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

Chapter 8

The churchyard at Ashby St. Mary’s stood on a slope above the village, and the wind off the moor came through it like something with a purpose.

Evelyn had come alone. The gate was stiff with rust; the path was grown over with yew.

She found the grave in the north corner, where the poor and the unbaptised were laid, which she had never questioned as a child and which now made her stand still for a long moment with her hands at her sides.

EMMELINE, LADY ASHBY.

That was all. No date. No text. No beloved wife, no rest in peace. The stone was small and the lettering was the cheap kind that a mason cuts without wanting to.

Sixteen years of the dead being less than a name.

Evelyn knelt, and pressed her palm flat against the cold top of the stone, and said, aloud, to nobody and to possibly everyone: “I know. I know now.”

Then she stood up, and went home, and married the Duke of Halstead.

The wedding was on a Friday, at six in the morning, in the ancient stone chapel at Halstead Park, in Devonshire — one hundred and forty miles from London, in a valley where no one from Mayfair had ever had reason to come. Candles guttered against a vaulted ceiling. The silence felt sacred rather than suffocating.

There was no veil. He had insisted upon it.

No disguises, Sebastian had written in the note that arrived with the carriage. Not in my house.

She wore ivory satin, and the satin had been made in six days, which is a thing that money can do. It fit her shoulders. It fit her height and her strength and the particular way she stood, which nobody had ever thought to build a garment around before. For the whole of her life, clothes had been made to accommodate an ideal and she had been asked to accommodate them. Standing at the altar, she understood that she was wearing something designed for her, and she had to look at the floor tiles for a moment.

Sir Percival attended. He smiled too broadly. He bowed too deeply. He thanked the Duke with the brittle eagerness of a man who had watched sixteen thousand pounds evaporate in a single signature and could not quite believe his luck was real. Two of the tenants came. So did Mr. Finch, the Duke’s solicitor, a thin man with ink on his cuffs, who wrote down everything.

Evelyn did not look at her father when she spoke her vows.

She looked at the man beside her.

“I, Evelyn Ashby, take thee, Sebastian, to my wedded husband.”

Her voice did not tremble. She had prepared it the way she prepared everything, and there was no crack in it anywhere, and that was the last gift her upbringing had given her.

When he answered, he said her name as though it had weight.

“I, Sebastian Vane, take thee, Evelyn.”

Not Evelyn Ashby. Not Miss Ashby. Her name alone, the way a person says the name of something they have chosen.

When the ceremony ended, he did not claim her mouth in triumphant possession. He lifted her hand, pressed his lips once to her knuckles, and led her out of the chapel as though she were something precious rather than something acquired.

There was a small collation afterwards in the long gallery. Cold fowl, wine, a fire in a grate big enough to stand in. And there, at the edge of it, Evelyn met the Duke’s aunt.

Lady Agatha Vane was seventy, small, built like a folded umbrella, and she had the same grey eyes as her nephew, though warmer by some trick of the face. She looked at Evelyn for a long time over the rim of her glass without a word.

“You have no idea what you have walked into,” she said at last. “This family eats its own.”

“I am used to being eaten, Lady Agatha. I simply have not been asked my opinion on the seasoning.”

Lady Agatha’s mouth twitched. “Good,” she said. “That is exactly what is needed. He has been alone in this house since he was twelve and it has made him a monument instead of a man.”

“Since he was twelve?”

“His mother died when he was twelve.” Lady Agatha drank. “Or so they say. They say a great many things about the late Duchess, and none of them is the truth.”

Evelyn’s blood moved strangely in her veins, like water under ice.

“Lady Agatha,” she said carefully. “Where did the Duchess die?”

The old lady lowered her glass.

“That,” she said, “is the only question in this family that nobody has asked aloud in twenty-two years.”

She smiled, and it was not a kind smile. It was the smile of somebody who has been waiting, patiently, for a very long time, for a stranger to arrive.

“Come and see me on Tuesday,” she said. “Bring the letters.”