Page 4 of I Never Forget a Duke (The Night Fire Club #1)

He nodded slowly. “Would it be inappropriate to tell you I find you very pretty?”

She laughed softly and bowed her head. “I don’t know if it’s appropriate, but I liked hearing it. And you are quite handsome, my lord.”

That felt encouraging. He smiled at her, his dizziness forgotten. “You live here with just the countess and her staff, so I assume you are not married. How can that be?”

She shot him a startled look that he couldn’t quite interpret.

“Oh,” he said. “I apologize. Was that a rude question?”

“No. Well, yes, the question was a bit forward. I imagine had we met at a ball, you would have asked in a more delicate way.”

“I was merely wondering, because you are pretty and compassionate, how it could be that you do not have a husband.”

She sighed. “Well, if you must know, I was betrothed to a man whom I loved very much, but he died two weeks before the wedding.”

That took him aback. “My deepest condolences. What happened? No, that is also too forward. I merely wish to inquire—”

“It is all right. He was sick. He never told me.” Her voice sounded a little watery.

She blinked a few times and shrugged it off.

“Well, anyway. He became very ill about a month before the wedding, The doctor didn’t know what was causing it, but suspected it was a weak heart.

He’d been sickly as a child, but had never mentioned it to me.

He may have thought he was healthy. But I wish he would have warned me. I could have prepared myself.”

This was clearly something that still sat with her. He wanted to comfort her, but something told him touching her would be inappropriate. But then he did it anyway, touching her arm lightly. “You must miss him.”

“I do sometimes. However, the point of this story is that I mourned him and stayed away from society for a while, and by the time I returned for a Season, there was a new crop of debutantes who were younger and prettier than me and no man of quality even looked in my direction. So now that I am on the shelf, I take care of gentlewomen in their dotage.”

That seemed puzzling. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he understood that this was how things were done, but still he said, “So if you get to whatever advanced age you’ve arrived at… which is…?”

“Six and twenty.”

“That is not even… that is, can it be true that women reach a certain age, and they are just… out of chances?”

“I am not out of chances. Life is just going in a different direction than I expected. I am setting aside funds so that I might purchase a home for myself. Then who knows? I may write or paint or garden. I imagine I will find things to fill my day.”

“Do you not want a family?”

She looked wistfully toward a row of flowers in the garden. He took that to mean she did want a family. She let out a long sigh. “I love children. I always enjoy when the earl brings his family to visit the countess. But this is the hand I was dealt.”

“It seems unfair.”

“Maybe it is, but at this point, I believe I must make my own happiness.”

“Are you happy here?”

She made that startled face again and clasped her hands together. “My, you ask a great many questions.”

“I know… nothing. Well, that is not true. I know some things. I have this vague recollection of the rhythms of conversation. I suspect that if we were a couple courting that you’d also pepper me with questions so that we might get to know each other.

But I cannot tell you much about myself.

Or about conversational niceties like the weather. ”

“You seem to remember quite a bit. When I spoke with Doctor Willis about your condition, he said that some memory loss patients forget how to walk or how to speak. You seem to have merely lost your long-term memory, and it is quite possible it will return to you in due course once you have fully recovered from your head injury.”

“Or I will be forever lost.”

She patted his knee. “In that case, you will make new memories. Your life is not over.”

“Yours is not either.”

She frowned at that. “Perhaps not, but you are of an age when most men marry. Perhaps you will find a new occupation and you will marry and start a family.”

He wanted to ask why it would have been impossible to start a family with her, but they’d barely just met, and he could tell the question would be unwelcome. Instead, he said, “You didn’t answer my question.”

“Which question?”

“Are you happy here?”

“Most days,” she said. “Do you feel better, my lord? We could go look at that mirror now.”

“Yes, all right.”

He understood that she was putting him off, likely to avoid having to answer more questions, so he’d stop asking her things for now. But he sensed that she was actually deeply unhappy with her situation.

She helped him up, and as they walked slowly back inside, she said, “Some women would be happy to escape the trap of matrimony. It gives them the freedom to pursue their own interests and own property for themselves. What they possess is theirs, not their husband’s.”

“Yes, I am sure that is true.” And it was likely that owning things for herself and pursuing her own interests were things Adele valued, but he still did not believe she relished in spending the rest of her life without a husband or children.

Of course, he had no right to contemplate such things or to barge into her life in the way he had.

He had no right to judge her choices or desires.

And yet this mix of yearning for something more than what she had and resigning herself to her fate intrigued him.

Wilton, the butler, greeted them at the door. “If I may,” he said, “the countess suggested we purchase another suit of clothes for Mr. Smith.”

“Mr. Smith?” Adele asked.

Wilton smiled. “Apologies. That is what I have taken to calling our guest when speaking with the countess.”

Smith. He tried on the name but wasn’t sure it fit. Still, it was a thing to call himself, an identity to cling to, and yet it was perfectly benign and anonymous. “Mr. Smith it is,” he said.

“Very well. I took the liberty of measuring the clothing you arrived in and sending those measurements to a tailor I know on Savile Row.”

“Is something wrong with the clothing I arrived in?” Smith—for he supposed that was his name now—asked.

“No, not at all. But they are evening clothes, as if you came from a ball or dinner party. We need something more appropriate for day.”

“I hate to put you to that expense.”

Wilton shook his head. “Not at all. The countess authorized it.”

“Perhaps I should meet this countess.”

Adele nodded. “Yes, I will take you to visit her when she is feeling a little better.” She turned to Wilton. “Mr. Smith has requested to see a mirror, so I was going to take him to the gold salon.”

Wilton opened his mouth, perhaps to ask a question, but then snapped his jaw shut. He nodded. “Very good, my lady.”

Adele led him down a hallway to a room that seemed to be set up for people to sit and converse.

It was indeed gold—gold curtains, gold in the wallpaper, gold thread in the upholstery on the chairs and sofas.

There was a huge, gold-framed mirror over the fireplace.

It seemed opulent at first glance, but on closer inspection, the room was well-worn.

The curtains were slightly discolored in places, the wallpaper was peeling near the ceiling, the upholstery was threadbare, and the mirror’s frame was tarnished near the bottom.

Smith’s mind whirred as he tried to process this with what he knew so far.

A countess, but a poor one, perhaps, or one whose fortunes had greatly diminished in recent years.

Why had she spent money on a suit of clothes for him? He put that away to revisit later.

For here was the moment of truth. Smith walked up to the mirror and gazed at himself.

The man looking back was familiar, but again, it was like a heavy gray curtain hung between his conscious mind and his recollections. He knew this man, but not well enough to say who he was or how he came to be in this house.

Then he had a flash: a man with graying hair saying, “You have your mother’s eyes.

” He could picture a woman with dark hair and eyes very much like the ones looking back at him now.

She was strict, he knew, and opinionated, but also loving.

She was his mother. He knew that on an elemental level.

Just as he knew the man with graying hair was his father.

And they each put all their hopes in him.

“I have parents but no siblings,” he said aloud. “I spent a lot of time with my mother when I was a boy, but not all of my time.”

“You likely had a nanny and a governess.”

A woman with stern eyebrows speaking to him in Latin popped into his mind.

“Yes, I had a governess, until I was old enough to go away to school. The school I went to did not require a uniform, but the headmaster did not allow anything eccentric, and we were required to wear a neckcloth.” He touched his neck.

“Which I do not appear to be wearing now.”

“That sounds like Eton,” Adele said. “Which, incidentally, supports my hypothesis that you are a lord of some sort. Many of the best families in England send their boys to Eton.”

“I had friends there. I can picture their faces but not recall their names.”

Adele walked over to one side of the room and gestured toward a painting.

“I do not know if you would have crossed paths with the Sweeneys, but this is a portrait of the countess with her late husband and her two sons. I believe the present earl is around your age, or maybe a little older, so perhaps you would not have crossed paths with him when you were children.”

Smith looked at the painting. No one in it was familiar to him. “Is it a good likeness?”

“I believe so. That is, I did not know the Sweeneys well until I came to work for the countess a year ago, but I imagine that’s what they all would have looked like twenty years ago.”

“I do not think I knew them.”

“Worth a try.”

Smith nodded. He looked back at his reflection and studied it for a long moment. Those little flashes from his childhood had felt like the beginning of something, but now the gray curtain was back.

“I’m feeling quite tired,” he said, rubbing his chin. He wished these whiskers were not there. He found the shadow on his face disagreeable.

Adele appeared at his side. “You should get some rest. Do you know the way back to your room?”

“If you could get me as far as the stairs, I know the rest of the way.”

“Of course. Follow me.”