“Impossible!” the Maid Whispered, Freezing Before Her Childhood Portrait Hidden in the Duke’s Private Chambers—Then She Turned It Over and Found the Name “Aurora” Beside the Year of Her Birth, Unraveling the Secret of Her Entire Life

PART 2

The Duke of Ashworth was named Hadrien.

Ara knew this the way all servants knew things about their employers — through slow accumulation. Overheard conversations. Kitchen gossip. And the particular quantity of silence that surrounded a man who inspired both respect and unease in everyone who came near him.

He was thirty-four years old. He had inherited the title and the estate at twenty, when his father died in a riding accident that some said was not an accident at all — though no one said so loudly, or with any evidence beyond the meaningful raising of eyebrows.

He had never married. He had no children.

He had a younger sister, Lady Charlotte, who lived in London and visited twice a year — filling the house with noise and light and the smell of French perfume before vanishing again like a brilliant, expensive bird.

He was tall. His hair was black, kept short in a style that suggested impatience with anything requiring maintenance. His eyes were gray. Not the soft gray of morning mist — the gray of storm clouds, of steel, of something ancient and unforgiving.

He moved through his own house as though it were a military encampment. The precise, measured steps of a man who had learned to command before he had learned to rest. The servants respected him because he was fair. They feared him because he was distant. They whispered about him because he was alone.

In a great house full of people, a man who chose to be alone was always a mystery.

Ara had seen him perhaps thirty times in five months. He passed through corridors without looking left or right. He took his meals alone in the dining room, or more often in his study. He rode every morning at ten, regardless of the weather, on a black horse named Solomon that was as silent and controlled as its master.

He returned at eleven, handed the reins to the stable boy without a word, and disappeared into the house.

He had never spoken to her. He had never looked at her long enough for her to believe he knew her name. He was to her a figure made of distance and authority — as real and as unreachable as the stone walls of the house itself.

And yet.

He kept a portrait of her as a child, hidden in his private room, inscribed with a name that was not hers and a date that was her birth year.

She could not make those two facts exist in the same world.

That night, in the narrow bed she shared with Polly in the servants’ quarters on the third floor, Ara stared at the ceiling and did not sleep.

Polly snored gently beside her, one arm flung across the pillow, lost in the uncomplicated dreams of someone who had never found a portrait of herself where no portrait should be.

Ara thought about her mother.

Catherine Voss. A woman who had worked her hands raw every day of her life and still found the energy to teach her daughter to read by candlelight, using a Bible and a book of fairy tales she guarded as though they were made of gold.

Catherine, who was now propped up in bed in their small cottage in Thornfield, growing thinner by the week, her cough a constant companion that no amount of medicine seemed to quiet.

Had her mother lied to her?

The thought was a betrayal so sharp that Ara flinched from it physically, turning on the thin mattress and pressing her face into the pillow.

Catherine Voss did not lie. Catherine Voss was honest to the point of pain. A woman who would tell you your soup was terrible and your dress was ugly and your singing needed work all in the same breath, because she believed the truth was the only gift worth giving.

But someone had painted Ara as a child.

Someone had dressed her in white lace with pearl buttons and sat her on a velvet cushion and written My Aurora on the back of the canvas. And that someone had given the painting to the Duke of Ashworth — or the Duke had taken it, or found it, or inherited it.

However it had arrived in that hidden panel, it had been placed there with care. With intention.

With the unmistakable tenderness of someone preserving something precious.

She had to go back. She had to look at the painting again. She had to be sure.

Thursday was five days away.

Five days had never felt so long.