Page 101 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

Phelps looked at the open door where the morning light was pouring across the threshold.

“Very good, sir,” he said, and the faintest crack appeared in his composure, the ghost of a smile suppressed with professional precision. “Shall I have Cook prepare breakfast for two?”

Oliver looked at Louisa. She nodded.

“Breakfast for two, Phelps. And close the front door, would you? We are letting in all of Grosvenor Square.”

Phelps closed the door. The noise of the square fell away, and the quiet of the entrance hall settled around them, morning light golden across the floor, the travelling trunks still sitting on the pavement outside, going nowhere at all.

Louisa looked up at him. His thumb traced a circle against the back of her hand.

“You will have to tell Eleanor,” he said, and she nodded. “I shall, and she will be unbearable about it.”

He laughed, and Louisa leaned against his shoulder. His arm settled around her, easy and unhurried, and they stood in the brightening hall while the household stirred to life around them, Cook’s footsteps below, a maid’s voice on the landing, the ordinary machinery of a morning that had become, without ceremony or announcement, the first morning of everything that came next.

CHAPTER 32

Oliver stood on the pavement outside the Fairchild townhouse at ten minutes past eleven.

The knocker was brass, tarnished green at the edges where the polish had not reached. He lifted it once. The sound carried into the narrow hall beyond, and footsteps followed, slower than the brisk pace of a trained household. The door opened. The maid, Rosaline, freckled and barely twenty, her cap slightly askew, recognized him with wide eyes.

“Your Grace.”

“Good morning. Is Mr. Fairchild at home?”

Rosaline glanced behind her, as though the answer required consultation. “He is in his study, Your Grace. He does not usually receive callers before luncheon. He does not usually receive callers at all, if I am being honest, sir.”

“I understand.” Oliver held out the card. “Would you be kind enough to take this to him? I am happy to wait.”

She took the card he had written and vanished into the house, leaving the door half-open. Oliver studied the hallway through the gap. Narrow. Clean, but worn at the seams, the wallpaper lifting above the dado rail, the runner thinning where feet had passed for years.

The maid returned quickly. “Mr. Fairchild will see you, Your Grace. If you will follow me.”

He followed Rosaline down the corridor, and she opened the door and stepped aside.

The room was small. Bookshelves covered three walls, their contents arranged by subject, each spine aligned flush. A writing desk stood beneath the window, and behind it sat a man Oliver had heard described but never met.

Charles Fairchild was fifty-three. He had the build of a taller man who had spent years compressing himself into smaller and smaller spaces, his shoulders curved inward, his chin lowered as though the weight of the air above him pressed harder than it pressed on other people. His hair had gone grey early. His coat was well-made but several seasons old, the cuffs turned once and then turned again. He held Oliver’s card between two fingers and studied it as though deciphering a foreign script.

“Your Grace.” He did not rise. His voice was courteous but distant, the voice of a man greeting a visitor from inside a room he had long since locked himself within. “Please sit.”

Oliver sat. The chair was leather, cracked at the arms, facing the desk in the arrangement of a man who had once conducted business here and now simply occupied the seat because it was the place the house expected him to be.

“I apologize for calling without prior arrangement, Mr. Fairchild.”

“You are a duke. Dukes do not require prior arrangement.” A thin smile crossed his mouth and vanished. “Though I confess, I cannot imagine what business brings you to this study. My investments are in no condition to attract interest, and I am not aware of any parliamentary matter that would benefit from my opinion.”

“I am not here about investments or parliament.” Oliver set his hat on the arm of the chair. “I am here about your daughter.”

Fairchild’s hand, still holding the card, lowered to the desk. He placed it flat on the blotter beside a stack of unopened letters and an inkwell that had crusted over at the rim.

“Louisa?” He said it carefully, as though confirming the word still applied to him. “What about her?”

“I wish to court her. Properly. And I have come to ask your permission.”

Fairchild studied him. His eyes were blue-grey, the same shade as Louisa’s, and they carried the same quality of careful attention, though in his case the attention was pointed inward, trained on the long catalogue of his own failures, and Oliver’s arrival had briefly drawn it outward into unfamiliar light.

“You are the Duke of Ashford,” Fairchild said at last.