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

Chapter 14

Sir Percival Ashby entered Halstead Park the way a man enters a house he intends to own one day: slowly, appreciatively, cataloguing the marble.

“My dear,” he said, taking Evelyn’s hands in both of his own. “My dear, my dear. You look — well. You look well.” His eyes went past her, up the great staircase, over the doors, and did the arithmetic of the whole estate in a single pass. “The Duke is not with you?”

“He is in the gallery.”

“Ah.” A flicker. “The gallery.”

They walked the length of it together, past the Van Dycks and the Reynolds and a long dark Holbein of somebody who had clearly been unpleasant. Sir Percival talked the entire way about the weather, the roads, the shocking price of oats, the shocking behaviour of the present government, and the shocking state of the church roof at Ashby St. Mary’s, which would require, sadly, the raising of a subscription.

Sebastian was standing at the far end with his back to the fireplace, on the exact spot Evelyn had told him to stand, directly beneath the portrait of Lady Marguerite Vane.

“Your Grace.” Sir Percival bowed low. “An honour. A very great honour. I cannot tell you what it means to a father—”

“Sit down, Sir Percival.”

“Of course. Of course.” He sat. He arranged his coat. He crossed his legs and folded his hands and smiled his charming, ruined, ruinous smile. “I have come, Your Grace, because I understand there has been some — family business — and I thought it best to speak plainly, as one man of affairs to another.”

“Speak plainly, then.”

Sir Percival’s smile faltered by a fraction and recovered.

“Your wife is grieving,” he said. “It is natural. She was always the sensitive one, and she has been reading old papers — letters, from her mother’s last years. You will understand, Your Grace, that my wife was unwell. Very unwell. It began after the birth of my younger daughter, and it took the form of — convictions. Fixed ideas. She believed that people were pursuing her. That I was keeping her against her will. The physicians explained it to me at the time; it is a known species of melancholy.”

“I see.”

“She was committed for her own good. I sat with the certificate in my hand for eleven days before I could bring myself to sign it.” Sir Percival’s voice actually trembled on the word certificate, which Evelyn found, in an appalled sort of way, impressive. “It is the hardest thing I have ever done. A man does not speak of it. But I have come here to speak of it, because I will not allow my daughter — my grieving daughter — to build a life on a story told to her by a handful of madwoman’s letters.”

The word madwoman hung in the air.

Evelyn watched her husband’s hands, and saw them close, very slowly, on the arms of his chair.

“Mama is alive,” she said.

“Evelyn—”

“She is alive, and you know it, because you have just told me so.” She took a step closer to her father’s chair. “You did not say she died in eighteen thirty-one. You said unwell, and committed, and for her own good, in the past tense used by a man describing an arrangement that continues to this day. If she were dead you would have started with that. It is the strongest thing you have. You always lead with your strongest thing.”

Sir Percival’s smile stayed exactly where it was, and his eyes went very cold.

“You have grown clever,” he said. “It is a pity. Clever women are lonely women.”

“I have been lonely since I was seven. It has not killed me.”

“Evelyn.” His tone changed, softened, became the tone he used on the tenants before a rent increase. “Do you understand what you are doing? Do you understand what you are asking a duke to do to his own father-in-law? There is no version of this that ends with anything but ruin — mine first, then your mother’s.”

“I do not intend to ruin you,” said Evelyn.

“No?”

“No. I intend to free her. And then I intend to ask her, in front of witnesses, what you did and why.” She met his eyes. “I have no interest in your ruin, Papa. I find I have no interest in you at all. That is the part of this that I imagine will hurt the most.”

For one second — one second only — the mask came off, and Evelyn saw the man underneath it: small, frightened, and furious, the way he had been in the attic at two in the morning with the lamp held under his chin.

Then Sir Percival Ashby laughed.

It was not the charming laugh. It was a cracked, ugly sound, and it filled the gallery.

“You will look very foolish,” he said, “when you find nothing.”

He stood up. He brushed his coat, and straightened his cuffs, and looked up — for the first time — directly at the portrait above the fireplace.

He stopped.

Evelyn watched him see her. Lady Marguerite Vane, painted at two-and-twenty, with her long quiet face and her mouth already braced for something.

Her father’s colour changed.

“You,” said Sir Percival, to the dead woman on the wall.

Then he turned and looked at the Duke — really looked at him, for the first time that afternoon — and Evelyn saw the whole of it arrive in her father’s face at once, the way weather arrives.

Sebastian Vane had not moved from the fireplace.

“You know the face,” he said mildly.

Sir Percival said nothing.

“You know it,” said Sebastian, “and you knew it in eighteen twenty-nine, when you signed the deed of transfer on the Ashby railway paper, because the man who arranged the loan brought you to a house in Norfolk and you were introduced to the proprietors, and one of them had a portrait in the hall. Do you remember which house, Sir Percival?”

Silence.

“Marlbrook,” said Sebastian.

Sir Percival took a step backward, toward the door, and put his hand out behind him to find the wall.

“I signed nothing,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“About the woman. About her transfer. I signed nothing, Your Grace, you must understand that, I never signed anything about a transfer.” His voice was rising, thin, cracking at the top. “Four years ago. They came and told me she was being moved, to a smaller house, somewhere closer — I asked where and they would not tell me, and I asked again and Kerr said it is not your affair any longer, Percival, you signed her away in thirty-two and you do not get to ask—”

He stopped, because he had heard himself.

The gallery was absolutely silent.

Evelyn’s hands had gone numb.

“Four years ago,” she said.

Her father looked at her. For the first time in her life, he looked at her as though she mattered — as though she were the only door left in a burning house.

“I do not know where she is,” he said. “That is the truth. On my soul, girl. They moved her in eighteen forty-three and they did not tell me where, and I have not had one letter, not one, not in four years.”

“Who,” said Sebastian, with terrible gentleness, “is they?”

Sir Percival Ashby’s mouth opened and closed twice, like a landed fish.

Then he said, “Aldous Kerr came to me in eighteen twenty-eight. And Dr. Penn wrote the paper. And I have spent fifteen years being told that I did the right thing, and I have believed it, because the alternative—”

He did not finish. He was walking toward the door before he had finished speaking, and no one stopped him.

They heard his carriage leave the gravel eight minutes later.

Evelyn stood in the long gallery beneath the portrait of the woman whose son she had married, and she said, aloud, to the room:

“She is not in Norfolk.”

“No,” said Sebastian. “She is not in Norfolk.”