Chapter Eleven
“I have made a mess of this, Father.”
The long gallery at Ravenhurst Park was dark at three in the morning, the candles unlit, the windows letting in nothing but thin moonlight that fell in pale rectangles across the floor and caught the lower edges of the portraits along the east wall.
Thirty-seven Hambridges watched from their frames, arranged in chronological order from the first baronet to the seventh duke, and Ash was standing in front of the last of them: his father.
He had the expression that Ash remembered from childhood, an expression that was not quite stern and not quite kind and was, in fact, simply the face of a man who had stopped pretending to be either and had settled for something more honest.
The pocket watch was in Ash’s hand. He had taken it from his waistcoat, opened it and was holding both halves of the portrait side by side in the moonlight: the miniature of his mother in the casing and the full portrait of his father on the wall.
The two faces that had made him, looking at each other across forty years and a layer of gold and a layer of oil paint, and neither of them was able to tell him what to do, but their silence was better than anyone else’s advice.
He was in love with Imogen Goodall. He could say it now, standing alone in the gallery at three in the morning with no one to hear except thirty-seven dead Hambridges and a pocket watch.
The word sat in his mouth differently than he had expected.
Not heavy. Not dramatic. It was quiet, plain, and factual.
He was going to end the wager. He was going to marry her.
He was going to walk into Devlin’s rooms and put five thousand pounds on the table, sign over the chestnut and tell him it was finished.
Then he was going to his solicitor for a special license, and he was going to stand in front of Imogen Goodall with clean hands and tell her every terrible thing he had done and ask her, without performance and without deserving it, to marry him.
His father’s painted eyes regarded him from the canvas. The expression had not changed, because painted expressions did not change, but Ash could have sworn that the set of the mouth had softened a quarter of an inch, and that might, in different light, have been approval.
“I know,” Ash said to the portrait. “You would have done it better. You did do it better. You married a woman you loved, and you carried her portrait for thirty years and you never lied to her about who you were. I have lied to Imogen about everything since the first night, but I am going to stop, and the stopping is going to cost me, but I am going to pay.”
He stood in the gallery for a long time after saying it. The moonlight shifted across the floor as the hours passed, the pale rectangles sliding east, and the house creaked around him in the particular rhythm of old stone settling in the night.
He thought about the conservatory, the library, the cottage and the balcony, and the times he had stopped.
It had been the hardest thing he had ever done, harder than inheriting the title, harder than burying his father, harder than eight years of emptiness.
Because stopping when your body was burning, and the woman you loved was in your arms and willing, was a kind of discipline he had not known he possessed and that he was fairly certain he could not sustain much longer.
The next time he touched her, the next time her mouth was on his, or her hands were on his body, and she was choosing him, he was not going to be able to stop.
The wager had to end. The truth had to be spoken.
The license had to be in his pocket, the words had to be out of his mouth, and the whole rotten scaffolding of the game Devlin had proposed at Aurelie’s had to come down before he could allow himself what every nerve in his body was demanding.
He went upstairs to his rooms, sat at his writing desk and wrote to his solicitor, Mr. Briggs of Lincoln’s Inn, requesting that the paperwork for a special license be prepared for his collection upon his return to London.
His name was already on file with Briggs, because dukes kept solicitors as other men kept horses, perpetually maintained and occasionally ridden, and Briggs would have the documents ready within the day.
He sealed the letter and sent it down with the night footman for the morning post. He lay down on his bed fully clothed and slept for the first time in three nights, and when he woke the sun was up, and the decision he had made in the gallery was still there, as solid and certain as the watch in his pocket.
The house gathering broke up two days later.
The guests departed in stages, the grander carriages first, then the lesser ones, then the gigs and the hired chaises; the gravel sweep was busy all morning with luggage, footmen and the particular chaos of a large household returning itself to its parts.
Imogen left with Aunt Margery and Cassie in the hired carriage.
Ash watched from the front steps as the carriage was loaded.
Aunt Margery’s trunk went up first, then Cassie’s bandboxes, then Imogen’s single small bag.
It was so much smaller than the others that something in his stomach tightened.
The small bag seemed to reflect the smallness of her world.
That world had been closing in on her for four seasons.
He wanted to open it. He wanted to fling it wide and fill it with books, dresses, country houses and whatever she wanted. The feeling was fierce, sudden, and entirely new.
Imogen climbed in last. She paused on the step and looked back at him across the gravel. Her face was calm, and her eyes were bright. She was humming.
He could hear it faintly over the noise of departure. It was a small, tuneless melody, one she probably didn’t realize she was making. The sound undid him more than any kiss. It was happiness, unperformed and unguarded. The kind that slipped out when a person forgot to hold it in.
He suspected Imogen Goodall had not been happy in a very long time.
And he had caused that humming.
The wager still stood between them, but she did not know about it. Those truths settled heavily in his stomach, and the morning air did nothing to ease the nausea.
He raised his hand. She raised hers. The carriage rolled away, and the faint humming faded with it. He remained upon the steps of Ravenhurst Park and resolved: I shall set this right. I shall tell her everything.
If she forgives me, I will devote my life to proving worthy of that grace. If she does not, I shall have earned her displeasure. Either fate is preferable to lingering here, watching her depart, with a lie concealed upon my person.
He left for London that afternoon.
Devlin’s rooms were on the second floor of a building on Half Moon Street, decorated in the style of a man who had excellent taste and wished everyone to know it.
Dark panelling, good furniture, a painting over the fireplace that was either valuable or a convincing copy, and the particular atmosphere of masculine comfort that money could buy but breeding could not, though Devlin had both and deployed them interchangeably.
Ash arrived at noon with five thousand pounds in a bank draft folded inside his coat pocket and the bill of sale for the chestnut stallion in his other pocket; both documents signed and ready, the financial architecture of the wager’s end complete in every detail.
He had dressed carefully, dark coat, correct cravat, the ducal ring turned outward for the first time in weeks, because what he was about to do required formality, and formality required the appearance of a man who was in control, even if the man inside the appearance was nothing of the sort.
Devlin received him in the study. He was seated behind a mahogany desk that was too large for the room and that had been placed there, Ash suspected, specifically because it was too large, because Devlin understood that furniture was a form of argument and a desk that dominated a study was a desk that told its visitors who was in charge.
“Ravenhurst.” Devlin did not rise but gestured to the chair opposite, and the gesture was casual, and the casualness was a performance. Ash had known Devlin long enough to recognize the performance for what it was: a man who was expecting something and was pretending not to expect it.
“I am paying out,” Ash said. He set the bank draft on the desk and set the bill of sale beside it.
The two documents looked small on the mahogany, two pale rectangles against the dark wood, the financial sum of a wager that had started as entertainment and had ended as a catastrophe, though Devlin did not know the second part yet and Ash was not going to tell him.
“Five thousand and the chestnut. The wager is ended.”
Devlin looked at the documents but did not touch them. His fingers rested upon the arm of his chair; he tapped once against the leather, and it was slow and deliberate.
Ash had seen the gesture before in card games and in conversations. It meant Devlin wished to command the moment and that he would.
“The deadline is the end of June, Ravenhurst.”
“I am aware of the deadline, but I am ending the wager before the deadline. The terms are met and the money is on the desk.”
“The terms are not met.” Devlin leaned forward.
His elbows came to rest on the mahogany, his chin on his fingers, and the posture was casual, but the casualness was a lie.
“The terms specify that the lady be verifiably in love with you by the thirtieth of June. You are proposing to forfeit. A forfeit is not a settlement. A forfeit is an admission that the game was never played.”
“It was never a game.”