Chapter Sixteen
“Get up.”
Henry Frost was standing in the doorway of the study at Grosvenor Square with his coat on, his hat still in his hand and rain on his shoulders, which meant he had come directly from somewhere else, or someone had sent for him.
Collins was the only person in the building who had the authority to send for anyone and the only person in the building who was still speaking to Ash, because Ash had dismissed the rest of the staff four days ago on the grounds that being looked at by people who pitied him was worse than being alone.
“Get up, Ash.”
He was on the floor of his study. He had been on the floor for some time, though he could not have said how long, because the distinction between hours had become academic at some point around Tuesday and he had stopped tracking them.
The study was dark, the curtains drawn, one candle guttering on the desk above him, the wax pooling on the wood because no one had trimmed the wick and no one was going to trim the wick because the staff had been dismissed.
A half-emptied decanter of brandy sat within arm’s reach, and beside it a stack of letters he had written and not sent, seven of them, each one addressed to Miss Imogen Goodall in his angular handwriting, each one sealed, none of them carrying the right words because the right words did not exist. He had tried seven times to find them.
The first letter had been an apology, and the apology had been inadequate.
The second had been an explanation, and the explanation had been insufficient.
The third had been a confession, and the confession had been self-serving.
The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh had been progressively shorter, progressively more desperate, progressively less convinced that ink on paper could repair what he had broken, until the seventh letter contained only her name and a single sentence he could not bring himself to finish.
He had not slept since the Carlisle ball.
Five days. He had eaten something on Monday, a piece of bread Collins had left on the desk, and then nothing since, because eating required the belief that sustaining oneself was worth the effort, and the belief had departed his body at approximately the same moment Imogen had walked past him in the Carlisle parlor with tears running down her face.
He replayed it every hour, the image of her walking past him, her face set, her eyes bright, her body moving with the fierce controlled precision of a woman who was holding herself together by an act of will and who would break the moment she was out of his sight.
The breaking was his fault, every piece of it, and the every-piece-of-it was what kept him on the floor.
Frost came into the room without asking what had happened because he had read the Tattler, and the Tattler had been sufficient.
He picked up the decanter, carried it to the far side of the room, and set it on the mantelpiece, out of reach.
Then he rang the bell. Collins appeared, expectant, vindicated, the face of a man who had sent for reinforcements and whose reinforcements had arrived.
“Tea,” Frost said. “Then soup. Then a barber. In that order.”
“I do not want tea.”
“I did not ask you what you wanted. I asked Collins for tea. The tea is not for your enjoyment, Ash. The tea is for the purpose of getting liquid into your body that is not brandy, because you have been drinking brandy for five days and it is not helping and you are beginning to smell like a man who has given up. But giving up is not what we are going to do today.”
Frost sat down in the chair beside the desk, regarded Ash on the floor with the calm, unsparing look of a man who had watched other men come apart before and who understood that the first step in reassembly was not sympathy but architecture.
You did not put a broken man back together by telling him you were sorry.
You put him back together by giving him something to build.
“The girl is not the only one who has lost something here,” Frost said.
“You will lose yourself if you stay on this floor. I have known you for twelve years, Ash, and I have watched you waste eight of them. I am not going to watch you waste the ninth on the floor of your own study because a woman you love discovered that you are a coward and a fool. You are a coward and a fool. The question is whether you intend to remain one.”
The tea arrived. Ash drank it because Frost was watching and because not drinking it would have required more energy than drinking it.
He drank three cups and then the soup arrived, and he ate that too, standing at the desk because Frost had told him to stand.
When the barber came, he shaved Ash’s face with the careful neutrality of a man who had been paid not to comment on the state of his client’s eyes or the hollows under his cheekbones or the fact that the Duke of Ravenhurst appeared to have lost half a stone in five days.
That afternoon Ash dressed himself in the severest black he owned, the coat he had worn to his father’s funeral, the cravat tied simply, the signet ring turned outward.
He looked at himself in the glass and did not recognize the face that looked back, because the face was thinner, older and carried something in its expression that had not been there before.
Something beyond the absence, beyond the boredom, a quality that might have been called determination if determination did not sound too clean for what it actually was.
It was the particular stubbornness of a man who had destroyed everything he valued and was now going to destroy his own reputation in payment.
He walked into White’s at the busiest hour of the afternoon.
The main room was full, thirty or forty members in chairs and at tables, coffee, conversation, the rustle of newspapers and the low murmur of men conducting the business of being wealthy in public.
Heads turned when he entered. The Duke of Ravenhurst had not been seen in public since the Carlisle ball, and the Tattler had been running items all week, and the room’s attention landed on him with the focused intensity of men who had been waiting for exactly this entrance and were now getting it.
He walked to the betting book. The large leather-bound volume sat on its stand near the bow window, open to the current month, the pages filled with wagers in various hands, sums, terms and deadlines recorded in the particular shorthand of gentlemen who believed that the formalisation of a bet constituted a binding agreement and who took the formalisation very seriously.
The page was crowded. Lord Rourke’s handwriting near the top, a wager about horses.
Lord Aldous’s below, something about a boxing match.
And in the middle of the page, in a hand Ash recognized as Devlin’s, the entry he had been looking for, the original wager, dated April, the terms abbreviated but clear, the initials R and S at the bottom, Ravenhurst and Stormont, the two men who had made a game of a woman’s heart and had recorded the game in a book that was read by every man in London.
He picked up the pen. The room had gone quiet.
Not the polite quiet of men attending to their own business, but the focused quiet of men who had stopped attending to anything except the Duke of Ravenhurst standing at the betting book with a quill pen in his hand and an expression on his face that suggested the pen was about to be used for something unprecedented.
He dipped the pen and wrote, in his own hand, in the middle of the page, in letters large enough to be read from three feet away:
Wager dated 29 April. Subject: Miss I. Goodall.
Resolved this day in the favor of the lady, against the man who proposed it and against the man who accepted it, who hereby acknowledges he behaved as a coward and a fool, and pays out double the sum to the proposer in penalty for ever entering the lady’s name in this book. Signed, Ravenhurst.
He set the pen down. He took from his coat the bank draft for five thousand that Devlin had refused to accept, and beside it a second bank draft for five thousand more, the penalty he had imposed on himself, and laid both on the stand beside the betting book.
Ten thousand pounds total. The price of his own disgrace, written in ink in front of half the membership of the most exclusive club in London.
He walked out without looking at any of the faces watching him.
He walked out of White’s and into St. James’s Street, and the afternoon sun hit his face.
He stood on the pavement and breathed, and the breathing was the first clean breath he had taken in five days, because the betting book entry was the first honest thing he had done since the Carlisle ball.
By six o’clock the entry was being copied and read aloud in three other clubs.
By the following morning, every gentleman in London would know that the Duke of Ravenhurst had publicly named himself a coward and a fool in the betting book at White’s and had paid ten thousand pounds for the privilege.
The naming would follow him for the rest of his life, and the following was the point, because it was the punishment that he earned.
***
The Saintbury visit. That same afternoon.
He drove to Hanover Square. The Dowager Duchess of Saintbury’s townhouse was a tall gray building with black railings and a front door that had not been repainted in Ash’s lifetime, because Aunt Eugenie did not believe in repainting things that were still functional and did not care what the neighbors thought about it.
A butler admitted him to the morning room without surprise, because butlers at Hanover Square had been admitting Hambridges for forty years and had learned to expect them at inconvenient hours.