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 4

The fire, he told her, in the nights that followed.

Eleven years ago: the old Duke — Gideon’s father, Arthur, ninth’s predecessor — had summoned his son from London for a single piece of business. Reginald had come with him, as he always did, the beloved cousin with the easy laugh and the mounting debts. The old Duke had taken his youngest brother’s boy into his house when the boy’s father died, had paid his card debts, had settled his accounts, had done it all with the particular silent weariness of a man keeping a window propped open in a storm.

But that spring, Gideon said, he found his father at the study desk with a paper before him whose first line he never read, because the old man looked up at him across it with a face Gideon had not seen him wear in all his life — the face a man wears at the end of a long account — and said: “I have written him. Gently, under the circumstances. He will come into an income on the terms of your grandfather’s will, and nothing further. I cannot carry both of you into the new century.”

Two nights later, the library was burning.

The fire was found to have started at the library’s north window, where a careless lamp had stood too near a curtain’s fold. The official account was written by the county coroner and accepted by everyone it needed to satisfy. The old Duke had been found in the passage outside the library — “gone back,” the report said, “for his papers” — and Gideon had gone in after him, and had come out with nothing but the left side of his face on fire and his father’s name dead in his throat.

He had been in London, they said. He had come back to find the smoke. He had walked into it anyway, a son, ill-advised and heroic, and the flames had taken their fee.

The servants had been good to him. The county had been horrified. Reginald had wept like a brother, and had stood by the grave in the rain with his hand on Gideon’s shoulder, saying nothing, shaking — everyone remembered that: the beloved cousin, the shaken heir. And the debts, which everyone knew had been pressing Reginald badly that spring — the moneylenders of three counties had been talking — were found to have been settled within a fortnight of his uncle’s death, in full, by his own hand.

Proof, the official account said, that the boy had been striving toward a settlement with his uncle’s blessing all along.

“Read it again,” Gideon said. “Read it with my eyes. Debts pressing for years, settled — fully — a fortnight after the will was no longer alterable. The money came from somewhere, Mercy. It came from exactly the place he had just been told he would never see again.”

“If he burned the will,” Mercy said slowly, “he had nothing. He burned your father’s will and he was still the heir presumptive — he merely had to be patient. Eleven years patient.”

“Eleven years patient,” Gideon agreed. “Patient, and loyal, and devoted. The only family I had. The man who wept at the funeral.”

They sat with it for a while, the fire moving.

“Can it be proven?” Mercy said.

“I do not know,” Gideon said. “I have been afraid to find out for eleven years. When I was a boy my father taught me the arithmetic of a household: that every door opened by a lie must be closed by a truth sooner or later, and that the truer a man tries to be, the fewer locks he must carry. I think,” he said, “I have been carrying locks, Mercy. A great many of them. All of them in the same shape.”

Then the county began to move against her.

It was never large. That was the genius of it; Reginald was a genius of small things. A whisper at the merchants’ dinner, dropped in the tone of pity: she nursed him with such calculation, they say she knew the horse before the man. A word at the posting house, about her father — the creditors who had stopped calling four years ago, how strange, how neat, that a penniless mill-man’s daughter should hold her cottage free and clear, and what exactly had she done, one wondered, to be so ingratiated to the district’s officials. A contemptuous slippage: fortune hunter.

It came to her at the church on Sunday — dropped, folded, precise: a document bearing the old lease-review stamp, calling her cottage’s freehold into question. And then, the worst — a letter, in a hand Mercy had not seen in years, from her estranged aunt, who had been told, very sympathetically, that Mercy was proposing herself to a duke, and that Sir so-and-so and Lady such-and-such remembered her father’s ruin, and that a family that cannot pay its own debts must not contrive to become a duke’s millstone, and — the lawyer’s seal under it, the Devon seal, her father’s debts, itemized, the shame of her childhood laid out in a stranger’s neat columns.

Mercy sat in her kitchen at midnight, the letter open on the table beside her mother’s herbal, and understood.

He was not attacking her marriage. He was attacking her legitimacy — her freehold, her father’s name, her right to exist at the level of a duke’s wife. He meant to make her impossible.

“And I have come to tell you before you offer me any rescue,” she told Gideon in the Hall’s library the next evening, standing in the doorway of Ashgrave Hall for the first time in her life, in her second-best gown, with her hands locked in front of her, “that I do not intend to be rescued. I intend to fight him. And I would be glad of your help in doing it properly — and I will not stand behind you while you manage this on my behalf, as though I were an ornament requiring protection. He is trying to make me into a rumor. I will not be a rumor.”

Gideon rose from behind the desk. The untouched papers of his own inquiry lay across it, half-ordered: the steward’s roster from eleven years ago, the butler’s account, the guttering testimony of old servants who had been retired anyway.

“Mercy,” he said. “I have spent my entire adult life arranging myself to be smaller than the truth of what I am. I have hidden from a county, from a cousin, from my own face in the glass. It has made me rich in quiet and poor in everything else.” He came around the desk. “I am not going to hide from this.”

“Then we do it properly,” Mercy said. “Together. And we begin,” she said, taking the roster from the desk with her own hand, “with the question nobody has ever thought to ask in eleven years.”

“Which is?”

“Who else was awake in the house that night,” Mercy said, “and where they were standing when the fire was first seen. Every servant’s statement was taken by the coroner. But nobody has ever asked them where they began their accounts with themselves — whether they saw Reginald in his room, or in the passage, or —” she looked up — “at the library side door.”

Gideon looked at her for a long moment.

“My father taught me the arithmetic of a household,” he said. “He should have warned me it ran on the arithmetic of a woman who reads a sky like a letter.”