Chapter Seventeen
“Read it back to me.”
Frost held the letter at arm’s length, tilted toward the lamp, and read aloud in the flat uninflected voice he used when he was delivering someone else’s words and wished it noted that the words were not his own.
“I have already accepted my own ruin in print. Yours will follow without my assistance. The man who proposed the wager has nothing left to settle with the man who accepted it. Signed, Ravenhurst.”
The study was quiet. Ash sat at the desk with his pen still in his hand and the ink still wet on the original and listened to his own sentence come back to him through Frost’s mouth.
The sentence sounded right, which was a thing he had not been certain of when he wrote it, because certainty required clarity and clarity required sleep and sleep was a thing he had not had in six days.
“It will ruin him,” Frost said. “A refused duel, printed in the Tattler. He cannot survive it. Not after the betting book. Not after the interview. Not after the cut at the Asquiths. This is the final piece. If you send this, Devlin is finished in London.”
“I know.”
“Do you want him finished?”
Ash considered the question. He considered Devlin in the crimson salon at Aurelie’s, two glasses of brandy ahead of everyone else, proposing the wager with the smile that had more teeth than warmth.
He thought of all his lies, and he considered the architecture of Devlin’s cruelty.
The precise systematic dismantling of a woman’s trust conducted across six weeks by a man who had never met her and did not care whether she survived the dismantling.
It took less than five seconds, because five seconds was all the consideration Devlin deserved.
“Send it,” Ash said. “By hand, to Half Moon Street. And send a copy to the Tattler.”
Frost sealed the letter and called for the footman.
The footman departed with two envelopes, one for Devlin and one for Garvey at Fleet Street, and the departure was quiet, a door closing, boots on the step, the click of the gate, and then the study was silent again.
The letter was gone, and there was nothing left to do except wait for the morning edition and the particular silence that would fall across London when the ton learned that the Duke of Ravenhurst had refused a duel by telling the challenger that his ruin would follow without assistance and had signed his name to the refusal and had sent a copy to the press.
Devlin read the note at midnight. Ash learned this later, from sources he did not request and could not avoid, because the ton’s information network was thorough and relentless and delivered its intelligence whether the recipient wanted it or not.
Devlin read the note in his study at Half Moon Street and threw his glass into the fireplace, and the throwing was heard by two servants and a man named Lord Cavendish who had been waiting in the drawing room to collect a gambling debt.
He left the house without collecting it, because the sound of glass shattering in a study was the sound of a man coming apart, and Lord Cavendish had no desire to witness the coming-apart of an earl whose social position was about to be reduced to rubble.
The Tattler printed Ash’s response the next morning.
The column ran beside a summary of the duel challenge, the terms Devlin had proposed, the location, the time, and then the refusal, printed in full; every word, including the signature.
The effect was immediate and devastating.
Half of London laughed, because a man who challenged another man over a wager he himself had proposed was a man whose sense of honor was so thoroughly inverted that it constituted comedy.
The other half was appalled, because the challenge exposed Devlin’s complicity in the wager in terms the Tattler’s previous columns had only hinted at, and the exposure was complete, and the completeness was fatal.
White’s removed Devlin’s name from the membership within the week.
Two other betting clubs followed. Three ducal households canceled his invitations.
Lady Carlisle, whose library had been the site of the overheard conversation that had broken the wager open, cut him at a charity meeting with a single glacial look that was reported in the Tattler the following day.
The Asquiths declined a dinner. The Hartwoods declined a card.
Lord Rourke, who had been Devlin’s audience in the Carlisle library and whose own name had been conspicuously absent from the Tattler’s coverage, distanced himself with the particular speed of a man who understood that proximity to disgrace was itself a form of disgrace and who had no intention of sharing Devlin’s.
By the end of the week Devlin had booked passage to Calais. He left London on a Tuesday, the same day of the week Ash had first called on Imogen in her morning room, and the coincidence was not poetic and was not meaningful but was simply a fact.
Devlin was gone, the wager set was dissolved, and the machine that had produced the damage was dismantled. Everything was public, permanent and irreversible, but none of it, not one piece of it, had brought Imogen back.
***
He did not take the carriage. He did not take Collins or a valet or a groom or any of the retinue that a duke was expected to travel with, because a duke’s retinue was a performance and he was done with performance.
He rode alone. One horse, one valise, the watch in his waistcoat pocket, the license still in his coat though it was a relic now; a document from a life that had ended at the Carlisle ball, but he carried it anyway.
Frost’s instructions had been simple. Write daily.
Report your location. Do not do anything that cannot be undone.
The instructions were those of a man who understood that the Duke of Ravenhurst was leaving London in a state that resembled devotion from one angle and self-destruction from another, and who wanted to make sure the devotion was the angle that prevailed.
He rode for six hours. The road from London to Hertfordshire was good, the turnpike well-maintained, the countryside green and rolling and entirely indifferent to the interior state of the man riding through it.
He stopped once, at a coaching inn, for water for the horse and nothing for himself, because eating was still a thing his body was refusing to do with any regularity, and the refusing had begun to show.
His coat hung loose at the shoulders. His face in the coaching inn’s mirror was gaunt, the hollows under his cheekbones deeper than they had been a week ago.
He felt focused though. The focus was narrow, specific and pointed at one thing: a village inn near the Goodall estate, and the pointing was all the direction he needed.
He arrived at the Hart and Hare by nightfall.
The inn was small, stone-built, a village establishment that served farmers, travellers and the occasional clergyman.
There was a common room on the ground floor, four rooms above and a garden out the back where Mrs. Patton, the innkeeper, grew herbs and vegetables and held opinions about the behavior of the gentry that she shared with anyone who would listen.
The building was old, the stonework darkened with age, the sign above the door hand-painted and slightly crooked, but everything about it was honest, and that was what he wanted.
Mrs. Patton was a broad-faced woman in her fifties who looked as if she had been running the Hart and Hare since before the inn was built and who regarded the arrival of a duke on her doorstep at nine o’clock in the evening with equanimity and a slight narrowing of the eyes that suggested she was forming an opinion and was going to keep forming it until the opinion was complete.
“A room,” Ash said. “And writing paper. Nothing else.”
“Dinner, Your Grace?”
“No.”
She looked at him and gave him the room. It was small, clean, a narrow bed and a washstand and a desk by the window that looked out over the road that led, half a mile distant, toward the Goodall estate.
He sat at the desk, opened the writing paper and began.
The first letter he wrote that night, by candlelight, his hand steady, the words chosen with the care of a man who understood that every word he put on paper was a word Imogen would read or refuse to read, and the understanding made each sentence cost more than any sentence he had ever written.
He crossed out lines and rewrote them. He held the pen above the paper for minutes at a time, searching for the right word, the precise word, the word that would carry the truth without adding performance to it.
He did not plead. He did not apologize. He did not explain or justify or make excuses.
He wrote an accounting. The first letter was the wager itself.
He described it plainly, without softening anything.
He described the absence, the emptiness that had lived behind his ribs for eight years, and the absence that had departed, gradually and then all at once, replaced by something he had not expected and did not deserve.
He signed it, sealed it and held it in his hand for a long time before giving it to the innkeeper’s boy to deliver in the morning.
The footman brought it back the next morning, unopened, the seal unbroken, the paper uncreased.
The footman was a young man with a weather-beaten face who did not meet Ash’s eyes when he delivered it, and the not-meeting was itself a communication.
Ash took the letter, set it on the desk, sat in the chair by the window and looked at the road that led toward the Goodall estate and did not move for a very long time.
The second letter was the conservatory. He described what he had told Devlin in the side hall, the exact words: the lady has surprised me and nothing more. He explained that Devlin must have followed them or sent someone to do so and that was how he knew.
The second letter came back that afternoon. Unopened.
The third letter was the cottage and the watch. He described the night by the fire, the story he had told her about his father and the story she had told him about the Crébillon. He wrote about how he trusted her and what that night meant to him.
The third letter came back the next morning. Unopened.
Ash sat at the window and watched the Goodall footman walk back down the road with the letter in his hand, and the footman’s retreating was the loneliest thing he had ever seen.
Lonelier than his father’s empty chair at the breakfast table, lonelier than the portrait in the watch, lonelier than the floor of his study at four in the morning, because retreating meant that Imogen had held his letter in her hands and had chosen not to open it.
He stayed. Mrs. Patton began, on the second day, to leave a small plate at his door. Bread and cheese and a slice of cold pie, food that did not require conversation or gratitude, food that appeared and sat and waited until it was eaten or removed.
The village began to talk. He heard voices carrying up from the common room through the floorboards. A duke wasting away at the Hart and Hare was not something the village was going to let pass without extensive discussion.
He heard his own name spoken on the second evening.
Mrs. Patton’s voice, lowered but not low enough.
“He has not eaten, Mr. Hewitt. Three days and he has not taken a proper meal. I leave a plate, and sometimes half of it is gone in the morning, and sometimes none of it is, and he sits at that window all day looking down the road. He does not move, and I have seen men grieve before, but I have not seen a man grieve like this, not for a woman, not for anything.”
Mr. Hewitt, the publican, offered the opinion that dukes were not accustomed to being refused and that the refusal was probably good for him.
He sat at the window above them, listened and did not disagree.
On the third morning Mrs. Drummond, the curate’s wife, arrived at the inn to buy eggs and stayed for tea and conversation, and the conversation was about the duke.
It was conducted at a volume that suggested Mrs. Drummond believed he could not hear from the first floor, but she was wrong.
He heard every word. He heard Mrs. Drummond say that the whole village was talking, that Mrs. Patton was worried, that the duke had been there for three days and had not been seen to take a meal.
He heard Mrs. Drummond say, in the gentle voice of a woman who was not entirely sure she should be saying it, that she intended to mention the matter to Miss Goodall at the village shop the next time she saw her, because someone ought to tell the poor girl.
The girl had a right to know, and whatever had happened between them was between them, but a man starving himself at a village inn was a public matter and public matters required public intervention.
He did not go downstairs to stop Mrs. Drummond from telling Imogen.
He did not ask her not to speak. He sat at the window and listened to the curate’s wife plan to tell the woman he loved that he was wasting away half a mile from her door, and he let it happen, because letting it happen was not a strategy.
It was an absence of strategy. It was a man sitting in a chair, not intervening, not performing and not doing anything at all except being present.
The fourth day arrived. He sat at the desk and opened the writing paper.
His hands shook when he picked up the pen, not from emotion but from hunger, the particular fine tremor that arrived when a body had been running on bread and cheese and cold pie for days and was beginning to protest the arrangement.
He steadied his hand against the edge of the desk and began the fourth letter.
This one was about the bed. He wrote about the morning room and the license and the narrow bed with the lavender pillow and the slow careful worship of a man who had kneeled at a woman’s feet because kneeling was the right thing and who had told her he loved her .
He sealed it, set it on the desk beside the first three, returned and unopened; a small stack of cream-colored confessions that no one had read and that he was going to keep writing until someone did or until the writing paper ran out, whichever came first.