movements.

“I am Mrs. Ayton, the headmistress,” she said. “We... we did not expect you to travel personally, Your Grace. A reply via your solicitor would have —”

“You sent a letter bearing a threat to my family’s privacy, Mrs. Ayton,” William cut in. “You did not invite a correspondence. You invited an appearance, don’t you think? I am here, but I am tired. Let us not waste the daylight.”

“My apologies, Your Grace,” she murmured.

“Please, follow me. We thought it best to handle this with the utmost discretion. We wanted to tell you first, you see. Before... well, before news of this nature began to spread to the village or the parish council. A name like yours carries a great deal of weight, and ears are always sharp in these parts.”

“I trust you will keep your tongue behind your teeth, Mrs. Ayton,” William said flatly.

He gestured for Jameson to follow. The air grew progressively colder the further they walked from the main entrance, and from behind the closed doors, William could hear the muffled, collective drone of children reciting lessons... dull, repetitive, and miserable.

“We found a girl, Alice, only three weeks ago,” Mrs. Ayton explained, her footsteps echoing sharply as she hurried to keep ahead of William’s strides.

“She was brought to us by a carter who found her wandering near the east crossroads. The poor thing was terribly sick when we first took her in. A lung fever, we feared. She spent the first ten days entirely delirious.”

Mrs. Ayton hesitated, turning a corner toward a sturdier set of doors at the end of the wing.

“But once the fever broke and her mind cleared, she became very quiet. Unusually quiet for a child of seven. When we began to question her about her origin, she refused to speak a word to the staff. She simply clutched a small leather pouch around her neck. It wasn’t until a few days ago, when the matron tried to bathe her, that she finally permitted us to see what she was hiding. ”

The headmistress stopped before the door, her hand resting on the latch. She turned back to William. “It was the only thing she had left of her parents, Your Grace. She claims her mother gave it to her on her deathbed.”

“Get to the point, Mrs. Ayton,” William said, his voice entirely devoid of patience.

“It is a letter,” she whispered, leaning in slightly as if the very walls might carry the secret away.

“A letter written in a hand we could not identify, but sealed with a crest we recognized instantly from the regional tax registries. It bears your family seal, Your Grace. The Norwyn seal. Intact, in red wax.”

Jameson let out a sharp, choked gasp behind William. “Good heavens...”

William did not flinch. His family seal in a place like this was almost certainly a fraud, a desperate attempt by some opportunistic peasant to extort his estate.

People lied, forged, and cheated for a fraction of his wealth every day, and he had not traveled eight hours to be swindled by the matron of an orphanage.

“Open the door,” William commanded.

Mrs. Ayton complied immediately, lifting the latch and stepping aside.

The room inside was a small, austere parlor, containing nothing but a plain wooden table, two stiff chairs, and a small hearth that held more ash than actual fire.

Sitting on the edge of one of the chairs was a small girl.

Her skin was still pale from her recent illness, her dark hair pinned back in a neat but simple braid that looked too heavy for her small frame.

She wore an oversized, scratchy gray wool dress, but despite her meager surroundings, she sat remarkably straight, her hands folded in her lap.

On the table before her lay a single, folded piece of cream parchment. He walked directly to the table, his eyes locking onto the red wax seal.

Christ.

Up close, the fraud he had fully expected to expose simply wasn’t there. There were no sloppy tool marks in the wax, no blurred lines from a cheap lead counterfeit, and the impression was perfectly deep. It was clean.

William didn’t let his expression slip, but a cold silence settled over his chest. He reached down, his long fingers picking up the parchment, and turned it toward the solicitor.

He turned and held it out to Jameson without a word.

Jameson stepped forward, and the nervousness left him the way it always left him when there was something precise to be done.

He took the parchment and held it angled toward the gray light of the window.

He did not look at the crest itself. His thumb moved instead to the outer rim of the wax, slow, feeling for something a casual eye would never find...

a hairline nick pressed into the third chevron by the London engraver who had cut the die, a flaw so small it was invisible unless you knew to look for it, put there precisely so that anyone who knew could look.

He found it.

He held the seal closer and breathed in once through his nose. The wax was not the brittle, cheap kind that crumbled at the edges and smelled of tallow.

He lowered the letter.

“It is entirely authentic, Your Grace,” Jameson said quietly, for William’s ears only. “This is precisely what I feared when the summons arrived. If news of this document starts to spread, if the papers or the parish council —”

“Hush, Jameson,” William cut in and shut his eyes tightly. “Let me handle it.”

William flipped the document over, noting that the parchment wasn’t sealed shut. The wax was split cleanly in two, the bond holding the folds together severed. He turned his gaze toward the headmistress, his eyes flattening into ice.

“You broke the seal,” William said calmly. “What gave you the right?”