He tried first the obvious and entirely unsuccessful route, making discreet inquiries among his own circle as to whether anyone knew a family named Coulter, only to be met with blank looks and the occasional raised eyebrow at the peculiarity of the question. He spent an afternoon at his solicitor's office attempting to determine whether property records for Chandler's Row might yield a name, and came away with three possible households and no certainty as to which, if any, was correct.
He considered briefly, and with some embarrassment, hiring someone to make more thorough inquiries on his behalf, and decided against it. It felt wrong somehow to find her through the same cold machinery that had arranged his marriage to Cordelia, as though tracking her down like a debt to be collected might taint the thing he was trying to reach.
So he went himself, on foot, in clothes plainer than he usually wore, and walked the length of Chandler's Row twice before he worked up the nerve to stop at the bakery on the corner: the one detail he was certain of, the one fixed point in an otherwise foggy memory of rain and lamplight and a woman's laugh.
The baker's wife, as it happened, was not easily persuaded. She made him wait while she finished serving two other customers, made him explain himself twice, made him produce, at her insistence, some manner of proof that he was who he claimed to be—which he found, to his own surprise, more amusing than insulting. This round, flour-dusted woman, entirely unmoved by his title, treated him with exactly the same brisk skepticism she might apply to any stranger asking after a young woman in her neighborhood.
"You'll forgive me for being careful," she said when he'd finally satisfied her. "Girls around here don't often have dukes come asking after them. And when they do, it's rarely for a reason a father would thank you for."
"I understand your caution. I hope when you come to know the reason, you'll think better of me for it."
She studied him a long moment more, arms still folded, and then something in her expression softened just slightly. "She came in here not three days past," the baker's wife said, "asking after a man she wouldn't name, wanting to know if I'd heard talk of a broken engagement among the fine families. I told her I didn't traffic in that sort of gossip, which was a lie, mind, but I didn't like the look on her face when she asked it—like she was afraid of the answer either way." She shook her head. "Third house past mine, blue door. You'd best have a good reason for showing up on it, Your Grace, or I'll hear about it, and I promise you I will have opinions."
Julian thanked her with more gratitude than the directions alone warranted, and stood a moment on the street outside her shop gathering himself, aware distantly that his heart was behaving in a manner entirely unbecoming of a duke about to knock on a merchant's door: too fast, too loud in his own ears, as though eleven minutes in a rainstorm carriage three weeks past had somehow rearranged the whole architecture of what mattered to him.
He walked the short distance to the blue door—the Duke of Ashwick, who had faced down furious in-laws and a solicitor's worth of broken contracts without breaking a sweat, standing on a modest street in Chandler's Row with his heart going entirely too fast for a man of his composure.
Marianne answered the door herself, an apron still tied over her dress, flour on her hands from some domestic task he hadn't expected of a woman he'd only ever seen soaked through in the back of a carriage. And her face, when she recognized him, went through a rapid succession of expressions: confusion, then recognition, then something like alarm.
"You," she said. "How did you... I don't even know your surname."