Five years after cruelly casting out his wife in disgrace, the Duke of Sliff saw her across the ballroom—with a boy who had his eyes and family birthmark, clutching a wooden horse carved by another man he called “Papa.”

 PART 7

It took Hollis eleven days to find Sarah Comb. She was working now as a lady’s maid to a baronet’s wife in Bath. Leof traveled there himself rather than trust so delicate a conversation to correspondence.

He found her in a small parlor off the servants’ hall. A woman perhaps thirty now, careworn but sharp-eyed, who went pale at the sight of him and did not need to be told why a duke had come so far to speak with her.

“I wondered if this day would come,” she said, before he had even finished introducing himself. “I have thought of little else for five years, Your Grace. And told myself each year that surely by now it no longer mattered. And each year discovered I was wrong.”

“Tell me what you know,” Leof said. “And I promise you — nothing you say will bring harm upon you. I am not here to punish a servant who did as she was told. I am here to learn who did the telling.”

Sarah’s hands twisted in her apron. For a long moment Leof thought she might refuse him after all. Might have learned in five years of careful silence to protect herself above all other considerations. Then something in her seemed to give way. Some dam long straining against its own weight.

“Mr. Vain came to me the week before the accusation was laid against the Duchess,” she said. “He told me he had reason to believe correspondence was passing between the Duchess and a gentleman not her husband. And that it was my duty, as a loyal servant of the house, to bring him any letter she gave me to post before it left my hands.”

She paused, her composure faltering.

“I did not believe there was any such gentleman, Your Grace. I had been the Duchess’s own maid since her wedding day. I knew her heart better than any soul alive, save yourself. And I told Mr. Vain so plainly. He told me that if I did not cooperate, he would see to it I was dismissed without character. And my mother being ill and dependent upon my wages — I —”

She stopped, her voice breaking.

“I am not proud of what I did, Your Grace. I gave him two of the letters the Duchess entrusted to me for the post — the first two she wrote, before I was found out. I do not know what became of them after they left my hand. I only know they never reached you. Because within two months I was dismissed regardless, on some manufactured complaint of Mrs. Pettis’s, that I have always believed was arranged to silence me before I could think better of my bargain. I was gone from the house before the Duchess wrote again.”

“Did you see the letter shown to me? The one purportedly in the Duchess’s hand, addressed to a man called Pellinger?”

“I saw Mr. Vain’s own secretary copying something in a careful hand at his desk some weeks before the accusation was made, Your Grace. Though I did not think anything of it at the time. A secretary copying correspondence is no unusual sight. I have wondered since whether that was the hand that wrote the false letter. Practiced from samples of the Duchess’s true hand that I myself had unknowingly delivered into Mr. Vain’s keeping.”

It was enough. It was not, Leof understood grimly, quite enough to satisfy a court of law, should matters ever come to such an extremity. But it was more than enough to satisfy his own certainty. And he thought, riding back toward London with Sarah Comb’s sworn and witnessed account folded carefully in his breast pocket, that he had never in his life wanted so badly to confront a man. And never so badly needed to master that want. Because a confrontation born of fury would accomplish nothing that a confrontation born of proof could not accomplish better.

He did not go to Silas first. He went instead to Marfleet House. And found Lady Marfleet this time willing to admit him beyond the morning room, into a small sitting room where Isolt sat with Beatrice curled against her, reading from a slim, well-worn book of fairy stories. Edmund was sprawled on the carpet with a set of wooden soldiers arranged in some private campaign only he understood.

Isolt looked up. He watched her school her face carefully. Though not quickly enough to hide the flicker of hope that crossed it before caution reasserted itself.

“I did not expect you so soon,” she said.

“I have proof.” Leof drew the folded papers from his coat and laid them on the small table between them. Not handing them directly to her. Understanding somehow, without being told, that she would want the choice of picking them up herself, in her own time, rather than having them pressed into her hands.

“A sworn account from your former maid, Sarah Comb. Describing how my cousin coerced her into surrendering two of the letters you sent me. And how he arranged, we believe, for a forged letter to be written in imitation of your hand. It is not everything. I have not yet found proof of the veiled woman’s identity. Nor absolute proof that Silas himself commissioned the forgery, rather than some agent acting on his behalf. But it is enough, I think, to show you that I did not simply choose to believe the worst of you on a whim, Isolt. I was given a very careful, very deliberate lie. Built by a man with everything to gain from our ruin. And I was fool enough not to look past it.”

Isolt read the account slowly. Her face unreadable. When she finished, she sat for a long moment with the paper in her lap, saying nothing. Beatrice looked up at her with the wordless concern children carry for their mother’s silences.

“I believed for five years,” she said finally, very quietly, “that you simply did not love me enough to ask me a single question before condemning me. That is a different grief than believing you were deceived, Your Grace. I do not yet know which grief is easier to set down.”

“I do not ask you to set either one down today,” he said. “I ask only that you let me continue proving it. Until you have every reason in the world to believe me, and none left to doubt.”

Edmund had abandoned his soldiers and come to stand at Leof’s knee. Regarding the papers on the table with a child’s incomprehension of their weight. After a moment he held up one small wooden soldier, offering it with the unthinking generosity of a very young boy who has decided, for reasons entirely his own, that the tall, solemn man deserves a gift.

“You may have the captain,” Edmund said. “He is the bravest one.”

Leof’s throat closed entirely. He took the small wooden figure with a care that made Lady Marfleet, watching from the doorway, press a handkerchief briefly to her own eyes. He crouched down to Edmund’s level, as he had at the ball, and said with a gravity he had not used to address anyone in five years: “Thank you. I will keep him safe.”

“He fights dragons,” Edmund informed him.

“Then he is exactly the sort of soldier a man needs,” Leof said. And was rewarded with a small, gap-toothed smile that undid something in his chest more thoroughly than any of the day’s revelations had managed.