Hidden away for a scarred hand, Beatrice Holley spent her season in dark rooms counting trade routes — until the most ruthless duke in England found her reading maps, and refused to leave her hidden. “I owe your stepmother a call,” he said. He kept his word.

PART 2

I was the footman with the tray.

I stood two steps behind Lady Agatha when she screamed that name into the room, and I want to tell you something the ballroom gossip will never know.

I know the elder Miss Holley. The whole household knows her, even the ones paid to look the other way. She comes in through the kitchens to every event — our footmen have fetched her pins and her mending thread for years while her sister dances above. We see her hands, the ones she keeps in those thick leather gloves. We hear what her stepmother says about them, daily, cheerful as breakfast.

It was not a servant, though, I want to tell you about.

A few minutes before Lady Agatha came looking, I saw the Duke of Calverton come down those stairs. He moves like a man who knows every dark corner of a house; the Earl’s family say he always slips off to the quiet rooms when he can bear no more of the ballroom. He stopped at that library door — the one that has been locked for as long as anyone here can remember, and which was, that night, somehow cracked open — and I watched him stand there in the corridor with his back to the wall for a full minute, just watching the light through the gap.

He was still standing there when I passed. When I came back with the tray, he was gone — and the door was shut.

I said nothing when I saw the Duke’s dark shape pressed against the wall behind the drapes, with the miss held against his chest. He said nothing either. We were both watching the same show: Lady Agatha tearing through that room calling her an insolent, wretched creature, saying she’d ship the girl to a rectory in Yorkshire to frighten the sheep with her hideous hand.

And here is the rest of it. When the Duke of Calverton finally emerged from that corridor at the end of the night, I was at the front door to see him off. He stood on the step in the lamplight, looked at nothing in particular, and said, to no one — or perhaps to himself:

“Holley townhouse. Tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock.”

Think about that. This is the man who has not been seen to look at a woman in five years. The man they say destroys social climbers with a single well-placed word. The man who owns half the shipping on the Channel and has never once in his life been late for anything.

The miss got him a library door, a map argument, and a morning appointment he arranged before the ball was even over.

So I will ask you what I have been asking myself all week: what does a man like that want with the one woman in London everyone else pretends isn’t there?

And which of them is about to find out?