Chapter 4
Damon's life changed after Milton's visit. Milton worked quietly, bribing the jailer to ensure his visits remained secret, arranging for legal representation, and then traveling to Jameson Manor to retrieve what was needed.
Paul, the last advisor, opened the door.
"Lord Milton."
"Good day, Paul. I have come on Damon's behalf."
Paul's face fell. "How is he? The house feels hollow without him."
"He is surviving. You know the man."
Paul glanced over his shoulder, lowering his voice. "Some of the other advisors have spoken ill of him. Most of them have resigned. I fear I may be the last loyal one."
"He warned me this would happen." Milton placed a hand on his shoulder. "I need to retrieve something from the study."
Paul led him through the grand gallery. Milton's steps slowed as they passed the portraits — Damon's forebears, proud and stern in their oil-framed immortality.
He stopped before a framed landscape: a golden field of wheat under a dusky sky, painted in delicate strokes.
The artist had signed it E. Jameson — Damon's mother.
"The Duchess painted that before Damon was born," Paul said quietly. "Her favorite view in all of Ravenshire."
Milton reached up and brushed his thumb along the frame's edge.
"The first time I visited this house, we were eight.
His father made us sit in here and stare at the paintings until we learned some decorum.
" A pause. "These are not heirlooms, Paul.
They are memories. I will not let them be scattered. "
"That is why I stayed," Paul said.
They retrieved what was needed from the safe — coin, heirlooms, the velvet box containing his mother's diamonds — and Milton took only what was required to retain the lawyer.
"Keep the estate steady," Milton said at the door. "Reach out to me, and no one else."
Paul nodded. "As long as I have breath in my lungs, it remains his."
Milton tipped his hat and disappeared into the dark.
◆◆◆
Two days later, a young woman arrived at the manor's service entrance.
She was simply dressed — a fitted grey coat, practical rather than decorative, a leather satchel over one shoulder. She carried herself with the composed efficiency of someone accustomed to being underestimated, and she had timed her arrival for mid-morning, when the house would be quiet.
Paul answered the door himself. He looked at her for a moment without speaking.
"I am a secretary," she said, "with the legal firm that considers taking on His Grace's case. I was sent to collect some background materials."
Paul's expression did not warm. "I doubt anyone would want to get involved with His Grace's case."
"Who would be foolish enough to claim such a thing?" She met his gaze steadily. "I understand your hesitation. You have had a great many people come through this door in recent months — most of them to take something. I am not here for that."
"Then what are you here for?"
She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was quieter, more direct. "I cannot tell you much. But I am not interested in what the papers say about your employer. I am interested in what this house says about him. There is always a difference."
Paul studied her for a long moment. Then he stepped back from the door.
He did not invite her warmly. He simply allowed her in — which was its own kind of permission.
She moved through the house carefully, as though reading it rather than inspecting it. Paul followed at a distance, watching.
The drawing room first. She noted the arrangement of the furniture — nothing moved for display, everything positioned for actual use.
Books left open on side tables, not arranged on shelves for appearance.
A chess set mid-game on the desk by the window, the pieces slightly dusty now but still in play, as though someone had simply stepped away and expected to return.
She said nothing. She looked at things the way a person looks when they are building a picture rather than confirming one they already have.
Then she asked to see upstairs.
Paul hesitated.
"His room," she said. "I will not touch anything."
He led her up the staircase. The door to Damon's chamber was closed. Paul opened it and stood in the doorway.
She stepped inside.
The room was immaculate. The bed made with precision, the sheets turned down as though in readiness. The washbasin held fresh water — changed recently, by the smell of it. No dust on the writing desk. No mildew on the curtains. The wardrobe stood slightly ajar; his coats hung in order, brushed.
She stood in the center of it for a moment, very still.
"The staff maintain this?" she asked.
"Every day," Paul said, from the doorway. "Without being asked."
She looked at him.
"They believe he is coming back," Paul said simply.
She said nothing to that. But something shifted in her expression — not sentiment, something sharper. The look of a person who has found the detail that does not fit the official account.
On the way back through the corridor, she paused at a doorway she had not noticed before. The door stood open. She looked inside.
The room was bright, well-proportioned, with a good window facing the garden. A clean rug. Proper furniture — a chest of drawers, a mirror, curtains that matched. There were small personal items on the surfaces: a ribbon, a small framed picture, a hairbrush.
"The guest rooms are very well appointed," she said.
"That is not a guest room," Paul said. "That is where the maids sleep."
She turned to look at him.
He met her gaze without elaboration, because none was needed. She could see it herself — the proportions, the light, the care taken with the furnishings. She had been in houses where the servants' quarters were cold attic rooms with shared pallets and no natural light. This was not that.
"He always believed that how you treat the people in your house is the truest measure of a man," Paul said, after a moment.
"Not how you present yourself in a ballroom.
Not what you say in Parliament." He glanced at the room, then back at her.
"His father understood that too, in his younger years.
But as the old Duke aged, he grew harder.
Pragmatic. He learned that kindness, in this world, costs you. "
"And His Grace?"
Paul was quiet for a moment. "His Grace never had the chance to learn that lesson.
Whether that speaks well of him or poorly — I have thought about it a great deal.
" He paused. "There are men in this city who had watched him for years.
Watched him grow. Watched what he was becoming.
" Another pause, carefully measured. "A man like His Grace — given time, given cause — would have been very difficult to manage. "
He did not finish the thought. He did not need to.
She stood in the corridor for a moment, looking at the maid's room with its good window and its careful furnishings, and she finished it herself.
"Thank you," she said. "For your time."
Paul nodded once. "Tell whoever sent you — whoever is truly handling this case — that we are here. What remains of us." He looked down the corridor, toward the closed door of the master bedroom. "We will be here when he comes back."
She left the way she had come, through the service entrance, into the grey morning.
She did not look back at the house. But she walked differently than she had arrived.
◆◆◆
Elizabeth had asked her two best friends, Jane and Clara, to meet her for tea rather later than was strictly proper, but neither of them had ever much minded impropriety when the tea was good and the company was hers.
"In a few days," she said, once the pot had been poured and the door safely closed, "I meet the Duke of Ravenshire."
Jane nearly choked on her first sip. "You are in earnest."
"Entirely."
Clara set her cup down with great deliberateness. "Well. I do think you are rather fortunate, murderer or not. The man is meant to be devastatingly—"
"This is serious, Clara." Elizabeth's voice was sharper than she had intended, and she softened it at once. "We are speaking of a man's life. His freedom. Possibly his neck, if we fail him. This will likely be the hardest thing I have ever attempted."
Jane and Clara exchanged a glance — the particular glance of two friends who had known each other long enough to recognize when levity needed to yield to something steadier.
"Then the true difficulty," Jane said, more gently now, "will be in not becoming entangled with your own client."
Elizabeth laughed despite herself. "That is not a concern. I have never once had difficulty setting such things aside, whatever the client."
"Until now," Clara said, with the particular certainty of someone who had watched her friend's professional composure hold firm through every previous case with rather less effort than this one seemed to be requiring. "This will be the true test of it, I think."
They all laughed at that — though Elizabeth's laugh carried something more thoughtful beneath it.
"It will be difficult from every direction," she admitted, once the laughter had settled. "I visited his manor today. I wanted to see for myself — not what the papers say of him, but what the people who actually know him say. What it feels like, standing in the rooms he has left behind."
"And?" Jane leaned forward.
"He seems kind," Elizabeth said slowly. "Caring, even.
Considerably more complicated than anything the papers have printed.
" She turned her teacup in its saucer, considering.
"It always seems to happen that way, does it not?
The papers print the simplest version of a man, because the simplest version sells more copies.
The truth is invariably more complicated than anyone wishes to pay for. "
Jane and Clara said nothing for a moment, watching her.
"You already like him," Clara said finally. "And you have not even met him yet."
"I do not like him," Elizabeth said. "I am merely curious about him. There is a considerable difference."