I Discovered the Duke Was an Impostor — And Became His Accomplice

Part 1

The floorboards of the archive room were freezing, but the cold wasn’t what made my jaw tremble.

It was the impossible weight of the brittle paper in my hand.

For ten years, a man had been wearing his dead brother’s coats, signing his name, and spending his money.

The archive room smelled of rotting binding glue and cold stone.

It was a sour, flat odor that settled in the back of my throat the moment I unlatched the heavy oak door every morning.

It was November, and the damp of the countryside crawled into the masonry and bled through the soles of my boots.

I rubbed my hands together, but the friction did nothing.

My knuckles were raw, the skin split in tiny, painful fissures around my cuticles.

A smear of iron gall ink stained my right index finger, dried into the fine lines of my skin like a tattoo.

I blew on my hands, watching the pale fog of my breath dissipate against the looming shadows of the shelves.

I hated this room.

I hated the ledgers.

And most acutely, I hated the man sitting two floors above me.

He had hired me three months ago to catalog the estate’s sprawling, neglected history.

A simple task for a woman of your particular desperation, he had said during my interview.

His voice had been low, gravelly, lacking the refined drawl of the peers I used to know before my father’s debts had stripped me of my station.

He was a massive, quiet man who moved with a heavy, deliberate caution.

He didn’t look like an aristocrat at all.

He looked like a man who worked with his hands.

I pulled the next ledger from the shelf.

It was heavy, excessively so.

When I set it down on my slanted wooden desk, a plume of gray dust billowed up, coating my eyelashes.

I opened the cover, listening to the stiff, cracking protest of the spine.

The pages were thick, curling at the edges, filled with the cramped, sloping handwriting of the previous steward.

I turned a page, my frozen fingers incredibly clumsy.

I paused.

The back cover of the ledger was unusually thick.

It wasn’t just leather over board.

There was a slight bulge near the seam.

I ran my thumb over it, realizing the texture was entirely wrong.

The leather was slit, a deliberate, razor-thin incision, barely visible beneath a century of grime.

I shouldn’t touch it.

My job was to index, not to pry.

But my feet were numb, my stomach was empty, and the sheer boredom of the room felt like a physical pressure against my skull.

I slipped my thumbnail into the slit.

The leather yielded easily.

I worked my finger down, widening the gap, my heart doing a strange, slow thump against my ribs.

Something was hidden inside.

It was paper, folded tightly.

I pinched the edge and pulled.

It was a letter sealed with black wax.

The wax had been cracked, meaning whoever hid it here had already read it.

I unfolded the stiff parchment, holding it up to the weak, sputtering light of my single oil lamp.

The handwriting was jagged and frantic.

It was dated June 19th, 1815.

“To my father,” the letter began.

I frowned, tracing the lines of ink.

The signature at the bottom wasn’t the current master’s name.

It was signed Brian.

I read the first line, then the second.

The air in the room seemed to thin completely.

The cold stone beneath my feet vanished.

A sharp metallic taste flooded my mouth like pennies and old blood.

“Craig is dead.

He took a musket ball to the chest in the late afternoon.

I was with him.

He bled out in the mud.

Father, I know I am the bastard.

I know I have no right to the name, but the estate will fall to the crown and the tenants will starve.

I look enough like him.

I have his ring.

I am wearing his coat.

When I return to England, I will not be Brian.

I will be him.

May God forgive me.”

I stared at the ink as it blurred before my eyes.

Craig was dead.

The man sitting upstairs, the man who had bought my debts and forced me into this freezing cellar, was a total fraud.

He was a bastard brother playing dress-up in a dead man’s life.

Every contract he signed was a forgery.

Every penny he spent was stolen.

A high, thin ringing started in my ears.

The shock didn’t feel like a sudden revelation.

It felt like being poisoned.

My stomach pitched violently.

I tried to stand, my chair scraping loudly against the floor.

I needed air.

I needed to leave this house immediately.

But my legs wouldn’t lock into place.

The blood drained from my head with terrifying speed, leaving my vision swimming with black spots.

I reached for the edge of the desk.

My slick, sweaty fingers missed the wood completely.

The lamp flared in my peripheral vision.

The stone floor rushed up to meet me.

I didn’t feel the impact.

I only felt the letter still crumpled tightly in my fist as the dark swallowed me whole.

Consciousness didn’t return gently.

It crashed into me, bringing with it a sickening wave of nausea.

I kept my eyes closed, fighting the urge to empty my stomach.

The floor beneath me was hard and freezing.

I could smell old wax, damp wool, and something else entirely out of place.

I groaned a pathetic, scraped-out sound and managed to peel one eye open.

The light was aggressively dim, yet it burned my retinas.

A massive shape loomed beside me.

The memory of the last ten minutes slammed into my brain like a physical blow.

The ledger, the slit leather, the black wax.

Craig is dead.

My breath caught in my throat.

I pushed myself backward, scrambling away from him.

My palms slipped on the dusty stone.

My back hit the bottom shelf of a bookcase with a hard thud.

I pulled my knees to my chest, my chest heaving as I stared at the man crouching a few feet away.

He wasn’t moving to help me anymore.

He was just watching me.

He was kneeling in the dirt, entirely ruining the line of his immaculate trousers.

His shirt collar was open, his cravat loosened.

In the stark, underlit shadows of the lamp, the harsh angles of his face looked less refined and incredibly dangerous.

Where is it?

My voice sounded like grinding stones.

I looked at my empty hands, frantically rubbing my thumbs over my palms as if the paper might miraculously reappear.

He didn’t point.

He just shifted his gaze slightly toward the desk.

I looked up.

The letter sat there, unburned and unhidden.

I stared at the man who had the power to ruin me, and realized he was at my absolute mercy.