"You're all right?" he asked. He didn't wait for an answer. His arms opened wide, releasing them both, almost pushing them away.
"Yes, yes. Quite all right." Emilie nudged Freddie away and settled back in her place. Her face burned against the cold air. Embarrassment. Yes, that was it. Of course the duke had been embarrassed. That was natural; she had felt it, too. They were strangers. It was simply the awkwardness of it all.
"Speak for yourself, Grimsby," said Freddie. "Where the devil have my specs gone?"
"Here," said Ashland, from the darkness.
"Oh, right-ho." Freddie leaned backward and sank into the seat, just as it rose up in another jolt to meet him. "I take it we're near the drive?"
"Almost there." A pause settled in. Ashland shifted his big body. "We will save our interview for tomorrow morning, Mr. Grimsby, if it's convenient for you. I daresay you'd just as soon head straight for your room."
"Yes, Your Grace." The carriage slowed and lurched around a corner. Emilie found the strap just in time.
"I believe they've already prepared it for your arrival. You shall instruct my butler, of course, if anything is amiss."
"Yes, of course. Thank you, sir."
Freddie coughed. "You're going to have to show a great deal more spirit than that, Grimsby, if you're hoping to survive a winter up here. Once the wind starts to kick up, things turn dashed melancholy."
A gust rattled the windows, shrieking along the seams.
"Hasn't it rather kicked up already?" Emilie ventured.
"This?" Freddie laughed without mirth. He rapped his knuckles against the glass. "Nothing more than a gentle breeze, this. A zephyr."
"Oh. I see."
Freddie laughed again. "You're in Yorkshire now, Grimsby. Abandon hope and all that. If I were you, I'd be counting the days until my first weekend off and booking the early express up to London. We are giving him a weekend off now and again, aren't we, Pater?"
Ashland did not stir. "If your progress is satisfactory, of course."
"Then I shall do my best for you, Grimsby. It's the least I can offer you. And I'm dashed clever, you know. Never fear."
"Quite clever, I'm sure." Emilie said this with conviction. No doubt at all, young Lord Silverton was altogether too precocious.
The carriage slowed, lurched, stopped. Almost before the wheels had fixed, the door was swinging open and the duke leapt out as if from a spring.
"That's Pater for you," Freddie said resignedly. "Not at all fond of closed spaces. You first, Grimsby. Hero of the hour and all that."
The moon shone round and full behind a raft of skidding clouds. It illuminated the Duke of Ashland's hair to whiteness as he turned and stared down at Emilie. She met his gaze squarely beneath the brim of his hat, afraid of letting her eyes trail downward to his ruined jaw. The single eye enveloped her whole. In the moonlight, it might have been any shade from pale gray to vivid blue. "Simpson, this is Mr. Grimsby, Silverton's new tutor. Have your staff see to his comfort tonight."
Emilie was aware of an enormous dark mass to her right, immense with gravity, obscuring the night sky. A single figure resolved itself from the pitch, white collar gleaming with its own luminescence from the corner of Emilie's vision. "Yes, Your Grace," said a low voice, crackling with age. "You may come with me, Mr. Grimsby."
"I shall send for you in the morning, directly after breakfast, to discuss the terms of your employment here." A sudden gust of wind nearly tore his words away, but Ashland didn't move, didn't raise his voice by so much as a single decibel. "In the meantime, I urge you to make yourself comfortable in my home."
"Thank you, sir." Despite the numbing shock of the wind, Emilie's cheeks glowed with warmth.
"In other words," Freddie put in, "you've been dismissed for the night, Grimsby. I'd dash while I could, if I were you. In fact, being a hospitable sort of chap, I believe I'll take you up myself." His hand closed around Emilie's upper arm.
"Frederick." The single word snapped out of the duke's throat.
The boy paused, one shoe poised above the gravel. "Yes, Pater?"
"In my study, if you please. We have a certain matter to discuss."
Freddie's hand dropped away from Emilie's arm. "What matter, sir?"
"Frederick, my dear boy. We have all been to a great deal of trouble tonight. I believe some sort of reckoning is in order. Don't you?" Ashland's silky voice nudged upward at the very tip of the last word, implying a question where one didn't really exist. Emilie heard a little slap, as of gloves hitting an impatient palm.
Emilie didn't dare look at Freddie. She couldn't have seen him well anyway, as the moon had just retired behind one of the thicker clouds. But she heard him gulp, even above the thrum of the wind about the chimneys. Her heart sank in sympathy.
"Yes, sir," Freddie said humbly.
"That will be all, Mr. Grimsby," said the Duke of Ashland.
The butler stepped aside in a meaningful crunch of gravel, and Emilie turned and walked up the steps, guided by the dim golden light from the entrance hall, and into Ashland Abbey.
* * *
The Duke of Ashland waited until his son's footsteps had receded entirely up the stairs before he allowed the smile to break out at the corner of his mouth.
Well, it had been an entertaining evening, after all, and he couldn't deny he stood in need of a little excitement from time to time. A chuckle rumbled in his throat at the image of poor Mr. Grimsby, eyes wide, whiskers a-flutter, one slender, scholarly fist closed at his side and the other brandishing a chicken drumstick. But he had shown spirit, after all. The young chap had put himself in imminent danger to rescue Freddie. That was all Ashland needed to know.
He rose from his desk. On the cabinet near the window, a tray beckoned alluringly with a single empty glass and three crystal decanters: one of sherry, one of brandy, and one of port. Ashland's right hand-the one that no longer existed-throbbed with eagerness at the sight.
He walked with steady steps to the cabinet, picked up the sherry with his left hand, and filled the empty glass nearly to the brim. A single glass of spirits each night: That was all he allowed himself. Any more, and he might never stop.
The first sip slid down his throat in a satisfying burn. His nose and mouth glowed with the familiar taste, the taste of relief. Ashland closed his eyes and dug his fingers into the diamond pattern of the bowl, giving it time, letting the sherry spread through his body to fill all his parched and aching cracks. The stiffness on the right side of his face began to ease, the throb of his phantom hand to fade.
How Grimsby had stared at first. Ashland had almost forgotten the effect of his ruined face on the untrained eye. How long had it been since he had encountered, unmasked, a genuine stranger, one who hadn't been prepared in advance for this abomination? But Grimsby had recovered in a flash and composed himself politely. Well-bred, that fellow. Outside the carriage, he hadn't shifted his eyes away, hadn't looked at the ground or his hands or Ashland's hat. Another point in the young man's column. He might very likely do. Only a few months, after all. Only a few more months until Freddie's Oxford examinations, and then Ashland need no longer bother with this business of bringing tutors into the house, into his well-ordered routine, only to have them pack their valises and leave after a week or two. Freddie would be off, would likely only return to the howling moors for the odd dutiful week or two, and that would be that.
The Duke of Ashland would be alone at last. No tutors; no Freddie spreading about his profligate charm, so like his mother's; no lingering reminders of the days before he had shipped off to India, plain old Lieutenant the Honorable Anthony Russell, leaving behind a beautiful wife and infant son, and two perfectly healthy cousins between himself and the dukedom.
Ashland took another drink, longer this time, and lifted aside the heavy velvet curtain. The window faced north; in full daylight, the view was bleak beyond description. Tonight, however, all was black. The clouds had moved in completely, propelled by the incessant wind, and there was no further moonlight to illuminate the spinning grasses, the rocks, the few scrubby bushes that had once formed a sort of garden along this side of the house. In her last year, Isabelle had worked obsessively on that garden, employing a raft of men from the village to eke out some sort of civilized order to the landscape. She had ordered plantings and statuary, tried for shade and windbreaks, and all for nothing. Only the statues remained, like the ruins of some lost Roman town, limbs cut off abruptly where the wind had toppled the poor fellows off their pedestals.