For eleven years the ninth Duke of Ashgrave had kept his scarred face out of every room in England. Then a carriage went into a ditch in a storm, and Mercy Ren — who fed strangers before she asked what they were worth — looked at him without flinching. He lied about his name. She forgave him. His cousin Reginald never would.

PART 2

There is a version of this story the county likes.

It goes like this: for eleven years, the ninth Duke of Ashgrave has hidden his face inside Ashgrave Hall like a wound kept against the light. The fire that killed the old Duke took half his heir’s face with it, and whatever else the fire took, rumor has furnished generously. Some say the son was the one who carried his father out through the smoke, and could not be forgiven for being slower than the flames. Some say worse. The children of Ashgrave call him the Shadow Duke, and the mothers of Ashgrave — ceaselessly, industriously, the mothers of Ashgrave — tell their daughters that a man who has barred the doors of his own house for eleven years will not be opened by a woman’s face, however fresh, however kind, and that a scarred man’s heart is a shadow with a title, and shadows do not marry. They warn. They warn. For eleven years they have been so very careful to warn.

And now here is the part no mother predicted.

The Duke’s own steward knows when his grace rides out — a steward at Ashgrave Hall knows everything, that is one of the conditions of the office, written in the first lines of the household ledger along with the coal allowances: all men’s movements shall be known to me. And for six months now, the movements of Gideon Ashworth, ninth Duke, have traced a single line on the map, repeated and repeated and repeated: the lane to Thorncraft. The cottage. The cottage’s storm-scarred shutter, the cottage’s chimney, the cottage’s garden — the garden the Duke is said to have dug himself, in the mud, in his boots, with a steward’s report in his pocket about a school levy he had not once attended to in a decade.

And Reginald Ashworth, the heir presumptive — the cousin eleven years on the far side of the coronet — has watched those riding reports come in with a patience that does not suit him.

Because here is what the gentle county version leaves out. Reginald’s gaming debts have begun, very quietly, to grow again. And a man who has spent eleven years positioned an inch from a dukedom does not watch an heirless duke attempt courtship of an obscure cottager — courtship, of all things, with sentimental callouses — and see a love story. He sees a negotiation tilting out of his favor. Then eleven years of calculation tilting out of his favor. The first and only safety he has ever known, walking off down a muddy lane under a false name, holding a hammer.

The mothers of Ashgrave have spent eleven years warning their daughters.

Nobody warned Reginald about what he would do the day the Duke stopped hiding.