She Forgot the Duke Who Broke Her Heart… Then Fell in Love With Him Again

Chapter 24

The solicitor, Mr. Barlow, was sixty and had spent thirty of those years being careful.

He was not careful that morning.

“Her ladyship’s instructions,” he said, “were entirely regular, your grace. There is nothing in the file that a court would call improper. The petition was drafted and never lodged. The file has been dormant since.”

“The petition exists.”

“It exists.”

“With whose signature on it?”

Mr. Barlow looked at the Duke, and then at the lady in the chair beside him, and then at the sheet of paper she had laid on his desk.

“With her grace’s signature,” he said quietly. “It is on the last page. Dated four years ago, in the second year of the marriage.”

Cecily felt Adrian go rigid beside her.

“Which is impossible,” he said.

“I assure you, your grace —”

“Impossible,” Adrian said, “because in the second year of our marriage my wife did not leave this house except to visit the vicarage at Marnhull, twice, in company, and because no document of any kind was put in front of her in that period. I have just read sixty-one letters she never received. I have a great deal of patience left, Mr. Barlow, but not for a forgery.”

Mr. Barlow sat back.

“There is a second signature,” he said.

“Where?”

“On the schedule of assets attached to the petition.” The solicitor opened a drawer and laid a page flat. “The schedule required the signature of the husband or his agent. This one is signed Ashford, and initialled A.A., and countersigned by her late ladyship’s secretary as attorney in fact.”

Cecily looked at the page.

The handwriting was a good imitation and no more. The A leaned the wrong way. There was a bluntness in the final stroke that Adrian’s hand did not have; his letters, she had held forty of them tonight, and every one of them tapered off at the end of a line like a man who did not want to stop.

“That is not Adrian’s hand,” she said.

“No,” Adrian said. “It is my mother’s.”

He said it flatly, with no inflection at all, and Cecily understood that she was watching a man dismantle his own childhood in public, in a solicitor’s office, over a sheet of paper on a desk.

“Mr. Barlow,” he said. “I want three things, and I want them today.”

“Your grace.”

“A statutory declaration from the physician, Dr. Ainsley, sworn before a commissioner, stating that his report was commissioned and dictated by Lady Ashford and that my wife was informed of an untruth. Preserve it. If he is dead, find his assistant.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“Second, the entire file — the petition, the schedule, the covering note, the physician’s report, and every letter from her ladyship in this matter — to be listed, itemized, and deposited with my own solicitor as evidence of a conspiracy to procure a false instrument. I do not intend to prosecute my mother. I intend that the record exist.”

“Yes, your grace.”

“Third.” Adrian paused. “The Dorset property. It was conveyed back to me in the third year for want of the transferee’s signature. Convey it out again. Same terms. Her name alone. And this time, Mr. Barlow, I will carry the deed myself and place it in her hands, and you may send your clerk to witness it if you wish, but no one in this house will ever see it again.”

Cecily sat in the hard chair in the solicitor’s office, and did not speak, and kept her hands very still in her lap.

It was on the way out, on the steps in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with the wind coming off the rooftops and the clerks going past with their bundles, that Adrian stopped walking and said,

“There is one more thing I have kept from you.”

She turned.

“The letter,” he said. “The one you left on the desk. You asked me once whether I wanted you to stay, and I told you that I let you go because you had been crying and I could not be the man who made you stay out of duty.”

“Yes.”

“That is true. But it is not the whole of it.” He looked at the paving. “There is a second page to that letter. You wrote it in the hall, and you gave it to me, and I have never shown it to you.”

He took a folded paper out of his coat and put it into her hand.

Cecily stood on the steps of the solicitor’s office and unfolded the second page of her own farewell.

It was four lines long.

If you come after me I will stay, and I will be sorry I stayed for the rest of my life, because I will always know that you came out of duty and nothing else.

So if you do not want me, do not come.

And if you do want me, come now.

Now, Adrian. Before the morning.