The tea arrived. Ash drank it because Frost was watching and because not drinking it would have required more energy than drinking it. He drank three cups and then the soup arrived, and he ate that too, standing at the desk because Frost had told him to stand. When the barber came, he shaved Ash’s face with the careful neutrality of a man who had been paid not to comment on the state of his client’s eyes or the hollows under his cheekbones or the fact that the Duke of Ravenhurst appeared to have lost half a stone in five days.
That afternoon Ash dressed himself in the severest black he owned, the coat he had worn to his father’s funeral, the cravat tied simply, the signet ring turned outward. He looked at himself in the glass and did not recognize the face that looked back, because the face was thinner, older and carried something in its expression that had not been there before. Something beyond the absence, beyond the boredom, a quality that might have been called determination if determination did not sound too clean for what it actually was. It was the particular stubbornness of a man who had destroyed everything he valued and was now going to destroy his own reputation in payment.
He walked into White’s at the busiest hour of the afternoon. The main room was full, thirty or forty members in chairs and at tables, coffee, conversation, the rustle of newspapers and the low murmur of men conducting the business of being wealthy in public. Heads turned when he entered. The Duke of Ravenhurst had not been seen in public since the Carlisle ball, and the Tattler had been running items all week, and the room’s attention landed on him with the focused intensity of men who had been waiting for exactly this entrance and were now getting it.
He walked to the betting book. The large leather-bound volume sat on its stand near the bow window, open to the current month, the pages filled with wagers in various hands, sums, terms and deadlines recorded in the particular shorthand of gentlemen who believed that the formalisation of a bet constituted a binding agreement and who took the formalisation very seriously. The page was crowded. Lord Rourke’s handwriting near the top, a wager about horses. Lord Aldous’s below, something about a boxing match. And in the middle of the page, in a hand Ash recognized as Devlin’s, the entry he had been looking for, the original wager, dated April, the terms abbreviated but clear, the initials R and S at the bottom, Ravenhurst and Stormont, the two men who had made a game of a woman’s heart and had recorded the game in a book that was read by every man in London.
He picked up the pen. The room had gone quiet. Not the polite quiet of men attending to their own business, but the focused quiet of men who had stopped attending to anything except the Duke of Ravenhurst standing at the betting book with a quill pen in his hand and an expression on his face that suggested the pen was about to be used for something unprecedented.
He dipped the pen and wrote, in his own hand, in the middle of the page, in letters large enough to be read from three feet away:
Wager dated 29 April. Subject: Miss I. Goodall. Resolved this day in the favor of the lady, against the man who proposed it and against the man who accepted it, who hereby acknowledges he behaved as a coward and a fool, and pays out double the sum to the proposer in penalty for ever entering the lady’s name in this book. Signed, Ravenhurst.
He set the pen down. He took from his coat the bank draft for five thousand that Devlin had refused to accept, and beside it a second bank draft for five thousand more, the penalty he had imposed on himself, and laid both on the stand beside the betting book. Ten thousand pounds total. The price of his own disgrace, written in ink in front of half the membership of the most exclusive club in London.
He walked out without looking at any of the faces watching him. He walked out of White’s and into St. James’s Street, and the afternoon sun hit his face. He stood on the pavement and breathed, and the breathing was the first clean breath he had taken in five days, because the betting book entry was the first honest thing he had done since the Carlisle ball.
By six o’clock the entry was being copied and read aloud in three other clubs. By the following morning, every gentleman in London would know that the Duke of Ravenhurst had publicly named himself a coward and a fool in the betting book at White’s and had paid ten thousand pounds for the privilege. The naming would follow him for the rest of his life, and the following was the point, because it was the punishment that he earned.
***
The Saintbury visit. That same afternoon.
He drove to Hanover Square. The Dowager Duchess of Saintbury’s townhouse was a tall gray building with black railings and a front door that had not been repainted in Ash’s lifetime, because Aunt Eugenie did not believe in repainting things that were still functional and did not care what the neighbors thought about it. A butler admitted him to the morning room without surprise, because butlers at Hanover Square had been admitting Hambridges for forty years and had learned to expect them at inconvenient hours.
Aunt Eugenie was in her chair by the window. Early sixties, dressed in mourning lavender, the color she had worn since her husband died six years ago and that she showed no sign of abandoning. Her hair was silver and pinned severely back. Her face was narrow and sharp and carried the particular expression of a woman who had been intelligent her entire life and who was tired of pretending otherwise. A cup of tea sat at her elbow, Sevres porcelain, the one good set she had inherited from her mother-in-law and that she used daily because beautiful things were meant to be used and not displayed.
She had not seen Ash for a long time. She had stopped inviting him because she had grown tired of being lied to by her only nephew, the boy she had raised after his mother died, the boy she had taught to read, to ride and to tell the truth. The boy had grown into a man who did none of those things with any consistency, and the inconsistency had exhausted her.
The morning room was quiet except for the clock on the mantelpiece, which ticked with the steady patience of a clock that had been measuring Hambridge failures for two generations and was not going to stop now.
He knelt at her chair.
The kneeling was not a performance. It was not a gesture or a strategy or any of the moves he had spent eight years deploying in drawing rooms across London. It was a man going to hisknees in front of the woman who had raised him, the only person who had ever told him no and meant it. “Aunt Eugenie.”
“Ashton.” Her voice was level, cool, the voice of a woman who had been waiting for this visit and was not going to make it easy. “You look terrible.”
“I am terrible.”
“Yes. I have read the Tattler. I have also read the betting book entry, which Lord Abernathy’s man copied and brought to me an hour ago. It was very thorough. I assume you wrote it yourself.”
“I did.”
“Then you had better tell me the rest, because the entry named you a coward and a fool and I should like to know the specific dimensions of the cowardice and the foolishness before I decide what to do about them.”
He told her everything, and he did not soften any of it. He described the wager in the terms Devlin had used, five thousand and the chestnut and the most invisible girl of the season made to love you by the end of June. He described the conservatory in terms that made Aunt Eugenie’s mouth tighten, and her tea go untouched.
Aunt Eugenie listened without interrupting. Her face did not change during the conservatory or the bet. Her face changed, briefly and almost imperceptibly, when Ash described Imogen kneeling in the wet grass beside him to search for the watch, and the change was small; a softening at the corners of her mouth that arrived and departed in less than a second.
He asked her, when the telling was done, not for himself. Not for his reputation or his standing or any of the things a duke was supposed to ask his aunt the dowager duchess to protect. He asked her for Cassie.
“Miss Cordelia Goodall is eighteen years old. Her first season has been destroyed by my behaviour. She has donenothing wrong. She is bright and kind and deserves a season that is not contaminated by my disgrace.” He paused. His knees were aching on the morning room carpet, but the aching was appropriate. “I am asking you to sponsor her, Aunt Eugenie. Under the Saintbury name. Next year, when the season opens. I am asking you to give her what I took from her.”
“And Miss Imogen?”
“Miss Imogen is not to be told. I do not want the sponsorship to count as a chip in any apology I owe her. I do not want her to weigh it against the wager. I want you to do this because an eighteen-year-old girl should not pay for what I did, and for no other reason.”
Aunt Eugenie set her cup down and looked at him for a long time.
