Page 25 of Bride of the Fae Duke

‘Go ahead, then,’ Locke said sharply, the couch creaking as he rose from its pillows. ‘Restore the place however you see fit.’

By the time she’d lifted her head from the desk to ask if he was joking, he’d already vanished, slamming the bedroom door behind his hard-set shoulders.

Chapter 9

‘Seewhatadifferencethat makes?’ Mrs. Hartnell triumphantly exclaimed, gesticulating at the large antique mirror held against the wall of the drawing room by two tall footmen. ‘Lights up the whole room – and it will do so even in the middle of winter, I can promise you that.’

It did make a difference, indeed. Enough to transform the room from gloomy and dark into something one could almost call cheerful – the silver surface reflected every glimpse of sunlight filtering in through the high windows and scattered it across the mismatched chairs, the empty bookshelves, the dark wallpaper where paintings should have hung.

Nellie nodded to the footmen, who promptly lowered the mirror again, and said, ‘Then why was it ever removed from this spot?’

‘Oh.’ Mrs. Hartnell’s triumph abated at once. ‘Lady Jeanne brought this particular mirror with her when she moved into the townhouse – an heirloom. Then after the duke remarried …’

‘Lady Alis preferred not to have it around and had it sent up to the attic?’ Nellie finished wryly.

‘Yes.’ Mrs. Hartnell permitted herself a watery smile. ‘Yes, I suppose it’s becoming predictable.’

The attic, Nellie had learned the previous day, was stocked with enough furniture, decorations, and other odds and ends to fill five separate households – the result of duchess after duchess banning her predecessor’s possessions upon arrival, then dying before they could finish their own furnishing of the home. There were crates of books, piles of paintings and drawings, marble busts from Lady Colette’s theatre days, and Issian blown glass from Lady Alis’s travels. The space as a whole was a macabre treasury, smelling of oblivion; Nellie was as loath to spend time in it as the servants seemed to be, never sticking around for longer than the few minutes it took to pick some promising items from the mess.

Only Anne seemed perfectly happy to spend hours upon hours between the towering stacks, peeling off wrappings and rummaging through trunks, pilfering fluffy velvet pillows and painted landscapes and dramatic silver candelabras for her own room.

‘Let’s keep the mirror, then,’ Nellie firmly decided. ‘If it’s an heirloom of Lady Jeanne, it doesn’t deserve to be stacked away in the attic. And then we should fill those shelves again – they’re just gathering dust like this. Some books, perhaps?’

‘We have Lady Isaure’s volumes on botany,’ Mrs. Hartnell offered, gesturing at the footmen to find the crates in question. They promptly hurried out of the room. ‘And of course, Lady Blanche read a lot, although I’m not sure thosenovelswould be at all suitable to display in one’s drawing room …’

‘Let’s not,’ Nellie said with a grimace, remembering Lady Eyestone’s outrage on the topic. ‘Do you know whether Lord Locke himself has any reading preferences?’

‘Oh.’ Mrs. Hartnell blew out her cheeks. ‘Well, he used to read all the grand Elidian literature, of course. And the great playwrights, Stoke and Merland – but I admit I haven’t seen him hold a playbook since … well, not for years, but I couldn’t tell you …’

‘Since Lady Colette died?’ Nellie suggested.

A short and uncharacteristic silence fell, broken only by the thuds and thumps of the servants rummaging through the crates piled up in the hallway. Mrs. Hartnell blinked. And blinked again. Then she dazedly sank into the nearest armchair, perfectly manicured hand slowly rising to her ample bosom.

‘Good gracious,’ she said, sounding shocked and embarrassed in equal amounts. ‘Good gracious, Lady Locke – you may be right.’

‘We found a whole pile of charcoal sketches this afternoon,’ Nellie panted as she fell down on Locke’s bed for her fifteen minutes of rest, still dizzy from the force of the climax that had just washed over her. ‘In one of the attic crates. Very pretty work, really.’

On the other side of the room, her husband was buttoning up – shoving his armour back into place like he did every single night, his chiselled face hidden behind a veil of blue-black hair. The scales on his forearms glimmered in mesmerising ways in the candlelight. Nellie couldn’t help studying them attentively as she curled up on his blankets in nothing but her shift, well-aware that she would not be granted more than these few minutes to take in the sight of him and feeling unreasonably cross about the fact.

‘Did you?’ he curtly said, moving from his breeches to the shirt buttons she’d torn open in the process of this night’s work.

‘Mm-hmm,’ she said, and when that did not elicit any reaction, she pointedly added, ‘They were very pretty.’

His voice didn’t mellow. ‘Isaure was an excellent artist.’

‘Oh, I love her work,’ Nellie admitted, which was true. She had dedicated an entire salon to the duchess’s flower drawings. ‘But these didn’t look like her style. Landscapes. The city mills. A view of the marshes. That sort of thing.’

Locke’s fingers had stiffened.

‘They were signed withO.L.,’ she added sweetly, observing the slope of his shoulders.

A single frozen moment was the only confirmation she was given – but itwasa moment, proof that those stunning, gloomy drawings had not been created by some distant cousin or forefather sharing the same initials. Considering the place where she’d found them, stashed away in a yellowed folder at the bottom of a trunk, she hadn’t dared to be sure.

‘Have you drawn anything in the last few years?’ she asked, prodding despite his hardening exterior. It felt like testing a newly formed layer of ice on the canals in winter – putting more and more weight on the slippery surface, waiting for the inevitable crack. ‘I couldn’t find any more recent work.’

‘I would prefer not to talk about this,’ he bit out, snatching his coat from the floor without looking her in the eyes.

‘Well, all the better,’ Nellie said, unfazed. ‘You ought to think of me as a little nuisance you can’t wait to be rid of. I assume you quit drawing, then?’

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