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

Chapter 5

The carriage reached Ashby Grange at half past one in the morning, and the house rose out of the fog like a memory of itself.

Seventeen years Evelyn had lived there, and she had never once been able to look at it without a small, private ache behind the ribs. It had been a fine house once — Elizabethan bones, a long gallery, a knot garden laid out by her great-grandmother. Now the shutters on the east wing were nailed closed, the hedge had gone feral, and the gravel drive was rutted where the tenant carts had been let through to save the cost of a second gate.

Her father was waiting in the hall. He had waited up, which surprised her. His coat was brushed. His shoes were polished. He smiled too widely and bowed too deeply and spoke too fast.

“Well,” said Sir Percival Ashby. “Well. One thousand pounds.”

“Papa.”

“A thousand pounds, and the Duke of Halstead.” He laughed, a brittle sound that broke halfway. “Do you know what they were saying at my club? They were saying you must have bewitched him. I said, no, no — my Evelyn is a sensible girl. My Evelyn has always been sensible.”

Evelyn looked at him: at the shine on his shoes, paid for a fortnight ago when the household was already eating scraps; at the new waistcoat, bought the day after he learned what the debts had reached.

“Where is Bess?” she asked.

“Sent off. There is no money for three servants.” He waved a hand. “There is no money for anything, which you know better than anyone, which is why tonight must go beautifully. It will, won’t it? He was most particular.”

“He was.”

“Most particular,” her father repeated, and something flickered behind his eyes — fear, or calculation, or both. “You will be a duchess. A duchess. My God.” He touched his mouth. “Your mother would have—”

He stopped.

The hall went very quiet.

The portrait of Lady Emmeline Ashby hung at the top of the stairs, painted in the year of her marriage, in a gown of soft grey with a green ribbon at the waist. Evelyn had grown up beneath that portrait. She had learned her own face from it: the same brown eyes, the same cheekbones that refused to be fashionable, the same level, patient regard.

“I am tired, Papa,” she said. “I will go up.”

Halfway along the corridor she stopped and turned, because she had promised herself she would not be a coward in her own house.

“Papa. When Mama died — where was I?”

“You were seven.” He was already walking away. “You were in the nursery with a fever. You were not permitted to attend the funeral. I have told you this a hundred times.”

“Yes,” said Evelyn. “You have.”

She went to her room and sat on the edge of the bed, still in her sister’s pale blue silk, and she did not light the candle for a long while.

She had been seven. There had been a fever, that was true. But she remembered other things too, in the way children remember: a night of raised voices below the stairs; her mother crying, not softly but furiously, the way a person cries when arguing with someone they have stopped respecting. She remembered being carried down a corridor. She remembered her father saying, you will not speak of this, and she remembered — or thought she remembered, and had been told a hundred times she did not — a carriage leaving before dawn.

And she remembered that the funeral had taken place on a day she was told she was too ill to attend, and that afterwards nobody ever said the word typhus, or fever, or childbed, or anything at all.

Sixteen years of she was ill.

The stone at the church had a year on it. Eighteen thirty-one. And no date. She had been told that was an old-fashioned practice among the gentry, and she had believed it for a long time, because she had needed to.

Evelyn sat in the dark and understood, with a cold clarity that would not leave her, that she had been circling this question her whole life and had never once turned to face it.

She stood up. She took the candle. She walked, barefoot, to the small door at the end of the corridor that led to the attic stairs, and she went up them, past the luggage trunks, past the moth-eaten muff that had been her grandmother’s, past a painting turned to the wall.

At the far end, under the dormer window, there was a black trunk bound in iron, and it was locked, and the lock was new.

That was the thing that stopped her heart. Every other trunk in the attic had a lock the colour of rust. This one was bright.

Evelyn knelt, and took the pin from her hair, and did what twenty-three years of being ignored had taught her that nobody in this family would ever suspect: she listened, and she worked patiently, and she did not stop until the lock gave.

She lifted the lid.

Beneath a layer of folded linen, tied in a faded green ribbon, was a bundle of paper.

She lifted the topmost sheet to the candlelight, and the first thing she saw, written in a hand she knew from the half-dozen letters her mother had left behind in a Bible, was her own name.

My darling Evelyn.

The paper was dated eighteen thirty-two.

Her mother had supposedly been dead for one year when the letter was written.