Her Groom Let Her Fall at the Altar to Save His Polished Shoes—But the Feared Duke Caught Rosalind, Carried Her Out Before Three Hundred Guests, and Refused to Return Her to the Family That Had Nearly Killed Her.

PART 8

They did not need a priest.

The solicitors came on the Thursday and sat in the morning room with their papers and their careful, scandalised faces, and drew up the deed of partnership in the name of R. Abernathy and the Duke of Wickliffe, equal shares, complete autonomy, no clause anywhere in the document that mentioned marriage.

Mr. Peel, the senior of the two, cleared his throat twice and finally asked whether his grace wished the arrangement to be described in any particular way in the preamble.

“No,” Dominic said.

“Yes,” Rosalind said, at the same time.

They looked at each other.

“Specify the work,” she said. “Dockyards, manufactories, shipping. My name on the contracts as partner, not as a dependant. If I sign a page, I am answerable for the page, and I expect to be paid for the page.”

Peel’s pen hovered.

“Put that in,” Dominic said. “Word for word.”

She came back to the morning room that evening and found him standing at the window with the signed copy in his hand, reading it over again in the light of the fire.

“You are looking at it as though it might turn into something else.”

“I am looking at it,” he said, “because I have signed perhaps four hundred documents in my life and this is the only one I have wanted to read twice.”

Rosalind took it out of his hands and closed it.

“You will ruin the paper.”

“It is already ruined. You have annotated clause six in the margin.”

“That clause was badly written.”

“It was.”

“I fixed it.”

“You did.”

He took the document back from her and set it on the desk, and then he did not move away, and she did not step back, and neither of them said anything for a while, because there was nothing that needed saying.

The first test of the partnership came in the second week of January, and it came from Liverpool.

The third dock manager — the one who had resigned before he could be dismissed — had gone to the port authority with a story. He claimed the Duke of Wickliffe was running cargo manifests through a woman’s name to conceal tonnage from the customs board, and he had found a clerk willing to swear to it for the price of a season’s drinking.

It was a lie. It was also an extremely well-constructed lie, because the man had worked inside the business for eleven years and knew exactly where the seams were.

Dominic heard it from Finch on a Tuesday morning and was on his feet and reaching for his coat before the sentence was finished.

“Sit down,” Rosalind said.

He stopped with one arm in the sleeve.

“Two inspectors from the customs board will be at the Liverpool office on Thursday,” she said, not looking up from the ledger. “They will find the manifests in order, because they are in order. What they will also find is Mr. Calloway’s own signature on forty-one falsified tonnage returns in the eighteen-nineteen ledger, six of which predate the Duke of Wickliffe’s ownership by four years and eleven days.”

Dominic stared at her.

“When did you find that?”

“November.”

“November.”

“The third day you gave me the books.” She turned a page. “I did not raise it, because at the time I was not certain whether you would want it used, and I do not offer a weapon until I know whether the man I am standing beside intends to fight.”

A long silence.

“And now?”

“Now I know.” She looked up. “Do you want to fight, Wickliffe?”

Dominic took his arm back out of the coat and sat down.

“Tell me what to write.”

It was clean. It was finished in nine days.

Mr. Calloway was not merely dismissed; he was charged, and the charge stuck, and the man who had come to ruin the Duke of Wickliffe by going after his name went to the assizes on his own forged paper. The port authority issued a formal correction, which appeared on the third page of the Liverpool Mercury and the eleventh page of a London evening paper, and was read by precisely nobody who mattered.

But the docks knew.

By February the whole of the northern trade knew, and men who had spent two decades regarding the Duke of Wickliffe as a hard man to be avoided began to speak of something else entirely, in lowered voices, in counting-houses: that the Duke of Wickliffe had a partner.

And that the partner did the reading.

Her mother wrote once.

The letter arrived in March, forwarded from the country, on paper that still smelled faintly of the Abernathy drawing room. Four pages. Two of them were about the scandal and the shame and the ruin of a family name that her daughter had apparently destroyed single-handedly in front of three hundred witnesses.

One page was an itemised account of expenses incurred in preparation for the wedding, with a sum at the bottom and a request for its reimbursement.

Half a page mentioned Rosalind’s father’s health, which was reported to be poor, and her mother’s own nerves, which were reported to be worse.

Rosalind read it at the breakfast table with her face perfectly still.

Then she folded it into quarters, crossed to the fire, and put it in.

Dominic watched from the head of the table and said nothing. He had learned, over the winter, when not to fill silence.

She came back and sat down and picked up her tea.

“My mother has asked me to pay for my own wedding dress,” she said.

“What did you tell her?”

“Nothing. I burned it.”

“Good.”

She drank her tea. Then she said, without any particular expression, “I would like to buy the Abernathy house.”

Dominic set his cup down.

“The London house?”

“On the understanding that they never enter it.” She turned her cup a quarter-turn on the saucer. “It is a good house. It has a courtyard. I am told the freehold is encumbered.”

“It is. I hold the lien.”

“I know.” She looked up at him. “I would like to buy it out of my share.”

He considered her for a moment. Then he nodded, slowly.

“Then the deeds come to you and you alone.”

“That is correct.”

“Because it is not charity.”

“Because it is not charity.” She picked up the newspaper. “It is a transaction. I have learned to like them.”

Outside, the rain came down on the cobbles and the city went about its business, and inside the severe grey morning room of a house that had been built to keep the world out, a woman who had been sold for thirty thousand pounds read the shipping news over her tea and made a note in the margin.