Page 173 of The Wallflower Takes All

Mr. Wetherby did not flinch. “Yes.”

“My father is alive.”

“Your father’s life has no bearing upon the descent. The title passes through your mother’s bloodline, not the Ashby line.”

Gabriel understood the explanation first with a solicitor’s mind, recognizing its correctness, its logic, and its terrible inevitability. A moment later, he felt the full force of it, and his life shifted beneath him.

Mr. Wetherby folded his hands. “Mr. Gabriel Ashby, you are, by law, the Duke of Alderbury.”

Silence settled over the office.

Gabriel looked at his father, expecting some dry remark. Some wry observation about dukedoms being an inconvenient addition to an already crowded afternoon.

None came.

His father stared at the papers with a stunned sheen in his eyes.

“Father?”

“She knew it was possible,” his father said softly.

Gabriel’s chest tightened. “Mother?”

“Yes.” His father drew a slow breath. “Possible in the way storms are possible on a clear summer day. Theoretically. Distantly. Not something to live by. Or expect.”

Wetherby inclined his head. “Lady Anne’s position in the line was recorded, though few expected the matter to become practical. The late duke’s death and the failure of nearer claims have altered that.”

Gabriel looked back at Wetherby. “There is no competing claimant?”

“None with superior right. We have examined the line thoroughly. There are minor matters to be addressed, formal recognitions to obtain, but the substance is clear.”

The substance.

A laugh rose in Gabriel’s chest, then died before it could escape. The matter was far too serious for disbelief.

“What…property is attached?” he asked, because when sense failed, practical questions remained.

Mr. Wetherby took up another paper. “Alderbury Court in Lincolnshire. The London town house in Grosvenor Square. Land in Surrey. Holdings in Yorkshire. Several smaller properties. The revenues are considerable.”

Considerable.

Gabriel, who had spent yesterday calculating whether Poppy might endure a dismal cottage with tolerable drainage, now apparently possessed enough roofs to require a list of their own.

His father made a sound that might have been a laugh if it had contained less emotion. “Well.”

Gabriel looked at him.

His father removed his spectacles and pressed his fingers to his eyes. “Your mother refused to have you raised in expectation of this. She said a man ought to know who he was before anyone told him what he might inherit.”

Gabriel could not speak for a moment. He had resented aristocratic ease for years. He had mistrusted titles, despised the casual entitlement of men shielded by inherited consequence, and built his own life around order, work, and use. He had planned, if he married at all, to marry sensibly. A respectable woman. A manageable household. A life whose limits he understood.

Now the world informed him he had inherited precisely the sort of rank he had thought Poppy needed.

The irony would have been amusing if it had not been so enormous.

Poppy.

Her name moved through him, clearing the confusion.