THE DUKE CHOSE THE PLAIN GIRL AT A MAYFAIR AUCTION — THEN THE VEIL CAME OFF

Chapter 10

The door was painted the same colour as the wall, and the same paper hung over it, so that unless you were looking for it you would walk past it a hundred times and never see it.

Sebastian carried the lamp himself. He had dismissed the servants the night before with the instruction that the west corridor was not to be entered, and Mrs. Craddock had obeyed without a flicker of curiosity, which told Evelyn that she already knew.

“There is no key,” he said. “My father had the lock removed and the frame sealed. I have never had it opened.”

“How do you get in?”

“I don’t.”

He set his shoulder against the panelling and pushed, and the door gave with a long groan, the way a thing gives when it has been holding itself shut for twenty-two years.

The air that came out of the room was cold and dry and smelled of nothing at all. Evelyn had expected dust, or rot, or the sweet stale odour of a shut-up place. Instead there was only emptiness, as though the room had been holding its breath.

He lifted the lamp.

It was a sitting room. Small, west-facing, with a fireplace and two chairs and a writing desk beneath the window. The shutters were closed. There was a workbasket on the floor beside the chair, and a piece of embroidery still stretched on its frame, half-finished, the needle left standing in the cloth as though the woman who owned it had meant to come back after tea.

Evelyn put her hand over her mouth.

“There is a portrait,” Sebastian said. “Above the fireplace. Pull the cloth.”

She did. The linen came away in a rush of dust, and Lady Marguerite Vane looked down at her.

She was young — younger than Evelyn was now, perhaps two-and-twenty — with a long, quiet face and heavy dark brows and a mouth that was already braced for something. She was not beautiful in the fashionable way. She was beautiful in the way that makes people uneasy, because she was clearly thinking.

“You have her jaw,” Evelyn said.

“I know.”

“You have her eyes.”

“I know.” He set the lamp on the mantel. “My father used to say it to me when he was angry. You have your mother’s eyes. He meant it as a curse, and it was the only compliment he ever paid me.”

Evelyn turned slowly on the spot, taking the room in. A hairbrush on the sill. A book face-down, still open at the page. A child’s drawings pinned to the wall beside the desk — seven of them, in charcoal, done by a hand that had not yet learned to be careful.

Yachts. Horses. A dog she did not think had ever existed.

“She taught me to draw,” said Sebastian. “She said I had no talent and should continue regardless, because talent is what the world calls it when a thing comes easily, and the things worth having are the ones you do badly at first.”

“When did she die?”

“Eighteen twenty-five.” He said the date the way a man says a date he has said to himself ten thousand times. “I was twelve.”

“And how did she die?”

“Of a decline.” His mouth twisted. “That is the word. A decline. My father arranged a funeral, gave her a marble slab in Halstead church with an angel on it, and wept in public at the interment in a manner that was much admired.”

Evelyn waited.

“There was no decline,” he said. “There was a doctor. There was a certificate. And there was a house in Norfolk.”

The room went very cold, or seemed to.

“I was eleven when she went,” he said. “She had discovered something about my father’s affairs — I have never known precisely what, only that there were men who came to the house at night and left with ledgers. She told him she would not keep silent. Three weeks later she was hysterical, and the physician came, and she was removed.”

“Did you see her again?”

“Twice. She was permitted one visit a year.” His voice had gone completely flat, which Evelyn was beginning to understand was what he did instead of breaking. “The first time she did not seem ill at all. She asked me about my Latin and whether the grey mare had foaled. The second time — I was twelve — she did not know me. She asked me who I was.”

Evelyn felt her eyes sting and did not permit herself to cry.

“She died fourteen months after she arrived,” he said. “I was told by a servant, not by my father, who considered the matter a private grief and did not mention it to me at all. I found out at breakfast because a footman said your poor lady mother to the boot boy.”

He crossed to the desk. The single drawer opened without resistance, and inside there was one sheet of paper, folded in three, the ink faded to the colour of weak tea.

He handed it to her.

CERTIFICATE OF UNSOUNDNESS.

She read it twice. Her eyes skipped down, past the Latin and the legal phrasing, to the two signatures at the foot of the page: the attending physician, and the subscribing witness, and the name of the house.

Marlbrook House, Norfolk.

Elias Penn, M.D., Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians.

Evelyn’s fingers went white on the paper.

The room turned slowly around her, the way it had turned in the drawing room at Halstead House on the night of the auction, the way it had turned on the attic stairs.

She said the name before she could decide whether to.

“Marlbrook House.”

Sebastian looked up sharply, and for the first time since she had known him, the control on his face slipped openly.

“How,” he said, “do you know that name?”