Fool Me Twice by Meredith Duran

“Lately I’ll tell you what our duties have been: to duck a bottle or a shoe, or cringe away and hide downstairs, and ignore the awful noises he makes. Don’t pretend at bravery you haven’t got, for I’ve not seen you venturing upstairs to check on him. It was Mrs. Johnson who did that today, so I heard.”
    Jones looked at her. Olivia shrugged. “He was making a dreadful ruckus, and I feared . . .”
    All at once, Jones crumpled in his seat. “I have failed him.”
    “Oh, no! Here now,” Cook chided, and began to pound his back again. “Nobody meant to say that. My point was only that Mrs. Johnson might be the fresh blood we need. Now, now, you dear man, don’t cry now, there’s a good ’un . . .”
    Jones batted away Cook’s proffered handkerchief, then fumbled for his own and scrubbed his eyes. This done, he took tight hold of the bridge of his nose, drawing rough, loud, unsteady breaths that caused the rest of them to exchange looks of concern.
    After a very uncomfortable minute, he finally dropped his hand. “Very well,” he said. “For the sake of His Grace, my dear master, I will do a very difficult thing: I will ignore his wishes on the subject of Mrs. Johnson. Ma’am, you may remain here for the time being.”
    “Thank you.” Naturally, Olivia would not have confessed the news of her firing had Jones not seemed to be one of those lovely sorts who could be talked into, or out of, anything. But it was good to know that the next time Marwick sacked her, she’d not need to conceal it.
    She retired to bed feeling very satisfied. It was only as the fire began to die down, and she cast a look about for the newspaper she’d vowed to use for kindling, that she realized she had lost it somewhere.
    In the last moment of wakefulness, she had a vision of it, abandoned on a bookcase outside Marwick’s bedroom.
    *  *  *
    “How curious.” Baffled, Olivia halted in the doorway to the duke’s sitting room. Overnight, one of the bookcaseshad disappeared. The other lay toppled on its side. She tilted her head for a different view, but it brought no clarity. “Could he have moved the other one himself?”
    “No chance,” said Bradley, who was hanging back by several feet—which made him at least five feet braver than Fenton, who stood all the way out in the hall. “It’s a heavy beast. Took both of us to budge it.”
    “Well, we must ask him—”
    “Ma’am.” Bradley fixed her with a plaintive, hangdog look. “Don’t make us go in there.”
    “Do you take note of the state of the bookcase?” Fenton called from the corridor. “The shelves are broken, ma’am.”
    She looked back at it, startled. Fenton was right. But those shelves were solid oak, two inches thick. “You can’t mean . . .” How on earth would Marwick have split them? Was he hiding an axe in his room?
    She pondered the scene. Something was nagging at her—a feeling that she was missing something important. “Well, I suppose—” She looked over her shoulder and found that the footmen had fled once again. Sighing, she stepped into the hall. They had taken some cunning escape route, for the staircase, too, was empty.
    It grew very tiring, rounding up cowards. She would deal with them later. Squaring her shoulders, she marched back into the duke’s apartments and rapped smartly on his bedroom door—which yielded beneath her knuckles, creaking open.
    He hadn’t locked it.
    He hadn’t even latched it.
    A chill crawled down her spine. He hadn’t drawn the curtains, either. Through the inch-wide crack, she could see daylight pooling on a patch of carpet.
    But surely this was good news. Taking a deep breath, she stepped through the doorway. “Your Grace . . .”
    The scene imprinted itself in an instant, complete and terrifying:
    He sat against the wall beneath the window, his forehead laid atop his bent knees. The sunlight gilded his hair as gold as a coin; it illuminated the dust motes floating about him. And