“I will sponsor the child, Ashton, on my own terms. The girl will be told it was a private gesture from the Saintbury family, made in remembrance of your father, who was the last man in this family I genuinely respected. I will not lie for you. I will not let an eighteen-year-old child suffer for what you did.” She paused. Her eyes, which were the same pale shade as Ash’s mother’s eyes and therefore the same shade as Ash’s, held his without wavering. “And you, my dear, are the worst Hambridge I have ever known and the most likely to redeem himself, both of which you should consider compliments.”
He thanked her without rising. He remained on his knees until she told him to get up, which she did with a small impatient gesture that contained, buried deep inside the impatience, something that might have been the beginning of forgiveness, though Ash was not fool enough to call it that.
***
He gave the interview before nightfall. The Tattler’s man met him at a coffee house on Fleet Street, a thin nervousjournalist named Garvey who had been covering the ton’s indiscretions for six years and who had never, in those six years, had a duke walk into a coffee house, sit down across from him and offer, without prompting, to take the blame for a scandal that the Tattler had been building toward for a week.
The interview was unsigned, as convention required, but unmistakable, because the Duke of Ravenhurst’s voice was recognisable even in print, and the interview was phrased in the particular cadence of a man who was not asking for sympathy and was not offering excuses but was publicly, taking responsibility for the damage he had caused.
He named Miss Goodall as the wronged party. He took the entire blame. He described himself, without irony and without deflection, as the worst of his own circle, and the phrasing was deliberate, because the phrasing needed to be specific enough to turn the scandal in her favor and vague enough to protect the details of what had happened between them. Because the details were hers and not the Tattler’s, and the distinction mattered, and he would protect that distinction.
Garvey asked him, at the end, whether the duke wished to add anything, and Ash considered the question.
“The lady is owed every apology a man can make,” Ash said. “And the man making it is aware that he may never have the opportunity to deliver it. Print that.”
***
Garvey printed it. The interview ran the next morning, front page, above the fold. Within ten days the scandal had turned. Imogen recast across the season as the wronged woman, the wallflower who had been courted by a duke under false pretences and who had conducted herself with dignity throughout. Ash recast as the worst of the rakes, the man who had written his own condemnation in the betting book atWhite’s and who had paid ten thousand pounds to do it and who had given an interview in which he had called himself the worst of his own circle and had meant every word.
The turning was what he wanted. The turning was the fourth stage of the grovel, the public reversal, the deliberate destruction of his own reputation in service of hers. The cost was considerable, but that was the point.
***
The Asquith reception, four days later.
Ash arrived in plain black, the funeral coat, the simple cravat. The room was crowded, but he entered without speaking to anyone and crossed the floor and found Devlin standing near the refreshment table with a glass of wine and a smile that suggested he was still enjoying himself. He was not yet aware that the enjoyment was about to end.
Ash walked past him. Not around him. Past him, within three feet, close enough that the cut was unmistakable, close enough that every person in the surrounding radius saw the Duke of Ravenhurst look through the Earl of Stormont as if the earl were a piece of unfamiliar furniture, unremarkable and not worth the effort of navigating around. The cut was public, deliberate and total, and the totality of it hit the room and spread outward in concentric circles of whispered conversation, because a duke cutting an earl at a public reception was not a snub. It was a sentence.
Devlin’s face went white. Not the gradual draining that Ash’s face had undergone at the Carlisle ball. A sudden sharp blanching, the color departing all at once, leaving his features exposed, rigid and stripped of the charm that usually covered them. He stood near the refreshment table and watched Ash walk away, and the smile was gone, and what was left underneath was something Ash had seen before; somethingcold, calculating and wounded, because Devlin’s vanity was the core of him, and the vanity had just been publicly pierced. A man whose vanity had been pierced in front of the ton was a man who would retaliate.
***
The retaliation arrived before the next day. A man in a dark coat appeared at the door of Grosvenor Square with a card on a silver tray, the card bearing the Stormont crest and a single line written in Devlin’s hand. Pistols. Chalk Farm. Dawn the day after next.
Ash read the card in his study, and Frost was beside him, having refused to leave since the morning. The study smelled of tea instead of brandy, the letters on the desk had been sorted into a pile by Frost, and the decanter was still on the mantelpiece where Frost had put it. The room was beginning, very slowly, to feel like a room that belonged to a man who was rebuilding rather than a man who was falling apart.
“You will not meet him,” Frost said.
Ash set the card down on the desk.
“No,” Ash said. “I will not.”
He picked up the card, turned it over and began to compose, in his mind, the response he was going to write, the response that was going to end Devlin’s career in London society more thoroughly than any bullet could. Because a bullet was private but a refusal was public, and public was where the Duke of Ravenhurst was conducting his business now. The business was the systematic dismantling of every structure that had made the wager possible, beginning with the betting book and ending with the man who had proposed it.
He picked up his pen. Frost watched him from the chair by the window, steady, patient and entirely unsurprised, because Frost had known, from the moment he had found Ash on thefloor, that he was going to get up, and the getting-up was going to be the most dangerous thing the Duke of Ravenhurst had ever done.
Chapter Seventeen
“Read it back to me.”
Frost held the letter at arm’s length, tilted toward the lamp, and read aloud in the flat uninflected voice he used when he was delivering someone else’s words and wished it noted that the words were not his own.
“I have already accepted my own ruin in print. Yours will follow without my assistance. The man who proposed the wager has nothing left to settle with the man who accepted it. Signed, Ravenhurst.”
The study was quiet. Ash sat at the desk with his pen still in his hand and the ink still wet on the original and listened to his own sentence come back to him through Frost’s mouth. The sentence sounded right, which was a thing he had not been certain of when he wrote it, because certainty required clarity and clarity required sleep and sleep was a thing he had not had in six days.
“It will ruin him,” Frost said. “A refused duel, printed in the Tattler. He cannot survive it. Not after the betting book. Not after the interview. Not after the cut at the Asquiths. This is the final piece. If you send this, Devlin is finished in London.”
