Chapter Two The Duke Comes Home
Sebastian Harcourt had been Duke of Ashcombe for eighteen months before Ashcombe House felt remotely like his.
Perhaps that was because he had spent most of those months in Vienna, where diplomatic obligations, legal complications and the lingering wreckage of his father’s European investments had kept him occupied far longer than anyone in London considered reasonable.
Perhaps it was because his father’s presence remained embedded too deeply in the house for mere inheritance to dislodge it.
Or perhaps Sebastian had simply never possessed the gift Adrian did for walking into a room and behaving as though it had been waiting specifically for him.
Adrian had belonged everywhere. Sebastian had always belonged where duty placed him.
The distinction had shaped most of their lives.
By ten o’clock on the morning after his brother’s death, the library at Ashcombe House contained six ledgers, three boxes of correspondence, two decanters nobody had touched and enough financial disorder to make Sebastian wonder whether Adrian had spent the past several years attempting to bankrupt himself for sport.
He stood at the long mahogany table with one hand braced against its edge while Peter Fane, solicitor to the Harcourt family for nearly three decades, worked through another bundle of papers.
Rain blurred the windows overlooking Grosvenor Square, flattening the spring morning into gray and making the room feel even more enclosed.
A coal fire burned despite the season, though not sufficiently to warm the air.
Sebastian had arrived from Dover before dawn, changed clothes, answered the most urgent estate correspondence and begun meeting with Fane before most of Mayfair had finished breakfast. Grief, he had discovered, did not interrupt paperwork.
It merely made the handwriting harder to read.
“How much?” he asked.
Fane glanced over his spectacles.
“In total?”
“That is generally what the phrase means.”
The solicitor did not appear offended. He had known Sebastian since boyhood and had long ago become immune to Harcourt impatience.
“The confirmed obligations amount to a little over twenty-eight thousand pounds.”
Sebastian said nothing. Fane hesitated.
“That does not include the private markers.”
“How much do those add?”
“Possibly another eleven.”
Sebastian closed his eyes briefly. Adrian had been granted a generous allowance from the family estates, additional income from investments established by their grandfather and access to funds Sebastian had assumed were sufficient for any man not attempting to purchase a principality. Apparently he had been mistaken.
“Gambling?”
“Some.”
“Women?”
Fane coughed.
“Possibly.”
“Peter.”
“I am a solicitor, not a priest.”
“Today you appear to be both.”
Fane rearranged the papers.
“There are payments to gaming clubs, certainly. There are also loans secured against expected inheritances, subscriptions to two speculative ventures, several unexplained transfers abroad and a distressing quantity of money advanced privately to gentlemen whose ability to repay appears doubtful.”
Sebastian moved away from the table and toward the fire.
“Did he borrow against Bellamere?”
“Not directly.”
“That answer contains a qualification.”
“Yes.”
Sebastian turned. Fane removed another document from the leather case beside him.
“There are references to Bellamere in three sets of papers, but they are inconsistent. One treats the property as wholly unencumbered, another refers to an earlier settlement, and a third suggests Lord Adrian may have considered transferring it.”
“To whom?”
Fane did not answer immediately. That caught Sebastian’s attention. He returned to the table.
“To whom?”
Fane looked at him steadily.
“Miss Clara Whitcombe.”
For a moment, the name emptied the room of everything else.
The ledgers, the fire, the rain, Adrian’s debts, Vienna, the sleepless journey from Dover—all of it seemed to retreat behind something older and far more dangerous.
Sebastian’s expression did not change. He had spent most of his adult life becoming skilled at that.
“Show me.”
Fane unfolded a draft document.
“This was prepared six weeks ago. It appears to be an earlier version of Lord Adrian’s final will.”
Sebastian took it. The language was conventional at first: small legacies to servants, money to two charitable institutions, personal effects divided among acquaintances and family members.
Adrian had never married, so there was no widow to consider, no legitimate child, no household depending upon him beyond servants who would be placed elsewhere.
Then Sebastian reached the relevant paragraph.
Bellamere Cottage in Sussex, together with its lands, furnishings and associated revenues, was to pass absolutely to Miss Clara Whitcombe.
Below that came a further provision. An investment fund.
The estimated value was just under forty thousand pounds.
Sebastian read the clause twice. Then a third time.
“Why?”
“We do not know.”
“Did Adrian leave any explanation?”
“None that I have found.”
“Was this executed?”
“No. It is a draft.”
Sebastian looked up.
“And the final will?”
Fane passed him the document lodged as Adrian’s executed will.
The handwriting and phrasing were almost identical until the final dispositive section.
Clara’s name had disappeared. Bellamere now passed to Lionel Harcourt, a distant cousin whose branch of the family Sebastian barely knew, while the investment fund was divided elsewhere.
Sebastian examined the last substantive page before the attestation sheet.
Something about it felt wrong even before Fane spoke.
“The paper differs slightly.”
Sebastian looked at him.
“You noticed.”
“I would be a very expensive disappointment if I had not.”
“The ink?”
“Likely from the same period, though that proves little. The last dispositive sheet is newer stock than the pages before it, or at least from a different batch, while the signed attestation sheet that follows appears older. The binding between them has also been disturbed.”
A muscle moved briefly along Sebastian’s jaw.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning a dispositive page may have been substituted while the signed attestation sheet remained attached.”
“May have been.”
“Yes.”
“And the witnesses?”
“The attestation bears the names of Mr. Charles Bembridge and a clerk called Hollis. Bembridge confirms his own signature and remembers witnessing Adrian’s will, but the individual sheets were not initialled. He cannot swear that the present Bellamere page was among those attached when he signed.”
“Where is Hollis?”
Fane’s silence answered first.
“We cannot locate him.”
Sebastian put the will down. The fire cracked behind him. Outside, carriage wheels hissed across the wet square.
“Convenient.”
“Potentially suspicious.”
“Do not become timid now, Peter.”
“I am attempting to remain accurate.”
“Accuracy would be a refreshing novelty in this house.”
The remark came out more bitterly than Sebastian intended. Fane removed his spectacles and cleaned them slowly.
“You have not slept.”
“I slept on the packet boat.”
“That does not count.”
“It did to the man snoring beside me.”
Fane replaced the spectacles.
“You should rest before calling anywhere.”
“I am not calling anywhere.”
“Your footman has already gone to Brook Street.”
Sebastian looked at him. Fane’s mouth twitched.
“You instructed him half an hour ago.”
Sebastian remembered. Clara. The card. Of course. He had written the message himself, though he had rewritten it twice because every version sounded either offensively formal or absurdly personal. A matter concerning the late Lord Adrian Harcourt. It was accurate. It concealed almost everything.
“You disapprove?”
“I rarely waste time disapproving of decisions you have already made.”
“You used to.”
“You used to be twenty.”
Sebastian turned back to the will. Clara Whitcombe.
He had not allowed himself to speak her name aloud in years unless necessity demanded it.
Even thinking it had once been dangerous.
At twenty-four, he had believed himself old enough to distinguish admiration from attachment.
He had been wrong. Clara had been eighteen when he first properly noticed her, though noticed was too weak a word for what happened.
She had not entered a ballroom and transformed it, as Adrian later liked to claim.
There had been no theatrical moment, no room going quiet, no instant conviction that destiny had arrived in pale blue silk.
Sebastian had simply begun looking for her.
At dinners. Assemblies. Rides. House parties.
He noticed when she laughed before he knew what amused her, when she grew quiet in large groups, when she preferred tea to ratafia, when she pretended not to be cold because she disliked causing inconvenience.
He noticed that she listened when elderly people spoke, even when they repeated themselves, and that she once left a dance early to sit with a frightened child whose nurse had become ill.
He noticed too much. By spring he had decided to speak to his father.
By early summer he intended to court her.
Then Adrian proposed first. Sebastian remembered the afternoon with painful clarity.
His father had summoned him to the study at Ashcombe Park and announced, almost casually, that Adrian had become engaged to Miss Whitcombe.
Sebastian had thought the words absurd. Adrian had barely mentioned Clara.
At least not to him. Then came the announcement in the papers.
Congratulations. Family dinners. Toasts.
Clara smiling at Adrian with trust in her face.
Sebastian had done what honor required. He withdrew.
He told no one. Not Clara. Not Adrian. Certainly not his father, who would have regarded feeling as weakness unless it could be converted into property or political advantage.