Page 56 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

“A simple one. The best of them always are.” Greaves told it level and unhurried, his eyes on the fire and not on the man. “You will write to her. A letter, contrite and ardent, all the old warmth in it and a great quantity of remorse, begging one private meeting. Somewhere quiet. Somewhere she might reach unseen and leave again by the same road, so that her coming is her own secret and feels to her like her own free choice. You will name an hour.”

“And at the hour?”

“At the hour, in that quiet place, certain persons of standing will happen to be passing. They will happen to see. And they will happen to carry away with them the picture of a young duchess, alone in the dark, in the arms of a red-coated officer who is not her husband.” He turned his glass a slow half-circle by its stem. “That is the whole of it. You will observe there is nothing in it that asks you to be anything you have not already been to the lady once before, and you emerged from the business with your person and honour unblemished.”

“And the persons who happen to pass. Who are they to be?”

“That need not trouble you. Men whose word carries, and who owe me the execution of the task. You provide the lady and the hour. I provide the eyes.”

“And if she will not come?”

“Then you have lost an evening and I have lost nothing, and we stand precisely where we began.” Greaves’s certainty was a flat cold thing. “But she will come. A girl sold into a cold house does not refuse the one man who ever made her feel chosen. You taught her that lesson yourself, by your own account. You need only remind her she once learned it.”

“You need not touch so much as a hair upon her head,” he continued. “The picture is the whole of it. A duchess discovered is a duchess ruined, and a duke made a public fool of in his own park is laughed at in every club in London, and a man laughed at has lost a thing no fortune buys him back. Appearances are everything in the eyes of the ton.”

“And for the man who writes the letter?”

Greaves named a figure.

It was more money than Vance had seen at once in three years, his debts scrubbed to nothing, his pleasures paid, a fresh start in a regiment of the line where no creditor knew his face, and he felt it land the way the name had landed, too large and too useful to refuse, and he knew already, by his own pulse, that he would not refuse it.

“It is a great sum. It is also a great risk. A ruined duchess keeps a husband, and the husband is an ill man to cross.”

“The husband will never have your name. You will be a red coat in the dark and gone before the candles are lit. The risk you are pricing is the very thing the figure covers.” Greaves’s countenance betrayed not the slightest trace of impatience. “But if you mean you would like more, say so, and stop dressing greed as caution. It wastes us both.”

Vance had the grace to color, and then the larger want swallowed the smaller shame. “I would not say no to more.”

“Then fifty more on the day it is done, and not a shilling on a day it is bungled. We understand one another.”

“We understand one another, my lord.”

“One thing further, and then I leave you to your conscience, such as it is.” Greaves’s eyes did not warm. “You will speak of this to no one. Not to a brother officer in his cups, not to a woman across a pillow, not to a priest, not to yourself in the glass. Let one word reach one ear before the night is out, and the arrangement ends, and you will discover I am a far worse creditor than your man by the Fleet and a great deal harder to run from.”

“I am the soul of discretion, my lord.”

“You are nothing of the kind. No vain man ever was. But you are a frightened one tonight, and fear serves nearly as well as discretion, and it never oversleeps.”

“And am I to be there? At the discovery itself.”

“You are there until the moment before it, and well away the moment after. The witnesses must see a man, not your particular face. A red coat, a dark head, a duchess held close in the dark, and the thing is done. You are a rumor by morning and gone by the week’s end, with your pockets full.”

He had, to his lasting and insufficient credit, the one scruple. “She comes to no harm? Bodily.”

“None whatsoever.” Greaves did not trouble to make it sound like reassurance, which was its own contempt, and Vance, wishing very much to be reassured, took the thinnest thread of it and called it enough. “No man touches her, you least of all, since you will be away before the witnesses have done looking.”

“I shall want a few days. The letter must be in the old voice, or she will smell the change. She is no fool. She is only a girl who wishes very hard not to be one.”

“Take your week.” Greaves rose and slid a folded paper across the boards. “Send word there when the day is set, and burn it after. And choose your quiet place on the duke’s own ground, if you can contrive it. There is a particular sweetness in ruining a man upon the land he is proudest of.”

He went out into the night and did not look back, and Vance sat alone with the brandy and the firelight and the folded address beneath his hand.

He poured out the last of the bottle and did not taste it. The taproom had gone quiet around him, the landlord wiping the same patch of bar over and over in the way of a man who has learned not to see his betters’ business, the fire sunk to a single red eye, and Vance sat in the low light feeling, beneath the brandy and the fright and the rising warm tide of the money, a thing he did not often trouble to feel, which was the particular stillness of a man who has just agreed to do a thing he will never afterward be able to pretend he did not understand. It passed. It always passed.

Vance did not let himself wonder too hard why an earl would pay four years of a lieutenant’s debts for the look of a thing. Great men kept their grudges as other men kept hounds, and a wise small man did not inquire into the size of a great man’s grudge, only into the depth of his purse. He had the depth of the purse. The rest was the earl’s affair.

The place he half knew already. He had ridden the lane past Wrenfield twice since the regiment came up, calling it idle curiosity and knowing it for something else, and he had marked the little folly on the southern edge of the park, a Greek toy of a thing set among the trees, near enough the house that a woman might slip out to it on foot and far enough that no one would hear. He would walk it once by daylight, to be sure of the paths and the sightlines, and then he would name the hour. Greaves wanted the duke’s own ground. The folly would serve it up on a dish.

He thought about the money. He thought about the regiment of the line, the debts gone, the clean blank feeling of a slate scrubbed down to nothing. And then, once and briefly, of her face. Not the careful wedded face at the draper’s window, but the other, the one from behind the curtain at the Davenport ball a year and a half gone, when she had looked up at him wide-eyed and half-hopeful and entirely his for the price of a few kind sentences.