Mary Ann clapped her hands. “Wonderful! I, too, will instruct Cook to prepare some food we might easily hand out, and then we’ll be here bright and early. Anything that needs doing, I can do. I’ll wear my worst pair of gloves.” She gave a small laugh. “Imagine, next year, when I am presented and on the hunt for a husband, I will be able to tell them about the time I helped save a village.”
“I’m not sure that would endear you to him,” Aurelia said dryly. “I fear most gentlemen prefer their ladies safe in drawingrooms, wearing kid gloves and never spending more time than necessary in undesirable places.”
Mary Ann looked pointedly around the main street. The villagers had been proactive in brushing the debris and muck from the flood away, so the cobbles were once again in view and unmarred by great piles of dirt. All the smashed windows had been boarded up, and the bones of a very pretty village center could be seen underneath the disaster.
“If a gentleman is offended by my being in this lovely village, then I lose all faith in the institution of men,” Mary Ann said. “There could be nowhere as unobjectionable. And besides, my companion is aduchess, which naturally makes everything right.”
Aurelia knew perfectly well that she was not the most regular duchess, and she likely didn’t know how to behave according to her station—but her rank could not be denied. Let the gossip-mongers of London chew on that!
“Rumors of what we do here will almost certainly spread,” she warned, nevertheless. For Sebastian, she considered that a good thing—the fewer people considering him a murderer, the better. But it may not be a good thing for Lady Mary Ann; a lady rarely wanted a reputation before going to London and establishing one for herself there.
Unless, of course, it was a reputation for being the most beautiful lady in the county. Even then, those rumors very rarely made their way to London. But they were close enough to thecapital that it was likely rumors here would eventually make their way to thetonif they were juicy enough.
And rumors about the unconventional Duke and Duchess of Ravenhall were almost certainly juicy enough.
Mary Ann watched her face carefully. “It seems the tide has changed for His Grace already.”
“And so,” Aurelia said determinedly, “it will continue to change.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
They worked for a week straight. Sebastian had never felt so bone-tired. Or so whollyalive.
For the first time in his life, he had a purpose entirely unmoored from his rank. No one respected him merely because he was a duke; they respected him because he’d hefted sandbags until his shoulders screamed, because he’d waded into filthy water beside them. Since Catherine’s death, he had been living in a fog, avoiding the world because of the way it had rejected him.
But here, now, his own people had opened their arms. It mattered more than a thousand ton approvals ever could.
Aurelia, too, embraced this new life. He’d catch glimpses of her throughout the day—sleeves rolled up, laughing as she scrubbed mud from a child's rescued toy. She had a gift for this, he realized. For making people feel seen. Every meal she served came with that luminous smile, and he watched villagers who’d arrived hollow-eyed leave a little lighter.
When they stumbled home each night, filthy and spent, they fell into bed together. And there, in the dark, they made love with a desperation that bordered on worship. Those moments—her nails in his back, his name broken on her lips—felt morerealthan anything in his gilded, empty life ever had.
Unfortunately, like all good things, it had to come to an end.
After the week of work passed, the village was largely put back together, and the other demands of the estate could not be ignored any longer.Gully, the village bricklayer, came about with a collection of other men to repair the wall, and Sebastian went back to his entirely more tedious existence of writing letters and making calculations.
Fellows rapped on his study door later that afternoon. “Your Grace. Mr. Arnold is here to see you.”
“Mr. Arnold?” Sebastian laid his pen down. “Show him in.”
The door opened, and Fellows ushered the solicitor inside. As always, the bespectacled man looked rather out of place in Sebastian’s lush study. He adjusted his spectacles as he surveyed Sebastian. “Your Grace.”
“Surely, a letter would’ve sufficed, old chap. What’s so urgent that it required the journey from London?” Sebastian rose and gestured the slight man to an armchair. “Sit, please.” He rang for refreshments and took the other seat. “I presume this is about Her Grace?”
“Ah, yes.” Mr. Arnold removed his glasses and polished them with a small rag. “I take it you have settled into your marriage tolerably well?”
“Tolerably,” Sebastian said dryly. In truth, she had settled in far better than he ever could have anticipated, but knowing his plan—or at least, perhaps his former plan—to send her away, he kept that knowledge to himself. “Did you succeed in finding any members of her family?”
“I was unable to ascertain the identity of her father, although I have reason to believe he is a high-ranking member of theton. Her mother came to London from the countryside under unknown power, and lived in the capital for several months before seeking out her brother.”
As always, whenever Sebastian thought about the despicable nature of her father, he felt a wave of guilt. He had never done anything similar, but he could not deny that many similar men in positions of power took advantage of young women, then refused to provide for the inevitable consequences of their actions. And Aurelia had suffered as a result.
“Then whathaveyou discovered?” he pressed.
“Her mother and uncle come from a modest family on the outskirts of Manchester. Her grandparents are both dead now, but there was a great uncle—her mother’s father’s brother—who had a son, who married and had two children, one of which is still alive now, also living in Manchester.”
“And their living situation?”
“Reasonable. The man—a Mr. Jeremiah Smith—works as a lawyer, and his income is, from what I can ascertain, acceptable.”
