Chapter Twenty-Six
Gabriel had spent the better part of his life regarding other people’s emergencies with composure.
He had handled unpaid mortgages, disputed settlements, threatened evictions, forged signatures, contested wills, one baronet who believed “misplaced” was an adequate legal description for an entire estate account book, and Lady Viva Montfort attempting to turn household debt into seed cake.
He had watched gentlemen discover ruin, widows discover freedom, heirs discover they had inherited rather less than expected, and creditors discover that sympathy did not constitute payment.
Through it all, Gabriel had remained steady.
It was easier, he discovered, when the emergency belonged to someone else.
The clerk at Wetherby, Crane, and Holt looked down at the card Gabriel had given him, then up at Gabriel’s face. His expression altered.
“Your Grace,” he said, and bowed.
Gabriel stepped back. “I beg your pardon?”
The clerk flushed. “Forgive me, Your—Mr. Ashby. Mr. Wetherby will receive you and Mr. Ashby directly.”
Beside him, Gabriel’s father turned ashen.
Gabriel looked at him. “Do you know what this is about?”
His father looked toward the closed inner door, then back at him. “Possibly.”
“Possibly?”
“I’m certain Mr. Wetherby can explain it more accurately.”
That was not reassuring.
The clerk retreated, anxious to leave before his existence produced additional offenses. Gabriel remained standing in the outer office, hat in hand, while his mind attempted to arrange the impossible into something resembling sense.
Your Grace.
No.
That could not be right.
He was Gabriel Ashby. Solicitor. Son of a solicitor. Grandson of a schoolmaster. A man who had spent the past sennight advising aristocrats, correcting aristocrats, resisting aristocrats, and falling in love with one very beautiful aristocrat.
He had proposed to Poppy with nothing grander than an honest life, a respectable practice, and a promise to stand beside her.
She had accepted him before he could offer her anything else.
That thought held steady when nothing else did.
The inner door opened. A gray-haired gentleman with a narrow face and an excellent coat stepped out.
“Mr. Ashby. Mr. Ashby. I am Wetherby.”
The three men shook hands.
“If you will come in.”
The office into which they were shown looked old, quiet, and expensive in the most forbidding way, confident enough to require no display.
Shelves of leather-bound volumes lined one wall.
A tall window admitted sober light. The desk was wide, dark, and polished by generations of hands accustomed to arranging centuries on paper. There was no ink stain on it.
Mr. Wetherby seated himself behind the desk. A portfolio tied with red ribbon lay before him.
Gabriel sat because remaining upright had begun to feel less like resolve than stubbornness.
His father sat more slowly.
Gabriel glanced at him. “You know why we have been summoned.”
His father’s hand rested on the head of his cane. “I know only that Wetherby’s letter mentioned your mother’s family.”
“My mother’s family?” Gabriel repeated.
“Ashburns. Martens. Old names, mostly dead ones.” His father’s mouth tightened. “Your mother rarely spoke them willingly.”
“I shall be direct,” Mr. Wetherby said, interrupting them. “The Duke of Alderbury died four days ago.”
Gabriel waited.
Alderbury was an old dukedom, rich with prestige and wealth, belonging to a world that had never seemed remotely connected to Gabriel’s own.
He knew the name in the way a solicitor knew the names of powerful families whose properties, alliances, and disputes shaped portions of the country in which he lived.
“I am sorry to hear it,” Gabriel said carefully. “But I fail to understand why the matter concerns us.”
Mr. Wetherby opened the portfolio and removed several documents. “Because His Grace died without surviving issue, and with the death of Lord Meryton last year, the nearer collateral branch failed as well.”
Gabriel looked from the papers to Wetherby. “I still do not see—”
“No,” his father said quietly. “Not yet.”
Gabriel turned to him.
His father’s face had changed, and what moved through it was not fear precisely. It looked closer to memory.
Mr. Wetherby adjusted his spectacles. “The original letters patent creating the dukedom were issued in the reign of Charles II. They contain a special remainder.”
Gabriel’s attention sharpened despite everything.
As a legal construction, he understood the phrase at once. A title need not always descend in the ordinary fashion if the instrument creating it directed otherwise. Rare, but not unheard of. Unusual enough to draw comment. Significant enough to alter lives.
Mr. Wetherby placed a copy before him. “The first Duke of Alderbury had no surviving son. The patent therefore provided that, should the direct male line and specified collateral branches fail, the title might pass through the senior line descended from the first duke’s eldest daughter.”
Gabriel looked at the document.
The words were there. Formal, precise, merciless in their implications.
“The senior line,” Wetherby continued, “continued through the Ashburn branch, then through the Marten family, and eventually through Lady Anne.”
The name struck harder than the title had.
Anne?
His mother.
For a moment, the room seemed to recede.
Gabriel saw not a name in ink, but a woman seated near a nursery fire, light hair pinned simply, laughing because he had tried to argue that bedtime could not be legally enforced without mutual assent.
He remembered her hand on his brow when he was feverish.
Her voice reading to him. The scent of lavender on her sleeve.
The emptiness that had followed when she died and no argument, law, or good behavior could bring her back.
His mother had not belonged to documents.
Yet here she was, placed in a line of descent he had never understood as anything more than family history.
Wetherby’s voice lowered, perhaps out of respect. “As Lady Anne is deceased, the right passes to her eldest and only surviving son.”
Gabriel looked up. “No,” he said, shaking his head.
Mr. Wetherby did not flinch. “Yes.”
“My father is alive.”
“Your father’s life has no bearing upon the descent. The title passes through your mother’s bloodline, not the Ashby line.”
Gabriel understood the explanation first with a solicitor’s mind, recognizing its correctness, its logic, and its terrible inevitability. A moment later, he felt the full force of it, and his life shifted beneath him.
Mr. Wetherby folded his hands. “Mr. Gabriel Ashby, you are, by law, the Duke of Alderbury.”
Silence settled over the office.
Gabriel looked at his father, expecting some dry remark. Some wry observation about dukedoms being an inconvenient addition to an already crowded afternoon.
None came.
His father stared at the papers with a stunned sheen in his eyes.
“Father?”
“She knew it was possible,” his father said softly.
Gabriel’s chest tightened. “Mother?”
“Yes.” His father drew a slow breath. “Possible in the way storms are possible on a clear summer day. Theoretically. Distantly. Not something to live by. Or expect.”
Wetherby inclined his head. “Lady Anne’s position in the line was recorded, though few expected the matter to become practical. The late duke’s death and the failure of nearer claims have altered that.”
Gabriel looked back at Wetherby. “There is no competing claimant?”
“None with superior right. We have examined the line thoroughly. There are minor matters to be addressed, formal recognitions to obtain, but the substance is clear.”
The substance.
A laugh rose in Gabriel’s chest, then died before it could escape. The matter was far too serious for disbelief.
“What…property is attached?” he asked, because when sense failed, practical questions remained.
Mr. Wetherby took up another paper. “Alderbury Court in Lincolnshire. The London town house in Grosvenor Square. Land in Surrey. Holdings in Yorkshire. Several smaller properties. The revenues are considerable.”
Considerable.
Gabriel, who had spent yesterday calculating whether Poppy might endure a dismal cottage with tolerable drainage, now apparently possessed enough roofs to require a list of their own.
His father made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had contained less emotion. “Well.”
Gabriel looked at him.
His father removed his spectacles and pressed his fingers to his eyes. “Your mother refused to have you raised in expectation of this. She said a man ought to know who he was before anyone told him what he might inherit.”
Gabriel could not speak for a moment. He had resented aristocratic ease for years.
He had mistrusted titles, despised the casual entitlement of men shielded by inherited consequence, and built his own life around order, work, and use.
He had planned, if he married at all, to marry sensibly.
A respectable woman. A manageable household. A life whose limits he understood.
Now the world informed him he had inherited precisely the sort of rank he had thought Poppy needed.
The irony would have been amusing if it had not been so enormous.
Poppy.
Her name moved through him, clearing the confusion.
Poppy had chosen him in a stripped study among crates and dust. Chosen his ordinary name. His careful practice. His promise of prudence. Chosen him without Alderbury Court, without an old title, without any large fortune to speak of.
The knowledge steadied him more than the title unsettled him.
He would not tell himself he could now give Poppy a home and call that the end of the matter, reducing her heart to a question of property.
He had made that mistake enough times. They would choose a home together.
A place with light. A garden where Freddie might terrorize insects instead of upholstery.
Rooms for Lady Viva—near enough to be loved, arranged enough to prevent philosophers with lonely hats from becoming permanent residents.
Perhaps even a ballroom where Poppy might dance because she wished to, whenever she liked.
Still, the irony remained. He’d gone through all her documentation this past week with a fine-tooth comb looking for a miracle. But the miracle wasn’t in her legal documents. It was in his.
Gabriel looked at the papers again. The relief that swept through him was nearly sharp enough to hurt.
Mr. Wetherby had continued speaking. “There will, of course, be immediate obligations. The household at Alderbury Court must be notified. The Grosvenor Square residence is staffed but requires instruction. There are tenants, accounts, settlements—”
“I must go,” Gabriel said, standing.
Wetherby stopped. “Your Grace?”
Gabriel nearly objected to the address. The words rose by habit.
Then he imagined Poppy hearing them for the first time.
Her eyes widening. Her mouth struggling not to laugh. Lady Viva declaring the whole thing marvelously convenient. Freddie attempting to eat ducal correspondence the moment it arrived.
The impulse to object faded.
“I must tell Miss Montfort,” Gabriel said.
His father looked at him, and warmth returned to his face. “Yes. Go.”
“There are details—”
“I shall stay and discover how many roofs you have acquired,” Father said.
Despite himself, Gabriel smiled.
Mr. Wetherby looked faintly alarmed. “There are quite a few.”
Gabriel turned back to his father, one question burning on his tongue. He lowered his voice. “She would have liked Poppy, wouldn’t she?”
His father’s expression softened fully. “Oh yes,” he said. “Very much.”
The answer struck deep. Gabriel wished suddenly, fiercely, that his mother had lived long enough to meet the woman who had overturned his careful life and somehow given every complication within it purpose.
He wished she could have seen Poppy laugh.
Seen her argue. Seen her face loss and still summon courage with ink on her fingers and fear concealed beneath wit.
He suspected his mother would have recognized Poppy as a kindred spirit: a lady born to rank who had fallen, inconveniently and entirely, in love with a solicitor.
Gabriel nodded to Mr. Wetherby, gripped his father’s shoulder once, and left the office.
Outside, London carried on with its usual composure.
Carriages rattled past. A boy shouted news at the corner.
Gentlemen crossed the street with umbrellas angled against a fine mist. Clerks hurried beneath dark coats.
A flower seller adjusted her basket and called to a lady beneath a striped awning.
It was still ordinary London, still the same street beneath the same gray afternoon, though the world no longer felt the same within him.
Because now Gabriel walked through it as the Duke of Alderbury.
He quickened his pace. Poppy was still at the Montfort house, packing the remnants of her old life into trunks.
Before he’d left, they had decided she and Lady Viva would stay at a hotel until the wedding could be arranged by special license.
Now Gabriel suspected such a license would be easier to obtain.
Poppy would be safe. Truly safe. Lady Viva would have rooms enough to be as extravagant as she pleased. And Gabriel, who had spent his life trusting paper, law, and restraint, had somehow become the answer to a problem no solicitor could have solved.
He had wished for some way to protect her.
He had wished to put himself between Poppy and every practical hurt surrounding her.
To make Algernon irrelevant. To give her a home no one could take.
To ensure she never again had to convert fear into lists because no one else stood ready to help carry the weight.
Now the means had arrived, late and astonishing, and made an aristocrat of him.
But the means was not the reward.
Poppy had already given him that.
Gabriel turned toward Berkeley Square and walked even faster.