The Duke’s Forever Companion (Preview)

Chapter One

The carriage wheels had not yet stopped turning when David Skeffington decided he hated being home.

Halworth Manor rose against the grey October sky the way it always had, wide-fronted and pale-stoned, ivy thick on the east wing, and gravel freshly raked. Six years gone, and the house looked entirely unbothered. He supposed he had expected that, and yet…

He stepped down before the footman could reach the door. His boots met the gravel, and he stood a moment, eyes moving across the façade the way they still moved across unfamiliar ground, searching for something without knowing what. An old habit. He pressed it down and walked toward the entrance.

Candlelight spilled across the checkered marble floor. A fire had been laid in the grate. The Skeffington portraits lined the staircase wall, generations of men in various states of self-importance, and he did not look at any of them.

Lady Philippa Halworth, his father’s widow or stepmother, as he would prefer not to call her, was waiting.

She stood at the center of the hall, not near the door and not at its edge, but precisely in the middle of it, as though the hall were a stage and she had measured her mark before his arrival.

She was a beautiful woman, which could not be denied. Tall and slender in a gown of deep plum, her auburn hair coiled immaculately at the nape of her neck, the grey at her temples arranged rather than concealed. Her pale grey eyes met his the moment he stepped across the threshold, and her mouth curved into something warm and practiced.

“David.” She moved toward him, both hands extended. “You look well. The years have agreed with you.”

He took her hands briefly. “Duchess.”

Her smile did not shift. It never did. That was the thing about it. A real smile moved, changed, reached the eyes, or fell away at the corners. Hers simply remained, a fixed and pleasant arrangement of features that gave him no more information than a painted one would have.

“The household is prepared,” she said, releasing his hands and folding her own neatly before her. “I have taken the liberty of arranging a small dinner this evening, nothing extravagant. I thought it best to ease you back rather than overwhelm you on the first night.”

“That was thoughtful.” It was the appropriate response. He made it.

“Your father’s study has been kept as he left it. I thought you might wish to review the ledgers at your own pace rather than be presented with an account of everything at once.”

“I appreciate that.”

Her head tilted, very slightly. “You must be tired after the journey.”

“Considerably.”

She smiled once more, gestured toward the staircase, and turned to speak to the housekeeper. David crossed the hall, and it was only when his back was to her that he allowed his jaw to unclench.

He was nearly at the stairs when a voice from the corridor to his right said, “You are late. I had a wager with the cook that you would arrive before two o’clock, and now I owe the woman three shillings.”

Seth Buxton appeared in the doorway. He was broad-shouldered and easy in the way of a man who has never had to practice being comfortable, his dark coat slightly rumpled at the collar, his brown hair falling across his forehead at an angle that suggested he had attempted to tame it and then thought better of the effort. His hazel eyes were bright and already halfway to laughing.

David stopped on the second stair. “You owe the cook three shillings because you lost a wager about my travel time.”

“I do.”

“And you came to tell me this because…”

“Because I have been in this house for two days and the most exciting thing that has happened is that your grandmother threw a slipper at her previous companion, and I wanted a witness for the next attempt.” Seth clasped his hand firmly, held it a beat longer than a handshake required, and released it. “It is good to see you, David. You look terrible.”

“Lady Halworth just told me I look well.”

“Lady Halworth is being polite. I am being honest. Come upstairs before she reappears and tells you something else that is technically true and entirely false at the same time.”

David felt something in his chest loosen, briefly, the particular loosening that only Seth produced, and he let himself feel it for approximately three seconds before he continued up the stairs. “Three shillings,” he said. “You could have simply asked me what time I planned to arrive.”

“And miss the thrill? Absolutely not.”

***

His rooms smelled of beeswax and the faint trace of cedar from the wardrobe, exactly as they always had. The fire had been lit, the curtains drawn against the failing afternoon light, and Peter Dowding was already there, crouched over an open trunk in the corner.

Peter, his valet, looked up at David’s arrival, and his face split into a grin that had not changed since they were boys stealing apples from the kitchen garden. He was lean and sandy-haired, hazel eyes bright above a scattering of freckles that had not faded with age.

“There he is,” Peter said, straightening. “Returned from the continent in one piece, more or less. I was beginning to think you had decided to stay and become someone else’s problem.”

“The continent would not have me,” David said, setting his hat on the chair by the window. “The coat, Peter.”

Peter obliged, moving behind him with the ease of long practice, lifting the greatcoat from his shoulders. “I have unpacked the first trunk already. The second one I left because your preferred method of organization has always escaped me, and I thought I would spare us both the argument.”

“My preferred method of organization is that everything has a place.”

“And my preferred method is that everything ends up somewhere. We have never resolved this.” Peter moved to the wardrobe and began hanging the coat with careful efficiency. “How was the journey?”

“Long.”

“And the roads?”

“Longer.”

“And your mood?”

David turned to look at him. Peter raised both hands in the manner of a man surrendering cheerfully. The familiarity of the gesture, the particular way Peter’s left eyebrow lifted and his chin dropped, was so unchanged from boyhood that for a moment it was difficult to remember what separated them now.

He was the duke. That was what separated them. Not affection, not history, not the fact that they had once shared a blanket during a winter storm when they were nine, because neither of them would admit to being cold. The title was what separated them, the title and everything it required.

Seth had arranged himself against the doorframe again, watching the room with those unhurried hazel eyes.

“Peter,” David said, his voice coming out cooler than he had intended, “there is a brass buckle missing from the second strap of the smaller trunk. See to it.” He moved to the writing desk and picked up a letter that had been left there. “That will be all.”

The room went quiet in a way that was different from ordinary quiet. David did not look up from the letter. He heard Peter cross the room, the soft sound of the trunk being examined, and the complete absence of any further commentary.

When he did glance back, Peter was crouching over the strap, his shoulders square, his face turned away. The grin was gone.

David looked at Seth. Seth looked back at him with an expression that required no words and that David, therefore, did not invite him to put into any.

“Dinner at eight,” David said.

“As you say,” Seth replied.

***

The gentleman’s club on the edge of the nearest town was warm, well-lit, and loud in the manner of all such establishments on a Friday evening. Low ceilings made lower by tobacco smoke, a fire too large for the grate, men in various states of post-dinner ease arranged in chairs and along the bar. David had chosen it deliberately. He would need to be seen, introduced as the new duke, recognized, and assessed. Approved by the kind of men who formed opinions over brandy and held them forever. Better to begin immediately.

Seth pushed the door open and walked in as though he owned it, which was more or less how Seth walked into every room he had ever entered.

“Buxton.” A broad man near the bar raised his glass without standing. “You’ve brought someone.”

“I have brought the Duke of Halworth,” Seth said pleasantly, “So do attempt to look respectable, Carver. At least until the second round.”

Carver turned. He was red-cheeked and barrel-chested, somewhere in his early forties. He looked David over with unhurried assessment.

“Your Grace,” he said. “Last time I saw you, you were eighteen and losing badly at whist.”

“I have improved,” David said.

“Have you.” Carver’s eyes moved over his posture, his coat, the set of his jaw. “You look like you’ve swallowed a flagpole. Is that the military or the title?”

“Carver,” Seth said mildly.

“Both, I expect,” David said. Carver laughed, apparently satisfied, and turned back to the bar.

Seth steered them further into the room, and the introductions began in earnest.

Seth, beside him, was entirely in his element. He remembered names David had already forgotten, asked after wives and horses and hunting seasons with equal warmth, laughed at the right moments, and made the whole room feel easy without appearing to try. It was a gift David had never possessed and had long since stopped envying.

“You know,” said a lean, grey-haired man called Forsythe, appearing at David’s elbow with a fresh glass, “I knew your father at this very club. Good man, before—” He stopped. Cleared his throat. “Well. You know.”

“Yes,” David said. “I know.”

Forsythe nodded, looked into his glass, and moved on. David watched him go.

“Before the decline,” Seth said quietly, appearing at his shoulder. “That is what he meant. He simply could not find the diplomatic version in time.”

“I gathered.”

“He meant no harm by it.”

“I know that too.” David took a drink. The brandy was good, at least. “Is everyone here going to reference my father within the first two minutes?”

“Probably only for the first month or so,” Seth said. “After that, you will have established yourself sufficiently that they will simply reference you.” He tilted his glass. “Try to give them something more interesting to say.”

“Such as?”

“Well. Don’t swallow the flagpole quite so far. Carver wasn’t entirely wrong.”

David looked at him.

“You are standing,” Seth observed, “as though you expect someone to call the regiment to attention. We are in a gentleman’s club in rural England, not on the field at Salamanca. You are allowed to put your weight on one foot.”

“I am perfectly comfortable.”

“You have not blinked in approximately four minutes.”

“Seth.”

“I am simply noting…”

“I am aware of how I am standing.”

“And yet.” Seth smiled into his glass and said nothing further, which was somehow worse.

The evening moved on. David accepted a second brandy from a passing waiter and let the noise of the room wash over him in layers, keeping his breathing even, his expression at the calibrated setting he had developed somewhere in the third year of the war, the one that read as composed and gave nothing further away.

A man named Aldridge cornered him near the window and began explaining, at considerable length, a dispute he was having with his neighbor over a shared drainage ditch. David listened. He nodded. He said, “Quite,” at what he judged to be appropriate intervals.

“You’re very serious for a man your age,” Aldridge said, pausing mid-sentence for no apparent reason.

“I am a duke,” David said. “It is more or less required.”

“Your father wasn’t serious. Not in his younger days.” Aldridge seemed to realize this might not be the compliment he intended and adjusted course. “What I mean is, the title needn’t change a man entirely.”

“No,” David agreed. “Quite.”

Aldridge opened his mouth to continue.

He was explaining something about the precise gradient of the disputed ditch when the waiter turned too quickly behind him, an elbow caught the edge of a tray, and a heavy glass went over the edge and hit the stone floor beside the hearth.

The crack split through the noise of the room, so sudden.

The sound dropped through David like a stone through water. The room kept going around him, the firelight, the voices, Aldridge still talking at the edge of his vision, all of it continuing in perfect parallel, and David was no longer in any of it. He was on a field in grey morning light, mud and smoke and the specific weight of a man falling against him. The noise was not a glass on stone; it was something he could not name aloud, not in company, not alone, not even in the dark when it came for him in sleep.

His hand found the back of the nearest chair. His chest had stopped working properly. The fire was too bright. The voices were too close and too many and coming from every direction at once.

He did not know if he had excused himself. He moved toward the door because the door was the only fixed point in the room, and he kept his eyes on it until his hand found the handle, and then the cold air of the street hit him all at once, and the night above him was large and dark and blessedly, mercifully quiet.

He pressed his back against the stone wall of the building and breathed.

The cold helped. It always did. He fixed on it, the bite of October air at the back of the throat, the distant smell of woodsmoke, the faint damp of rain not yet arrived. He focused on his own breathing, ragged at first and then slower, and the street became street again, and the wall behind him was stone, and the sounds inside the club were just men talking.

Seth appeared beside him. He did not ask what had happened. He did not look at David directly. He simply stood in the dark, hands in his coat pockets, and began to talk.

“I heard from Ashworth that a horse sold at Tattersall’s last month for an amount so extraordinary I considered the possibility that the horse could also write Latin. Apparently, it could not, but could jump a five-bar gate, which is nearly as impressive and more immediately useful.”

There was a brief pause.

“The weather is behaving as though it has a personal grievance against this particular county. Rained all of last Tuesday. I was indoors so long I began naming the furniture.”

“Lost three shillings to the cook, which I have mentioned, but there was also a separate incident involving a misplaced boot and your grandmother’s cat that I have not yet described, and which I am saving for a moment when you most need the image.”

David’s breathing had steadied. His hands had unclenched. The street was just a street.

He pushed from the wall and straightened his coat. “The horse,” he said. His voice came out even. “Could it at least count?”

“Unclear. The seller was evasive on that particular point, which I found deeply suspicious.”

David looked up at the sky. A handful of stars had broken through the cloud above the rooftops. He looked at them a moment and then looked away.

“We should go back in,” he said.

“We should,” Seth agreed.

Neither of them acknowledged what had just happened. They walked back through the door, and the noise received them again, and David settled into his chair and picked up his glass, and Aldridge, whose drainage ditch had apparently waited patiently in his absence, resumed exactly where he had left off.

David listened. He nodded. He said, “Quite.”

But when he lifted his glass to his mouth, his eyes moved without his permission to the door across the room, the way they always did now when the walls felt close.

Chapter Two

The neighbors had been talking for forty minutes, and Honora had stopped hearing them at thirty.

Her grandmother had been buried on a Tuesday, which felt appropriate. Margaret Finch had always considered Tuesday the most practical day of the week.

“She was a good woman, your grandmother,” Mrs. Hartley said again, pressing Honora’s hands between her own damp palms. “Kept to herself, but good. You could always tell.”

“Yes,” Honora said. “Thank you, Mrs. Hartley.”

“Are you eating? You look thin.”

“I am eating well, thank you.”

“You must come to us for supper this week. I will not hear otherwise.”

“That is very kind.”

“Tuesday. Do not forget.” Mrs. Hartley moved toward the gate.

Honora managed a nod and a quiet, “Thank you.” She said the same thing to the blacksmith’s wife, to the apothecary’s daughter, to the woman she didn’t recognize at all. Each time the words felt smaller, as if the grief had already hollowed her out and left nothing but the shape of politeness behind.

Allan Green appeared at her left elbow so quietly that she almost started. He was sandy-haired and steady-eyed, a year older than her twenty-five, with the kind of face that was easy to underestimate until you noticed how much it missed nothing. He said nothing at all.

He simply stood beside her, hands in his coat pockets, and let the remaining neighbors finish their condolences and filter through the gate then down the lane until the churchyard held only the two of them and the wind moving through the bare trees at the boundary wall.

“Ready?” he said.

“No,” she said and began walking.

They made it three steps beyond the gate before he spoke again. “Mrs. Hartley invited you to supper, didn’t she?”

“Tuesday,” Honora said.

“Are you going?”

“Absolutely not.”

He gave a small huff of amusement. “She’ll consider it a slight.”

“She’ll have forgotten by Thursday. She told me I looked thin three separate times.” Honora turned her collar up against the wind. “As if I were unaware.”

“You do look thin,” Allan said.

She gave him a sideways look. He only shrugged, the gesture so familiar it almost made her smile.

“I am merely stating a fact. Have you eaten today?”

She had not. She could not recall with any certainty whether she had eaten the day before either. “That is beside the point.”

“It is precisely the point.” He said nothing further on it, which she appreciated.

The lane narrowed between the hedgerows, bare-branched and grey on either side. Ahead, the cottage came into view at the bend, small and damp-looking, the garden going to seed at its edges the way it always did by October.

Her grandmother had kept it tidy through summer and declared it beyond redemption from autumn to spring, and Honora had never once argued the point, though she had occasionally weeded in the evenings when her grandmother was not watching.

She had never told her grandmother that. She wondered now, for no particular reason, whether she had known anyway.

The cottage door stuck, as it always did. She put her shoulder to it, the way her grandmother had done, the way she had done a thousand times behind her, and it gave way with its usual reluctant groan. The smell of the room met her: lavender, old paper, coal ash, the faint trace of the rosemary her grandmother had dried and hung above the window every summer for as long as Honora could remember.

She got the door closed.

Then she sat down on the floor.

Not in a chair, not at the table. On the floor, coat still on, back against the door, and the grief that she had been holding at precise arm’s length since Tuesday morning came at her all at once, and she had absolutely nothing left to hold it with.

She was not quiet about it. She had never been a quiet weeper, and she saw no reason to perform dignity for an audience of one who had known her since she was fourteen.

Allan sat down on the floor beside her. He did not say it would be all right. He did not say her grandmother had lived a full life or that she was at peace now or any of the other things people pressed on you like coins when they did not know what else to offer. He sat on the cold flagstones in his good coat and was there, which was the only thing that actually helped.

When the worst of it had passed, she pressed her sleeve against her face and breathed. The fire had burned to almost nothing. The room was cold.

“She kept the cedar chest locked for my entire childhood,” Honora said, her voice rough. “I used to think there were jewels in it. Pirate treasure. Something extraordinary.”

“Were there?”

“Three letters, a brooch, and a piece of cloth that was once a ribbon.” She looked at the chest. “And one other thing. She pressed it into my hands three days ago. Before the end, in the last hour, she was still herself.” Honora paused. “She said, ‘This belongs to you. I should have given it sooner.’ And then she would not say another word about it.”

“She never did explain herself when she had made a decision,” Allan said.

“No. She considered explanation a form of weakness.” Honora almost smiled. Almost. “I used to find that maddening. I find it rather admirable now.”

She got to her feet, crossed to the chest, and lifted the lid. The hinges complained loudly. She reached past the brooch and the tied bundle of correspondence to the envelope at the bottom, plain, sealed, her name written on the front in a hand she did not recognize. She carried it to the table and sat.

Allan took the chair across from her and said nothing, waiting.

“I need to tell you something first,” Honora said. “Before I read this. So you understand what it means.” She set the envelope flat on the table and pressed her palm against it. “My mother left me here when I was very small. I have fragments of memory, visits, always at night, always brief. A woman in a dark cloak. A voice I could never quite hold onto afterward.” She paused. “The visits stopped when I was about seven. My grandmother told me she worked far away, that she sent money when she could. The explanations were always vague, always different.”

“You stopped believing them.”

“I was twelve when I stopped believing them.” She looked at the envelope. “And when my grandmother told me she had died, I grieved. But underneath it, I was angry. I thought she had simply decided her own life mattered more than the one she had left behind.” She paused. “I carried that for thirteen years.”

Allan was quiet. Outside, a cart passed on the lane, and the sound of it faded, and the room settled back into its silence.

Honora broke the seal.

The letter inside was covered in irregular handwriting, letters pressed hard in some places and barely touching the page in others. The hand of someone writing against time and failing strength. She unfolded it carefully and began to read aloud.

Her mother’s name had been Diana. She had been twenty-three when she wrote it.

My darling girl, I am writing this because I am dying and there is no longer any reason to protect you from the truth by keeping it from you.

Her father had been a man of rank. An earl. He had loved Diana truly and married her despite everything standing against it, and for two years, they had been genuinely, unreasonably happy. Then he had died in a riding accident that was not an accident, and everything had come apart so quickly that Diana had barely understood what was happening before it was done.

A woman connected to the family that benefited from his death had presented forged documents through a solicitor, papers claiming the earl’s entire fortune had been signed over to a neighboring estate before his death. When Diana contested them, the message arrived clearly: any further challenge would result in accusations of fraud, and her daughter would be taken.

Honora stopped, swallowed, then read on.

Diana had taken her daughter to the cottage because it was the safest place she knew. Then she had left because staying near Honora meant leading them to Honora, and she would not trade her daughter’s safety for her own need to remain close.

Every night away from you was a wound that did not close.

She had written letters that went unanswered. Sought solicitors who refused her case. Travelled, worked where she could find it, and tried for years to find a way back that would not bring danger in her wake. She had run out of time before she found one.

I know you will be angry. I am asking for your forgiveness anyway. I am certain, absolutely certain, that you grew into an extraordinary woman. The stubbornness was already there at two years old. I suspected then it would carry you through anything. It is time for you to know the truth, your real father’s name is Thomas Hale.

At the end of the letter, Diana named the family. The Skeffington family. The Dukes of Halworth. She believed the proof of what had been done still existed somewhere inside that household, buried but not destroyed. A crime was recorded, as crimes often were, because the people who committed them never quite believed they would be found.

Look for it, my darling. You were always brave enough.

Honora set the letter down.

The cottage was very still. Outside, the wind moved through the hedgerow in a low, continuous sound that was nothing like comfort.

“She did not leave me,” Honora said. Her voice came out smaller than she had intended. “She spent years running and fighting and trying to find a way back, and I spent fifteen years telling myself she had not cared enough to stay.” She pressed her fingers flat on the table. “And my grandmother sat across from me every time I said something bitter about her and said nothing. Because the only way to keep me safe was to let me think the worst.”

“Honora,” Allan said quietly.

“She carried that for twenty years.” The crack in her voice was audible now, and she did not try to smooth it. “Every time I was resentful, or dismissive, or said I did not care. She just sat there and let me think it.”

Allan reached across the table and took both her hands. His thumb moved steadily across her knuckles, back and forth, patient and unhurried. “She protected you,” he said. “Both of them did. The only way they knew how.”

Honora looked at their joined hands. “I know,” she said. “That is what makes it worse, in a way. It is very difficult to be angry at someone for loving you too carefully.”

“You are allowed to feel both,” Allan said. “The grief and the anger. They are not contradictions.”

She looked at him. “When did you become so wise?”

“I have always been wise. You have simply never been in the right state to notice.”

She let out something that was almost a laugh, which surprised her. The sound of it surprised them both. Allan’s expression did not change exactly, but something in it settled, quietly relieved.

Honora looked at the letter. The tears came differently this time, quieter than the weeping at the door, the grief of a story she had carried for most of her life coming apart in her hands, and the strange, aching tenderness of forgiving two women who were no longer there to receive it.

When it had passed, she straightened. Her spine found its line. Shoulders back, Honora. Head up. We come from better than this, even if it does not always look like it.

She understood that sentence entirely differently now.

“I am going to find this house,” she said. “I am going to get inside it and find whatever proof still exists.” She met his eyes. “I am not asking your permission.”

Allan was quiet for a beat. “And how, precisely, do you plan to get inside a duke’s estate?”

“A position. Something that places me in the household without raising questions.”

“Such as?”

“A maid, a companion. I don’t know. I guess I’ll figure it out.” She folded her hands on the table. “Someone who needs attending and who the family would not look at twice.”

Allan stared at her with the expression of a man arriving at a conclusion he deeply did not want. “You want to take a position under a false name in the household of the family that destroyed your parents.”

“Yes.”

“You think this is a reasonable plan.”

“I think it is the only plan.” She held his gaze. “I have no money for a solicitor. No connections who would take this to court. No proof beyond a dying woman’s letter that any lawyer would dismiss in five minutes. What I have is a face no one in that house has ever seen, and the ability to keep my mouth closed when it matters.” A pause. “And I have you.”

Allan let out a long breath through his nose. “That,” he said, “is an exceptionally unfair thing to say.”

“I know.”

“You are using my good nature against me.”

“Deliberately,” she agreed. “Is it working?”

He looked at the ceiling. Then at his hands. Then back at her. He stood, picked up both their empty cups, and crossed to the cold kettle. “I am making tea,” he said. “And then you are going to tell me every detail of this plan, and I am going to tell you every way it could destroy you completely, and then we are going to argue about it for at least an hour.”

“That seems fair.”

“It is not fair at all. Nothing about this is fair.” He set the kettle over the rekindled fire and turned to look at her, his expression caught somewhere between exasperation and something warmer. “She was right, you know.”

Honora looked up.

“Your mother.” He turned back to the kettle. “About you.”

Honora looked down at the letter in her hands and said nothing. Her grandmother had always told her that the truest things rarely needed answering.