The valet cast a wary glance around the room.
“I won’t tell anyone, I swear it,” she whispered. “Here, I’ll even start. Once there was a young nobleman named . . . Bransom Fayne, the Duke of Mothfairy.”
“Mothfairy?”
She shrugged. “Did you have something better?”
He set the kettle on the hob. “He can never hear of this.”
“Of course not,” she said. “How could he? This man we’re discussing doesn’t exist. But this is the tale of his tragic past. In his youth, the nonexistent Duke of Mothfairy . . .”
“Was alone. A great deal. His mother died in childbirth.”
She nodded. This much, she’d learned from the man himself.
“And his father might as well have died the same day. The old duke shut himself off from the world to grieve, and he treated his son very coldly. Once this ‘Bransom’ was old enough, he frequently sought out . . . company.” The valet’s face contorted as he searched for words. “The female kind of company.”
“He sewed his wild oats, you mean.”
“Entire plantations of them. Good heavens. He made oat-sewing an industry.”
Izzy could believe it. She’d seen the accounts.
“But at the age of thirty, he finally settled down to the principal obligation of his title. Which was, of course, to produce the next Duke of . . .”
“Mothfairy,” she supplied.
“Yes.” Duncan cleared his throat. “He singled out the most sought-after debutante of the London season and declared his intentions to court her. The two were engaged soon thereafter.”
Izzy’s jaw dropped. “Ransom was engaged?”
Now she understood why he’d panicked at her foolish utterance of the word “marriage” earlier.
“No.” Duncan threw her a stern look. “Bransom was engaged. The Duke Who Doesn’t Exist. He was engaged to a young lady by the name of Lady Emi-” A distressed look crossed his face. “Lady Shemily.”
“Lady Shemily?” Izzy smiled to herself. He was getting into the spirit now.
“Yes. Lady Shemily Liverpail. Daughter of an earl.” The valet returned to his work. He uncapped a small bottle of something that scented strongly of lemon. “When the engagement was announced, the duke’s long-suffering servants were delighted. Some of the house staff had served the family for thirty years without a duchess. They were eager for a new lady of the house.”
“Including his trusty and distinguished valet?” she guessed. “Who went by the name of . . . Dinkins?”
“Especially his trusty and distinguished valet. Dinkins was looking forward to removing fewer remnants of rouge from the duke’s garments. Devilish tricky to remove, rouge.”
“I can imagine.” Izzy wondered what kind of woman could tempt the duke away from all that debauchery. “This Lady Shemily Liverpail . . . What was she like?”
“What you’d imagine a successful debutante to be. Beautiful, accomplished, well connected. And young. Just nineteen years old.”
Izzy suppressed a plaintive sigh. Of course. Of course Lady Shemily would be all those things.
“What went wrong?” she asked.
He hesitated.
“Fictionally. In this completely fabricated story that you’re only concocting to amuse me because you know how I love a tale of star-crossed love.”
“Everything was arranged,” he said. “Wedding, honeymoon, a well-appointed suite for the new duchess. And then, less than a fortnight before the wedding date, the bride-to-be vanished.”
“Vanished?”
“Yes. She disappeared from her bedchamber in the middle of the night.”
Izzy leaned forward, propping her chin on her hand. This story was getting rather exciting. And it seemed Duncan was relishing the chance to tell it at last. Poor man, confined here for months with all this melodrama and no one to talk to. And very few stains.
“Lady Shemily,” he said, his voice oozing dramatic tension, “had eloped.”
“Eloped? But with whom?”
“A tenant farmer from the Liverpail country estate. Apparently the two had been concealing their affections for years.”
“What a scandal. What did Ro—” She shook herself. “What did Mothfairy do?”
“Nothing prudent. He should have let the silly chit run off and ruin herself. Loudly disdain her upbringing to all who asked, joke cleverly about his close escape. And then next season, find a new bride. But his pride wouldn’t allow it. He rode off in furious pursuit.”
“Without his trusty and distinguished valet?”
He sighed testily. “Dinkins followed in the coach. And Dinkins fell, sadly, more than a day behind. Too late to stop the tragedy unfolding.”
She bit her lip, already cringing. “Did the duke fall from his horse?”
“Oh, no. Some twenty miles south of the Scottish border, Mothfairy came upon his would-be bride and her lover in a coaching inn. A confrontation ensued, blades were drawn . . .”
She winced, as though she could feel the full length of Ransom’s scar burning from her scalp to her cheekbone. “I think I can imagine the rest.”
“You will have to imagine it. I can’t tell you precisely what occurred. I wasn’t there.” Duncan dropped all pretense of storytelling. He braced his hands flat against the worktable. “When I found him, he’d spent two nights in a closet at that damned coaching inn. No surgeon had been called. The innkeeper was simply waiting for him to die. I had to stitch him myself.”
“Unconscionable,” Izzy said. “What about his intended bride?”
“Already gone. Little flibbertigibbet.” He shook his head. “He wasn’t well enough to risk traveling back to London, so I brought him here. It’s been more than seven months. He refuses to leave. He refuses to even let me perform my duties as a valet. His appearance is an embarrassment.”
Izzy hedged. “I don’t know that I’d say that.” She rather liked the duke’s rugged, unkempt appearance. And a dozen sighing handmaidens couldn’t be wrong.
“Half the time, he refuses to wear a cravat. It’s shameful.”
“Shameful indeed,” she echoed. She could agree on that point. The duke’s open collars gave her quite shameful thoughts.
Duncan set the iron aside and held up her pristine shawl for examination. “This little task has preserved my sanity for another day,” he said. “Thank you. You can’t know how unbearable it is to spend your life on one profession and then be forced to abandon it.”