Chapter Sixteen #2
Aunt Eugenie was in her chair by the window.
Early sixties, dressed in mourning lavender, the color she had worn since her husband died six years ago and that she showed no sign of abandoning.
Her hair was silver and pinned severely back.
Her face was narrow and sharp and carried the particular expression of a woman who had been intelligent her entire life and who was tired of pretending otherwise.
A cup of tea sat at her elbow, Sevres porcelain, the one good set she had inherited from her mother-in-law and that she used daily because beautiful things were meant to be used and not displayed.
She had not seen Ash for a long time. She had stopped inviting him because she had grown tired of being lied to by her only nephew, the boy she had raised after his mother died, the boy she had taught to read, to ride and to tell the truth.
The boy had grown into a man who did none of those things with any consistency, and the inconsistency had exhausted her.
The morning room was quiet except for the clock on the mantelpiece, which ticked with the steady patience of a clock that had been measuring Hambridge failures for two generations and was not going to stop now.
He knelt at her chair.
The kneeling was not a performance. It was not a gesture or a strategy or any of the moves he had spent eight years deploying in drawing rooms across London.
It was a man going to his knees in front of the woman who had raised him, the only person who had ever told him no and meant it. “Aunt Eugenie.”
“Ashton.” Her voice was level, cool, the voice of a woman who had been waiting for this visit and was not going to make it easy. “You look terrible.”
“I am terrible.”
“Yes. I have read the Tattler. I have also read the betting book entry, which Lord Abernathy’s man copied and brought to me an hour ago. It was very thorough. I assume you wrote it yourself.”
“I did.”
“Then you had better tell me the rest, because the entry named you a coward and a fool and I should like to know the specific dimensions of the cowardice and the foolishness before I decide what to do about them.”
He told her everything, and he did not soften any of it.
He described the wager in the terms Devlin had used, five thousand and the chestnut and the most invisible girl of the season made to love you by the end of June.
He described the conservatory in terms that made Aunt Eugenie’s mouth tighten, and her tea go untouched.
Aunt Eugenie listened without interrupting.
Her face did not change during the conservatory or the bet.
Her face changed, briefly and almost imperceptibly, when Ash described Imogen kneeling in the wet grass beside him to search for the watch, and the change was small; a softening at the corners of her mouth that arrived and departed in less than a second.
He asked her, when the telling was done, not for himself. Not for his reputation or his standing or any of the things a duke was supposed to ask his aunt the dowager duchess to protect. He asked her for Cassie.
“Miss Cordelia Goodall is eighteen years old. Her first season has been destroyed by my behaviour. She has done nothing wrong. She is bright and kind and deserves a season that is not contaminated by my disgrace.” He paused.
His knees were aching on the morning room carpet, but the aching was appropriate.
“I am asking you to sponsor her, Aunt Eugenie. Under the Saintbury name. Next year, when the season opens. I am asking you to give her what I took from her.”
“And Miss Imogen?”
“Miss Imogen is not to be told. I do not want the sponsorship to count as a chip in any apology I owe her. I do not want her to weigh it against the wager. I want you to do this because an eighteen-year-old girl should not pay for what I did, and for no other reason.”
Aunt Eugenie set her cup down and looked at him for a long time.
“I will sponsor the child, Ashton, on my own terms. The girl will be told it was a private gesture from the Saintbury family, made in remembrance of your father, who was the last man in this family I genuinely respected. I will not lie for you. I will not let an eighteen-year-old child suffer for what you did.” She paused.
Her eyes, which were the same pale shade as Ash’s mother’s eyes and therefore the same shade as Ash’s, held his without wavering.
“And you, my dear, are the worst Hambridge I have ever known and the most likely to redeem himself, both of which you should consider compliments.”
He thanked her without rising. He remained on his knees until she told him to get up, which she did with a small impatient gesture that contained, buried deep inside the impatience, something that might have been the beginning of forgiveness, though Ash was not fool enough to call it that.
***
He gave the interview before nightfall. The Tattler’s man met him at a coffee house on Fleet Street, a thin nervous journalist named Garvey who had been covering the ton’s indiscretions for six years and who had never, in those six years, had a duke walk into a coffee house, sit down across from him and offer, without prompting, to take the blame for a scandal that the Tattler had been building toward for a week.
The interview was unsigned, as convention required, but unmistakable, because the Duke of Ravenhurst’s voice was recognisable even in print, and the interview was phrased in the particular cadence of a man who was not asking for sympathy and was not offering excuses but was publicly, taking responsibility for the damage he had caused.
He named Miss Goodall as the wronged party.
He took the entire blame. He described himself, without irony and without deflection, as the worst of his own circle, and the phrasing was deliberate, because the phrasing needed to be specific enough to turn the scandal in her favor and vague enough to protect the details of what had happened between them.
Because the details were hers and not the Tattler’s, and the distinction mattered, and he would protect that distinction.
Garvey asked him, at the end, whether the duke wished to add anything, and Ash considered the question.
“The lady is owed every apology a man can make,” Ash said. “And the man making it is aware that he may never have the opportunity to deliver it. Print that.”
***
Garvey printed it. The interview ran the next morning, front page, above the fold.
Within ten days the scandal had turned. Imogen recast across the season as the wronged woman, the wallflower who had been courted by a duke under false pretences and who had conducted herself with dignity throughout.
Ash recast as the worst of the rakes, the man who had written his own condemnation in the betting book at White’s and who had paid ten thousand pounds to do it and who had given an interview in which he had called himself the worst of his own circle and had meant every word.
The turning was what he wanted. The turning was the fourth stage of the grovel, the public reversal, the deliberate destruction of his own reputation in service of hers. The cost was considerable, but that was the point.
***
The Asquith reception, four days later.
Ash arrived in plain black, the funeral coat, the simple cravat.
The room was crowded, but he entered without speaking to anyone and crossed the floor and found Devlin standing near the refreshment table with a glass of wine and a smile that suggested he was still enjoying himself.
He was not yet aware that the enjoyment was about to end.
Ash walked past him. Not around him. Past him, within three feet, close enough that the cut was unmistakable, close enough that every person in the surrounding radius saw the Duke of Ravenhurst look through the Earl of Stormont as if the earl were a piece of unfamiliar furniture, unremarkable and not worth the effort of navigating around.
The cut was public, deliberate and total, and the totality of it hit the room and spread outward in concentric circles of whispered conversation, because a duke cutting an earl at a public reception was not a snub. It was a sentence.
Devlin’s face went white. Not the gradual draining that Ash’s face had undergone at the Carlisle ball.
A sudden sharp blanching, the color departing all at once, leaving his features exposed, rigid and stripped of the charm that usually covered them.
He stood near the refreshment table and watched Ash walk away, and the smile was gone, and what was left underneath was something Ash had seen before; something cold, calculating and wounded, because Devlin’s vanity was the core of him, and the vanity had just been publicly pierced.
A man whose vanity had been pierced in front of the ton was a man who would retaliate.
***
The retaliation arrived before the next day. A man in a dark coat appeared at the door of Grosvenor Square with a card on a silver tray, the card bearing the Stormont crest and a single line written in Devlin’s hand. Pistols. Chalk Farm. Dawn the day after next.
Ash read the card in his study, and Frost was beside him, having refused to leave since the morning.
The study smelled of tea instead of brandy, the letters on the desk had been sorted into a pile by Frost, and the decanter was still on the mantelpiece where Frost had put it.
The room was beginning, very slowly, to feel like a room that belonged to a man who was rebuilding rather than a man who was falling apart.
“You will not meet him,” Frost said.
Ash set the card down on the desk.
“No,” Ash said. “I will not.”
He picked up the card, turned it over and began to compose, in his mind, the response he was going to write, the response that was going to end Devlin’s career in London society more thoroughly than any bullet could.
Because a bullet was private but a refusal was public, and public was where the Duke of Ravenhurst was conducting his business now.
The business was the systematic dismantling of every structure that had made the wager possible, beginning with the betting book and ending with the man who had proposed it.
He picked up his pen. Frost watched him from the chair by the window, steady, patient and entirely unsurprised, because Frost had known, from the moment he had found Ash on the floor, that he was going to get up, and the getting-up was going to be the most dangerous thing the Duke of Ravenhurst had ever done.