Not just houses, but people, too. Lives.
Ambrose was the reason he would never be able to truly come home again—the reason his boyish adoration for his once-beloved home had turned into a man’s implacable hatred. But that was the way of things, wasn’t it? Love and hate were inextricably linked, different sides of the same coin, a mere flick of a thumb the only thing separating one from the other.
He ambled through the rooms on the main floor, taking care to sidestep the floorboards that had swollen and warped with age and damp, wandering from the entryway with the grand, carved-wood staircase down the hallway toward his father’s study, with the library on the left, and the drawing and music rooms on the right, each a faded version of what they’d once been, and everything hidden under a thick layer of dust.
He made his way down the corridor and the servants’ staircase, the thud of his footsteps much too loud in the silent house. The kitchen hadn’t changed. The same copper pots still hung from the rack over the stove, and the old table still took pride of place in the center of the room.
He rested his hand on the scrubbed wooden surface. He and his mother used to sit here together on cold winter afternoons, feasting on warm chocolate and her special ginger biscuits, the same recipe his grandmother had used to make for her when she was a girl. He’d never tasted any as delicious. Even Gunther’s, for all that it offered the most celebrated sweets in London, couldn’t produce a ginger biscuit to rival his mother’s.
He cleared the sudden thickness from his throat. How absurd. That had been a lifetime ago, and his mother was long since dead and buried. Still, he couldn’t resist running his hand under the edge of the table, a smile rising to his lips when he felt the familiar indentation under his fingertips.
Four letters—M, A, H, and B, for Maxwell Alastair Hammond Burke.
He’d carved them with one of the cook’s sharp kitchen knives when he was seven years old. He’d wanted to carve his entire name, but it was too long, so he’d settled for his initials to save his backside from the thrashing he certainly would have gotten if Mrs. Archibald had caught him abusing her precious knives. The letters weren’t as distinct as they’d once been, the edges of each dulled with wear and time, but they were still here, the wood smooth and clean under his fingertips—
Clean? His head jerked up, the hair on the back of his neck rising as he glanced around the space. The table had been recently scrubbed clean. The polished copper pots gleamed in their place over the stove, and there wasn’t a speck of ash in the massive stone fireplace that dominated the room. The iron kettle sat atop the stove, with coals stacked neatly in the firebox underneath it, and the flagstone floors were swept clean.
Nearly every stick of furniture on the main floor was shrouded with sheeting and coated with dust, but here in the kitchen, there wasn’t a single streak of dirt or a cobweb to be seen. It was as spotless as it had been when Mrs. Archibald had presided over it, almost as if . . .
Someone had been in here.
He turned about in a circle, peering into the shadowy corners.
That was when he heard it.
It was so faint it would have been inaudible to anyone whose ears weren’t straining against the silence. The soft scuff of a footfall over the floorboards, a creak, and then louder, from behind him, the unmistakable click of a pistol being cocked.
Then a voice, soft and steady. “I don’t know who you are, or what you’re doing here, but I demand you leave at once.”
He whirled around, but by then it was already too late. A figure was advancing toward him from the deepest shadows hovering around the archway that led into the stillroom—a figure clad in a filmy white gown with a cloak thrown over the top of it.
She—for it was ashe, and rather a small, slightsheat that—was not at all an intimidating figure, aside from the pistol balanced in her hand. It was no pretty little muff pistol, either, but a double-barreled flintlock dueling pistol that was more than capable of blowing a sizable hole in his chest.
“Turn around, and go back out the way you came in.” Her voice was calm, even polite, but there wasn’t so much as a quiver in the hand that held the pistol, and her finger was steady on the trigger. “Now, if you please.”
As assassins went, she was a remarkably courteous one. Surely, such a gracious, soft-spoken lady wouldn’t actually fire on him? “If I don’t, madam? What then?”
She raised the muzzle of the gun—higher, then higher still, until it was no longer aimed at his chest, but right between his eyes. “Then I’m afraid I’ll have to shoot you.”
CHAPTER3
“Must you, indeed? How tiresome of you.” Not as tiresome as a pistol ball lodged in his skull would be, but Max would have wagered his dukedom that when he did choose to leave, he’d do so with his head intact.
He’d faced enough violence in his lifetime to know an empty threat when he heard one.
He’d fought dozens of brawls before the end of his first year at Eton and endured countless thrashings from vengeful headmasters. He’d had his eyes blackened, his bones broken, and boot heels lodged in his ribs.
Oddly enough, however, not once in his thirty-one years had he ever found himself on the wrong end of a loaded pistol. He’d had a near miss or two, certainly—there’d been that footpad in Covent Garden who’d held a blade to his throat, and on one memorable occasion a former mistress had tried to smother him with a pillow—but those were isolated incidents, and they’d taken place years ago.
These days, there weren’t many people in England who’d dare raise a fist or point a weapon at the Duke of Grantham.
“Did you not hear me, sir? I ordered you to leave my home this instant.”
He squinted into the gloom, but aside from a sweep of floating white hems, he couldn’t make out much of her. Her face was cast in shadows, but there was no mistaking the quiet menace in that soft voice.
Wasn’t his past meant to flash before his eyes in such circumstances? Shouldn’t he be overwhelmed with regrets over his misspent life? Shouldn’t he fall to his knees and grovel for forgiveness for his sins, and beg for mercy from the depths of his blackened soul? Surely, the fleeting moments before death should be ones of perfect clarity, and divine thanks?
But hewasn’tthankful, and the sudden racing of his heart and his sweat-slick palms weren’t the result of fear, but of fury. The sun had only just struggled over the horizon, for God’s sake. Surely, it was a bit early in the morning for such theatrics?
