Toast and Latin

By Wednesday you have learned three things about the Duke of Ashvale.

He answers every letter. Every one. The bishop who wants a new roof, the widow in Wiltshire whose pig got into the duke's turnips, the Prince Regent's man asking whether His Grace might be persuaded to attend a fête in a Chinese pavilion. He reads each one himself before it comes across the desk to you, and he writes a word or two in the margin in a small, black, upright hand. Yes. No. Pay her. God, no.

He doesn't eat. Pengrave sends up a tray at one and it goes back at four with the cover still on.

And he looks at the bottom-right drawer exactly once a day, last thing at night, the way some men check the locks.

"You're staring at His Grace's desk," says Jem Garrod, on your third evening, when you go down to the mews for air.

Jem is the duke's valet: twenty-six, red-haired, freckled, with a grin that would get him hanged in a less forgiving household. He's sitting on an upturned bucket feeding bacon rind to a one-eyed black cat.

"I'm staring at the stars," you say.

"You're in the mews, Mr. Carew. There's a roof." He scratches the cat's ears. "This is Bishop. Bishop doesn't like anybody. Bishop has decided he likes you, so I'll allow it. What's your Christian name?"

You tell him.

"Ethan," Jem says, trying it out. "Well, Ethan, not in front of Pengrave, he'd have a seizure. What do you want to know?"

"Nothing."

"Feltham," Jem says, as if you'd asked. "Mr. Hilary Feltham. Had your room. Had your chair. Lovely coats, never paid for one. Went out the front door on the second of March with Pengrave behind him and His Grace standing at the top of the stairs looking like the wrath of God in a waistcoat." He lowers his voice. "Theft, they're saying in the servants' hall. Nobody knows what."

"And you?"

Jem gives the cat the last of the rind. "I don't know what. I know His Grace didn't send for the constable. I know he didn't sleep for a week. Make what you like of that."

The Dowager's list arrives on Thursday, despite your letter.

It comes in a hand like a cavalry charge, on paper that smells of violets, and it's addressed to the duke, which means it's addressed to you first. You read it with growing horror. Lady Anne Ellacombe, nineteen, too giggly. Miss Ludgrove, twenty-two, eight thousand a year, teeth. Lady Lucasta Hollingbrook, twenty-four, the Earl's girl, beautiful, clever, sensible family, settle this by Midsummer, Varian, I mean it.

Lady Lucasta's name is underlined twice.

You pass it across the desk without comment. He reads it, writes God, no in the margin, crosses that out, and puts it in the drawer marked Family.

"Her Grace didn't care for your Sunday," he says.

"She sent a list instead of coming round. I'd count that as a victory."

"You would," he says. He doesn't look up, but you're learning that when he doesn't look up he's listening hardest.

You work late, because he does.

It becomes a habit by the end of the week: the house gone quiet, Pengrave's footsteps fading below, two candles on the partners' desk and the fire built up, the duke at his side and you at yours, the only sounds the scratch of two pens and the clock and, apparently, you.

"You're humming," he says, on Friday, near eleven.

You stop. "I'm sorry."

"The Old Hundredth," he says. "For about forty minutes."

"You counted?"

He turns a page. "I have a clock."

You don't hum after that. You can feel him not mentioning it.

Near midnight he holds out a letter across the desk without lifting his eyes. "The Bishop of Salisbury writes in Latin to show he can. He says the chapter will consider my proposal for the school with the greatest pleasure. Draft a reply."

You read it. Then you read it again.

"He doesn't," you say.

The duke's pen stops.

"Libentissime is with the greatest pleasure," you say. "He's written liberrime. Most freely. As in, they'll consider it entirely without obligation. He's telling you no and making it look like yes, so that when he refuses you can't say he didn't warn you." You turn the letter round and tap the word. "It's a very clerical sort of no. My father does it to the churchwardens."

He looks at the letter for a long time.

Then he looks at you, and something happens to his face. It isn't a smile. It's the place where a smile would be if he let it out, a sort of easing at the corner of the eyes, and it changes the whole architecture of him. He's beautiful when he's cold. Like this, he's almost unbearable.

"Liberrime," he says softly. "The old snake."

"Shall I write back in Latin?"

"Shall you?"

"I could make it very clear in Latin that the Duke of Ashvale funds two-thirds of the chapter's roof."

The almost-smile stays one second longer. "Do it in your best hand," he says. "I want him to frame it."

On Saturday the one o'clock tray goes back untouched again, and you've had enough.

At half past three you go down to the kitchen, charm Cook with a compliment to her bread, and come back up with toast. Thick, buttered, cut in triangles the way your sister makes it when your father forgets to eat over his sermons. You set the plate at his elbow without a word and go back to your side of the desk.

He looks at it like it's a dispatch from the French.

"I didn't ask for that."

"No, Your Grace."

"Mr. Carew."

"It's toast, Your Grace. It's not a political position."

He doesn't touch it. You don't look. Twenty minutes later, when you glance up, the plate is empty except for crumbs, and he's reading a report on Wiltshire drainage as if nothing in the world has ever been eaten in his presence.

You bring toast every afternoon after that. He never mentions it. The plate always comes back clean.

On your eighth day the evening post comes up at nine.

Jem brings it on a salver and winks at you behind the duke's back, and you sort it as you've learned: invitations in one stack, estate business in another, his mother's violets on top so he can brace himself. There's one letter left at the bottom.

Cheap paper made to look expensive. A sloping, elegant hand, a little too elegant, the hand of a man who practiced. Addressed to His Grace the Duke of Ashvale, Private.

You don't open letters marked Private. That was the first rule he gave you after the drawer. You hand it across the desk.

He breaks the wafer. Reads. His face doesn't change at all.

That's how you know.

Every other letter, you've watched him react: a tightening, a flick of impatience, that ghost of a smile for the Bishop. This one, nothing. He goes perfectly, deliberately still, the way a man goes still on ice when he hears it crack.

The color leaves his face from the top down.

You see the words, upside down across the desk, because you can read any hand from any angle, it's the one trick you have. I still have the page you'd most like back. Price to follow. H.F.

Then he holds the corner of the letter to the candle, very steadily, and watches it catch, and turn black, and curl, and drops the last of it into the grate.

"Mr. Carew," he says, without looking at you. "You didn't see that."