An aristocrat might wear such a ring.
MAXIMUS BATTEN, THE Duke of Wakefield, woke as he always did: with the bitter taste of failure on his tongue.
For a moment he lay on his great curtained bed, eyes closed, trying to swallow down the bile in his throat as he remembered dark tresses trailing in bloody water. He reached out and laid his right palm on the locked strongbox that sat on the table beside his bed. The emerald pendants from her necklace, carefully gathered over years of searching, were within. The necklace wasn’t complete, though, and he’d begun to despair that it ever would be. That the blot of his failure would remain upon his conscience forever.
And now he had a new failure. He flexed his left hand, feeling the unaccustomed lightness. He’d lost his father’s ring—the ancestral ring—last night somewhere in St. Giles. It was yet another offense to add to his long list of unpardonable sins.
He stretched carefully, pushing the matter from his mind so that he might rise and do his duty. His right knee ached dully, and something was off about his left shoulder. For a man in but his thirty-third year he was rather battered.
His valet, Craven, turned from the clothespress. “Good morning, Your Grace.”
Maximus nodded silently and threw back the coverlet. He rose, nude, and padded to the marble-topped dresser with only a slight limp. A basin of hot water already waited there for him. His razor, freshly sharpened by Craven, appeared beside the basin as Maximus soaped his jaw.
“Will you be breaking your fast with Lady Phoebe and Miss Picklewood this morning?” Craven enquired.
Maximus frowned into the gold mirror standing on the dresser as he tilted his chin and set the razor against his neck. His youngest sister, Phoebe, was but twenty. When Hero, his other sister, had married several years ago, he’d decided to move Phoebe and their older cousin, Bathilda Picklewood, into Wakefield House with him. He was pleased to have her under his eye, but having to share accommodations—even accommodations as palatial as Wakefield House—with the two ladies sometimes got in the way of his other activities.
“Not today,” he decided, scraping whiskers from his jaw. “Please send my apologies to my sister and Cousin Bathilda.”
“Yes, Your Grace.”
Maximus watched in the mirror as the valet arched his eyebrows in mute reproach before retiring to the clothespress. He didn’t suffer the rebuke—even a silent one—of many, but Craven was a special case. The man had been his father’s valet for fifteen years before Maximus had inherited him on attaining the title. Craven had a long face, the vertical lines on either side of his mouth and the droop of his eyes at the outer corners making it seem longer. He must be well into his fifties, but one couldn’t tell by his countenance: he looked like he could be any age from thirty to seventy. No doubt Craven would still look the same when Maximus was a doddering old man without a hair on his head.
He snorted to himself as he tapped the razor against a porcelain bowl, shaking soap froth and whiskers from the blade. Behind him Craven began laying out smallclothes, stockings, a black shirt, waistcoat, and breeches. Maximus turned his head, scraping the last bit of lather from his jaw, and used a dampened cloth to wipe his face.
“Did you find the information?” he asked as he donned smallclothes.
“Indeed, Your Grace.” Craven rinsed the razor and carefully dried the fine blade. He laid it in a fitted velvet-lined box as reverently as if the razor had been the relic of some dead saint.
“And?”
Craven cleared his throat as if preparing to recite poetry before the king. “The Earl of Brightmore’s finances are, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, quite happy. In addition to his two estates in Yorkshire, both with arable land, he is in possession of three producing coal mines in the West Riding, an ironworks in Sheffield, and has recently bought interest in the East India Company. At the beginning of the year he opened a fourth coal mine, and in so doing accrued some debt, but the reports from the mine are quite favorable. The debt in my estimation is negligible.”
Maximus grunted as he pulled on his breeches.
Craven continued, “As to the earl’s daughter, Lady Penelope Chadwicke, it’s well known that Lord Brightmore plans to offer a very nice sum when she is wed.”
Maximus lifted a cynical eyebrow. “Do we have an actual number?”
“Indeed, Your Grace.” Craven pulled a small notebook from his pocket and, licking his thumb, paged through it. Peering down at the notebook, he read off a sum so large Maximus came close to doubting Craven’s research skills.
“Good God. You’re sure?”