Page 172 of The Wallflower Takes All

Gabriel sat because remaining upright had begun to feel less like resolve than stubbornness.

His father sat more slowly.

Gabriel glanced at him. “You know why we have been summoned.”

His father’s hand rested on the head of his cane. “I know only that Wetherby’s letter mentioned your mother’s family.”

“My mother’s family?” Gabriel repeated.

“Ashburns. Martens. Old names, mostly dead ones.” His father’s mouth tightened. “Your mother rarely spoke them willingly.”

“I shall be direct,” Mr. Wetherby said, interrupting them. “The Duke of Alderbury died four days ago.”

Gabriel waited.

Alderbury was an old dukedom, rich with prestige and wealth, belonging to a world that had never seemed remotely connected to Gabriel’s own. He knew the name in the way a solicitor knew the names of powerful families whose properties, alliances, and disputes shaped portions of the country in which he lived.

“I am sorry to hear it,” Gabriel said carefully. “But I fail to understand why the matter concerns us.”

Mr. Wetherby opened the portfolio and removed several documents. “Because His Grace died without surviving issue, and with the death of Lord Meryton last year, the nearer collateral branch failed as well.”

Gabriel looked from the papers to Wetherby. “I still do not see?—”

“No,” his father said quietly. “Not yet.”

Gabriel turned to him.

His father’s face had changed, and what moved through it was not fear precisely. It looked closer to memory.

Mr. Wetherby adjusted his spectacles. “The original letters patent creating the dukedom were issued in the reign of Charles II. They contain a special remainder.”

Gabriel’s attention sharpened despite everything.

As a legal construction, he understood the phrase at once. A title need not always descend in the ordinary fashion if the instrument creating it directed otherwise. Rare, but not unheard of. Unusual enough to draw comment. Significant enough to alter lives.

Mr. Wetherby placed a copy before him. “The first Duke of Alderbury had no surviving son. The patent therefore provided that, should the direct male line and specified collateral branches fail, the title might pass through the senior line descended from the first duke’s eldest daughter.”

Gabriel looked at the document.

The words were there. Formal, precise, merciless in their implications.

“The senior line,” Wetherby continued, “continued through the Ashburn branch, then through the Marten family, and eventually through Lady Anne.”

The name struck harder than the title had.

Anne?

His mother.

For a moment, the room seemed to recede. Gabriel saw not a name in ink, but a woman seated near a nursery fire, light hair pinned simply, laughing because he had tried to argue that bedtime could not be legally enforced without mutual assent. He remembered her hand on his brow when he was feverish. Her voice reading to him. The scent of lavender on her sleeve. The emptiness that had followed when she died and no argument, law, or good behavior could bring her back.

His mother had not belonged to documents.

Yet here she was, placed in a line of descent he had never understood as anything more than family history.

Wetherby’s voice lowered, perhaps out of respect. “As Lady Anne is deceased, the right passes to her eldest and only surviving son.”

Gabriel looked up. “No,” he said, shaking his head.