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 5

The under-footman had been dismissed two years after the fire — a small disgrace, a silver candlestick, a broken character reference that had seen him blacken his own boots from Ashgrave to the docks, and now he worked a smugglers’ inn on the estuary where the county’s secrets went to be used up. He did not want the Duke of Ashgrave in his bar.

He talked anyway.

Because Mercy asked him, in the corner booth where the lamp was dim, the way she asked everything — level, unhurried, as if the answer were weather and they were reading it together.

“The library side door,” the man said, not meeting her eyes. “It shouldn’t have been unlocked.”

“Why not?”

“Because his grace locked it himself, every evening, regular as lamp-lighting. The household knew it. The old Duke came and went by the east door; the side door was kept secured on account of the —” he swallowed — “on account of the night the county was on about the poachers.”

“And on the night of the fire,” Mercy said.

“On the night of the fire,” the man said, “the side door was standing wide open when I come down the back stair at half past two. I was up with one of the maids, my — I was up.” A man’s shame and a stranger’s fire, tangled in the same sentence; Mercy waited for him past it. “The door was open. I heard the noise before I smelled the smoke. I saw a man’s shape go out of it, running with his coat over his head, down toward the stableyard.”

“You did not tell the coroner this.”

“I was in the maid’s bed, miss.” His voice was bare. “I told him, you see, in my head, over and over, the shape of it, the running, the coat — and then the will was read, and Mr. Reginald was our next duke, of a sort, for eleven years, and by the end of the first week he had raised every manservant in the house two shillings a quarter. And I had his silver candlestick in my box.”

“What did you see of the man’s face?” Mercy said.

“Nothing. Coat over his head. But I know the run.” The under-footman looked at her. “I had been fetching his vails at midnight from the tables at his clubs for years, miss. I know Reginald Ashworth’s run, when he is running from a thing he has done.”

Two weeks later they had the moneylender’s ledger — or the relevant page of it, obtained at cost, and Gideon paid the cost without a word — five entries, six weeks apart, the last a fortnight after Arthur Ashworth was laid in the ground, settling Reginald’s oldest and largest debts in full, with a marginal notation in the moneylender’s own prudent hand: adv. to be repaid on succession. An advance, that notation made plain — money lent against the expectation of a dukedom Reginald did not yet hold, and would not hold for eleven years more, not a payment already received.

And then, the letter.

The old Duke, meticulous man, had kept his lawyers’ correspondence in a strongbox behind the paneling of his study, which Gideon had never opened — because what good is a letter from the dead, he had told Mercy, that cannot be answered. It had felt like a room sealed against him. But the estate’s solicitors, eleven years cold, produced at last the one thing the fire had not been able to reach because the old Duke had kept it in London: the final letter of Arthur Ashworth, ninth Duke, written the week before the fire, delivered to his man of business with instructions to hold it against the event of his death.

My son knows nothing of this. If I die in the natural order, it is only his inheritance; if I do not, it is my testimony. Reginald’s debts have reached the measure at which all accommodation must cease. I have written to him this week to say so, kindly and finally. I do not trust that he will take it with grace. I am sorry, as ever, for the boy; I loved him, and he was not by nature a bad boy, but he has been ruined by the discovery that there is no limit to a generous man’s patience except the line one draws with one’s own hand, and I drew mine too late.

“He knew,” Dixon — Gideon’s steward — said, reading it over his shoulder. “His grace knew. He walked into that fire”— he stopped, wet-eyed — “with half a mind made up to die at his post. Your father did not die careless of you, your grace. He died armed.”

Gideon stood in the study where he had not been able to stand for eleven years, the letter trembling in his hand, and Mercy watched him take the first full breath of mourning he had taken since he was a young man and the smoke took the west wing.

“Reginald will settle,” Gideon said when he could speak. “If we take this to the law, he will settle, and emigrate quietly, and the county will never know a fraction of it. It is the cleaner path. It is what prudence dictates. It is what I have chosen, every time, for eleven years.”

Mercy said nothing.

“I have spent eleven years choosing quiet over truth,” Gideon said, “and telling myself it was prudence. I begin to think it was only ever cowardice wearing prudence’s clothing.” He looked at her. “I will not make that choice again. He hurt you. He tried to make you small with a forged seal and a stranger’s account of your own family’s grief. Whatever I do with the law, I will do with the county — with the truth in the open — standing in the light.”

“And if he fights?” Mercy said.

“He will fight. He is at his best when cornered.” Gideon’s mouth moved. “We must only make certain that the corner is large enough to hold the whole county, and well lit.”

It was Mercy who looked up from the letter then, and said, carefully, “Gideon.”

“Yes.”

“He has one further move left to him,” she said. “You have been gone from the county for eleven years. If he means to make you impossible, he will not wait for the law to find him. He will put you in a room, with the county watching, and make you be the one who cannot be borne.” She looked at him. “He will want to challenge you publicly. Before witnesses. And the only stage large enough is the one you have not once set foot on in eleven years.”

She was right.

The announcement went out from the Hall of the autumn assembly ball — the first gathering Ashgrave Hall had hosted in eleven years — bearing, in the very name of the hosts, the hand of Reginald Ashworth: that His Grace’s health permitted, at last, a celebration of the season, and that the county’s countenance would be an honor the Duke had long denied himself.

“When he read it twice and threw it down,” Mercy told the vicar’s wife later, “I knew what he had chosen. He is done being the county’s shadow.”

That evening, alone in her cottage, Mercy stood before her mirror in the first gown she had sewn in years — ash-blue silk, cut and mended by her own hands, over a hem she had unpicked and re-picked three times — with the fabric given, unasked and folded, by the housekeeper at the Hall. She stood under that indecisive candlelight and quarrelled with her own reflection, and lost, and went to bed, and dreamed of the hundred lighted tiers of a ballroom like a great gold wheel, and woke once in the small hours certain she had heard, on the lane, the stepping of a horse — but it was only the wind at the gate.