Chapter Eleven #2
Devlin’s eyebrows rose a quarter of an inch. “It was always a game, Ravenhurst. You accepted it at three in the morning in a brothel with a courtesan in your lap. Forgive me if I take the circumstances of acceptance as an indicator of intent.”
The mention of Aurelie’s landed on the room and sat there, and it was ugly, because Devlin was right.
The wager had been accepted at three in the morning in a brothel, and the acceptance had been casual, and the woman it concerned had been a name on a page in Debrett’s.
But now the name was Imogen, the page was a person, and the performance was over, and the only thing that remained was the damage.
“Take the money, Devlin.”
“A wager is a wager, Ravenhurst.” Devlin smiled, and the smile was the one from Aurelie’s, the one with more teeth than warmth, the one that sat on his face without reaching anything underneath.
“The deadline is the deadline. We do not change the rules of White’s because a duke has developed a conscience.
” He paused, and the pause was calculated; the machinery of a man’s cruelty turning behind a pleasant face was visible.
“There are eleven days remaining. I expect you to honour them.”
Ash stood very still, but the stillness was not composure.
It was the effort of not reaching across the desk and seizing Devlin by the cravat, which would have been satisfying but would not have helped Imogen.
On the contrary, it would have given Devlin exactly what he wanted, which was evidence that the Duke of Ravenhurst had lost control.
“If you will not release me from the wager, I will make other arrangements.”
“Arrangements.” Devlin tilted his head, amused. “What sort of arrangements?”
“The sort that do not require your permission.”
Devlin’s smile changed. The amusement remained, but something beneath it shifted, a recalculation, the small silent adjustment of a man who had just realized that his opponent was no longer playing by the expected rules. He looked at Ash for a long moment, and then he spoke.
“Marry the girl,” Devlin said, and the suggestion was delivered lightly, almost playfully, except that nothing about Devlin was playful and Ash knew it.
“If you are so concerned about your conscience, marry her quickly. A wedding before the deadline would satisfy the terms of the wager rather neatly, would it not? The lady in love, the duke in possession, everyone wins.”
“This is not a game, Devlin.”
“Everything is a game, Ravenhurst. The question is whether you are playing to win or playing to lose, and at the moment I confess I cannot tell which.” He picked up the bank draft, looked at it, and set it down again.
“If you have not resolved the matter by the thirtieth, I will expect a different kind of conversation.”
Ash took the bank draft back, but left the bill of sale on the desk because the chestnut was the smaller price and paying it was easier than arguing with Devlin, which was a thing he no longer had the patience for.
He left. He walked down the stairs and out into Half Moon Street. He paused upon the pavement in the afternoon light and drew a breath. It came quick and shallow, but did nothing to steady him.
He thought about Devlin’s suggestion about marriage, which was the most cynical thing Devlin had said, and the most practical. That was the difference between them. In Devlin’s mind, a marriage was a move in a game. In Ash’s, it was the last honest thing he possessed.
He went directly to Lincoln’s Inn. The walk took twenty minutes, through streets that were too loud and too bright for the storm inside him, but he walked fast. The staircase to Mr. Briggs’s offices was narrow, the walls lined with prints of the Inns of Court, and a clerk met him at the top and ushered him into Briggs’s office without requiring a name, because the Duke of Ravenhurst did not require introductions at Lincoln’s Inn.
Briggs was expecting him. A small neat man in a dark coat, gray at the temples, meticulous in the manner of a solicitor who had spent thirty years ensuring that other people’s documents were in order and who regarded disorder as a personal affront.
The paperwork was ready, laid out on the desk in its leather folder, the parchment crisp, the spaces for names and dates left blank in the careful hand of a clerk who understood that a duke’s special license was not a thing to be hurried despite the obvious hurrying.
“The Archbishop’s seal is here, Your Grace.
” Briggs pointed to the wax impression at the bottom of the document, heavy and official.
“The license permits a marriage to be solemnised at any time, in any church or chapel, without the reading of banns. Your Grace’s name is entered here.
” He indicated the first line, where Ashton James Hambridge, Duke of Ravenhurst appeared in the clerk’s hand.
“The name of the other party will be entered at the time of solemnisation. The license is valid for three months from today.”
Ash looked at the blank space where Imogen’s name would go.
The space was small, an inch and a half of empty parchment between two printed lines, and it was the most significant empty space he had ever seen, because filling it would mean that the Duke of Ravenhurst had chosen, publicly and irrevocably, a woman the ton had spent four seasons deciding did not exist. The Duke’s particular choosing would be an act of defiance against every expectation the peerage had ever placed on his shoulders, and the defiance was, he discovered, not frightening at all. It was exhilarating.
“Is there anything else, Your Grace?”
“No. Thank you, Briggs.”
He took the license, placed it inside his coat, on the left side, close to his body, and the placement was deliberate, because the license was going to sit next to the watch that contained his mother’s portrait.
The two documents were connected now, the old love and the new one, and the connection was something he would not have been able to articulate, because some things did not require language, they only required carrying.
He walked home through Mayfair. The afternoon was warm, the streets full, carriages, riders and pedestrians occupying every available surface of pavement and road.
He walked among them with two documents in his coat and a plan in his head that was either the bravest thing he had ever conceived or the most reckless.
He thought about the Carlisle ball, two days from now: The orchestra, the candlelight and the crush of half the ton packed into the Carlisle townhouse, and somewhere in that crush Imogen Goodall in her best gown.
He was going to show her the license and ask her, but he would tell her first, about the wager, about Devlin, the sum five thousand and the chestnut.
He was going to hurt her, and the hurting was going to be his fault, and no amount of licenses or proposals or clean hands was going to undo the fact that he had run his finger down a page, stopped on her name and felt nothing.
He felt everything now, though, and that was enormous, terrifying and present, filling the space the absence had occupied for eight years. This feeling was the hardest thing he had ever carried; harder than the watch and harder than the grief, because it contained within it the possibility of loss.
***
Collins was waiting in the front hall.
“Your Grace looks well,” Collins said, which was the closest Collins had ever come to expressing an opinion about his employer’s emotional state.
“Your Grace feels terrified, Collins. But thank you.”
He went upstairs, took out the license and read it once.
He read it carefully, every word, the formal legal language that reduced a marriage to a series of permissions and requirements, and underneath the formal language was the real thing, the human thing, the decision to bind his life to another person’s life and to do so publicly and permanently.
He read it again. His finger found the blank space where her name would go. Imogen Goodall. Two words. A name he had said aloud once for the wager and felt nothing.
He placed the license on the desk beside the watch and looked at them both, the gold casing and the pale parchment, and thought about the Carlisle ball.
He was going to ask her in front of everyone.
He was going to stand in the Carlisle ballroom, in front of every person who had spent four seasons ignoring her, and he was going to ask Imogen Goodall to be the Duchess of Ravenhurst. But before all, he was going to tell her the truth, all of it.
He was afraid, but it was the price, and he was going to pay it, because a man who carried a lie into a proposal was a man who did not deserve the answer.
He picked up the watch and looked at his mother’s face in the miniature, and he was certain that she would have approved.
He thought his mother would have liked a woman who read French novels behind potted palms, who told dukes their company was variable and who knelt in wet grass without being asked.
He thought his mother would have said that a woman who made a Hambridge laugh without warning was a woman worth every risk the Hambridges had ever taken, and the Hambridges, for all their faults, had never been afraid of risk.
Two days. He could manage two days.
But he was not entirely sure that he could manage the truth.