Please Don't Go

Nobody tells you that a duke's secretary is also, apparently, his seating chart.

"Lady Tregaskis cannot be near Mrs. Orme," the Dowager Duchess says, sweeping down the music room at four in the afternoon in lavender silk with her list in one hand and you in the other, metaphorically. "Mrs. Orme's husband shot Lady Tregaskis's brother in 1802. Badly. Lord Pomfret is deaf in the left ear and vain about it. Put him on the right of someone pretty."

"Yes, Your Grace."

She stops and looks at you properly for the first time. Albinia Rotherby, Dowager Duchess of Ashvale, is fifty-eight and still beautiful in the way a frost is beautiful: silver-blonde, straight-backed, eyes the same slate as her son's but with all the shutters open.

"You wrote that letter," she says. "The one with Sunday in it."

"His Grace approved it."

"His Grace has never in his life offered me a Sunday." She studies you a moment longer. "Mr. Carew. I'm told you're from Somerset and that you argue. Both will be useful tonight. Lady Lucasta Hollingbrook sits at my son's right hand for supper. If anyone tries to move her, you will have a fit."

"A real one, Your Grace, or a clerical one?"

The Dowager's mouth twitches exactly the way her son's does. "Whichever works," she says, and sweeps off.

By nine o'clock the music room holds sixty people, two harpists, a soprano from the Opera with a bosom like a ship's prow, and more candles than you have seen in your whole life put together.

You stand by the wall near the door with a sheaf of cards, the way you've been told: invisible, useful, black coat, white cravat, a secretary is a piece of furniture that can spell. It suits you. From the wall you can see everything.

Mostly you can see the room watching him.

It's extraordinary. You've worked across a desk from him for nine days and somehow you hadn't understood it. He comes in late, in black, with the jet pin in his cravat, and the room bends. Conversations stumble. A girl in white drops her fan and doesn't pick it up. Two matrons by the pianoforte turn as one, like sunflowers. Even the soprano, mid-warble, finds a note she hadn't planned.

And he walks through it as if it were weather. Bows where he must. Says three words to his mother. Takes his place by the front row, beside a young woman in dark green, and stands there, perfectly composed, like a man beside a gallows who has decided not to give the crowd the satisfaction.

Lady Lucasta Hollingbrook is, you have to admit, magnificent. Dark hair dressed high, a long pale neck, a face that would make painters weep and a mouth that looks like it's always about to say something you'll regret hearing. She's the only person in the room who doesn't look at him. She looks at the harp, the candles, her gloves.

Then, for one second, she looks across the whole room straight at you.

You look at your cards.

She finds you at supper.

You're by the sideboard making sure Lord Pomfret's good ear is pointed at Miss Ludgrove, and she appears at your elbow with a glass of lemonade she clearly has no intention of drinking.

"You're the secretary," she says.

"Yes, my lady."

"The new one. Mr. Feltham used to stand exactly there and look at the ceiling." She sips. She did intend to drink it, then. "You don't look at the ceiling. You look at him."

Your stomach drops so fast you almost feel it hit your boots.

"I look at everyone, my lady. It's how I know where to put them."

"Mm." She considers you over the rim of the glass. Up close her eyes are dark brown and terrifyingly intelligent. "You put me next to him at supper."

"Her Grace's instructions."

"And if I asked you to move me?"

"I'm instructed to have a fit."

Lady Lucasta laughs. It's sudden and real and several heads turn. "Oh, I like you," she says. "That's inconvenient. What's your Christian name, Mr. Carew?"

"Ethan, my lady."

"Ethan." She sets down the glass. "Well, Ethan, a word of advice from one piece of furniture to another. Everyone in this room is watching the duke. Be careful who notices you watching." And she drifts back to the table, and to him, and lays one gloved hand on his arm, and he looks down at it as if someone has placed a small, polite bomb there.

The carriages go at one. The house empties like a lung.

You're gathering cards from the music room floor when his shadow falls over you.

"Mr. Carew." He's standing in the doorway, cravat still perfect, face drawn with a weariness you've never seen on him in daylight. "A word. In the study."

The study is dark except for the fire. He doesn't light the candles. He goes to the partners' desk and stands behind his chair with both hands on its back.

"The letter that came on Wednesday," he says.

"The one I didn't see."

"Yes." Something like gratitude crosses his face and is gone. "The man who sent it will write again. He will ask for money. I would like a reply ready, to go the moment he does, that buys me time. A month. Six weeks. It must agree to nothing. It must admit to nothing. It must not even admit that there is anything to admit." He looks up. "Can you write such a letter?"

"I can write anything, Your Grace. But it would help to know what he has."

"No," he says. "It wouldn't."

He says it gently, which is worse than if he'd snapped. You nod. You don't ask again.

"Thank you," he says. "That will be all."

You go up to the third floor. Your room is small and clean, with a narrow bed and a washstand and a window that looks out over the mews roofs toward the dark bulk of the house's own wing. You take off your coat. You sit on the bed in your shirtsleeves and think about Lady Lucasta saying be careful who notices you watching, and about the way he said no, it wouldn't, as if he were protecting you from something rather than hiding it.

You don't sleep. You hear the house clock strike twelve.

Then, very softly, a whisper of paper on floorboards.

A note has come under your door.

You pick it up. It's folded small, square as a playing card, cream laid paper sealed with a blot of black wax pressed with the Ashvale stag. Your name on the outside in that small black upright hand you know better now than your own.

You break the seal.

Mr. Carew. You are dismissed for the evening.

And then, below it, as if the pen had gone on without permission:

Please don't go.