"If I have to marry the Duke to keep you alive, Kit, then I will marry him."
The whisper slipped through the crack of a freezing door, and the man standing in the dark corridor in a borrowed footman's coat stopped breathing."But don't ask me to love him. Uncle Silas says if I fail, you go to the madhouse in Bristol before the first snow."Lucien Harkort, the Duke of Calderwood, had come to Ashgrove Court in disguise to judge the woman he might marry. He had expected a greedy girl hungry for a title. Instead, through that crack in the door, he watched her pick up a pair of scissors and cut off her own hair.Lucien did not move. He couldn't.In thirty-one years, he had stood in the House of Lords while old men screamed at him. He had faced down bankers, bishops, and a prince regent in a foul temper, and he had never once felt the floor tilt under his feet. It tilted now.On the narrow bed lay a thin girl of eleven with a face as white as the pillow, and beside her knelt a young woman in a faded gray dress, holding a long dark braid in her hand as if it were something that had died."Mrs. Tilly in the village pays four shillings for good hair," she said softly, trying to smile. "Four shillings buys a week of medicine. See? I told you I'd find a way."The little girl started to cry. "Amy, your hair...""It'll grow back, Kit. You won't, so hush."Amy. Amelia Hartwell. The woman Sir Silas Crowther had described in six months of letters as docile, obedient, and eager to please a man of the Duke's rank. Lucien had read those letters at his desk in Calderwood with mounting disgust. They didn't read like a guardian recommending his niece; they read like a farmer selling a heifer.That was exactly why he was here in a scratchy gray livery that smelled of someone else's sweat while his valet sat downstairs pretending to be him. Lucien had believed one thing his whole life, ever since his own mother was lied to and robbed by people who smiled at her across a dinner table: you never learn who someone is by the way they treat a duke; you learn it by the way they treat the person carrying the duke's luggage.London was full of women who curtsied beautifully to his title and slapped their maids behind closed doors. He would not marry one of them—not for an heir, not for anything.So for as long as the visit lasted, Ambrose Pike, his valet of twelve years—a gentle, nervous man who blushed when he had to send back soup—was the Duke of Calderwood. And the Duke of Calderwood was simply Luke: a footman nobody would look at twice.