In Mayfair, 1814, She Was Humiliated in a Dress Shop When They Mocked Her for Counting Twelve Shillings and Four Pence—Until a Duke Walked In, Chose Her, and Revealed He Knew the Truth About Her Disgraced Father

PART 1

The snide remark cut through the boutique before Lydia had even touched anything.

“I wouldn’t stand too close, my dear. Your poverty might stain the silk.”

She pulled her hand back as though the gown had caught fire, and turned.

Lady Arabella Wentworth stood in the entryway with Miss Harriet Finch fixed at her shoulder like a brooch, and the two of them took in Lydia’s three-year-old wool pelisse, her mended hem, her scuffed boots, and found all of it delicious.

“I was merely admiring the craftsmanship,” Lydia said.

“Admiring.” Arabella stepped forward, circling with the predatory slowness of a woman who had never once in her life been refused anything. “One admires art in a museum, Miss Penhallagan. One does not skulk about the finest modiste in Mayfair looking like a chimney sweep’s abandoned orphan. Tell me, did you get lost on your way to the workhouse?”

Harriet tittered behind her glove like a small cruel bell.

“I have business with Madame Vivien.”

“Business.” Harriet’s hand flew to her reticule as though Lydia might snatch it. “What business? Begging for scraps to line a rat’s nest? Perhaps she intends to pay in buttons and pebbles.”

Arabella flicked the frayed cuff of Lydia’s sleeve with two careless fingers.

“Or perhaps she thinks she can catch a husband in the dark corners of a ballroom, disguised in stolen velvet.” Her voice dropped, and it was the drop that did it — the softness, the near-tenderness of it. “But no amount of silk can hide the stench of ruin, Lydia. Your father died a disgraced beggar, and you are no better.”

That did it. That landed like a hand across the face.

Lydia’s throat closed. She could feel the tears gathering, hot and treacherous, and she locked her jaw against them and kept her chin level and did not move.

She would not cry. Not here. Not for them.

The commotion brought Madame Vivien out of the back room — a stout woman poured into black bombazine, with a gaze that had spent thirty years calculating the worth of every woman who walked through her door.

“What is the meaning of this—”

She stopped. She saw Arabella. And her entire posture melted into something aggressively civil.

“Lady Arabella. What an unexpected honour. To what do I owe the absolute pleasure?”

“Madame. It seems your establishment has suffered an infestation.” Arabella did not take her eyes off Lydia. “Do you now cater to charity cases? Because if so, I shall take my patronage — and that of my mother’s friends — to Bond Street immediately.”

Madame Vivien’s eyes went to Lydia. To the mended hem. To the boots. To the complete absence of a chaperone or a carriage waiting at the pavement.

Her face hardened into something cold and mercantile, and the French accent she wore like a coat slid off her entirely, revealing the East End beneath it.

“You. What are you doing in my shop? Who let you in?”

“I came to inquire about purchasing some remnant ribbons. Just a few yards—”

“Remnants.” Madame Vivien advanced like a bird of prey. “This is not a rag and bone shop. We do not sell scraps to gutter snipes. You are tracking filth onto my Persian rugs. Get away from that gown at once.”

She lunged and took Lydia by the shoulder and shoved.

The force of it caught her off balance. The heel of her boot snagged the edge of the heavy rug, and she threw her arms out to catch herself, and the strings of her reticule snapped.

She hit the mahogany floor hard, and the breath went out of her in a sharp gasp — and then every other sound in the room was swallowed by the metallic clatter that followed.

Clink. Clatter. Roll.

Twelve shillings and four pence.

Her whole fortune. Her mother’s medicine money. Her one hope of salvation, spilling across the floorboards under the crystal chandeliers, the tarnished silver and copper rolling in miserable circles until one coin came to rest against the tip of Arabella’s pristine white kid slipper.

Silence.

Lydia did not move. She sat on the floor and stared at the visual proof of her absolute destitution laid out beneath a thousand pounds of chandelier, and the humiliation was so complete that it felt like the air had been drawn out of the room.

Then Arabella laughed.

It was a delicate, tinkling sound, and it was infinitely crueller than a scream.

“Oh, heavens.” She nudged the shilling away from her shoe with her toe, as though it were diseased. “One shilling. Madame Vivien, it appears you misjudged the lady. She is prepared to buy out your entire stock.”

“Tell me, Miss Penhallagan,” she said. “Is that what your father’s dignity was sold for? A handful of coppers?”

“Get up,” Madame Vivien hissed. “Gather your trash and get out of my shop before I call the watch and have you thrown in the Fleet for vagrancy. You are a disgrace.”

Lydia’s fingers were numb. She scrambled onto her knees and began clawing the coins back across the smooth boards, and her pride went with them, shattered into a thousand jagged pieces. She wanted only to escape — to crawl into the fog outside and never be seen again. She reached for the copper penny lying near Arabella’s foot.

Arabella shifted her weight and brought her heel down on Lydia’s outstretched fingers.

Lydia gasped and pulled her hand back. A red welt rose instantly across her knuckles.

“Careful,” Arabella whispered. “You wouldn’t want to soil my shoes.”

The first tear broke free and slid down her cheek and fell onto the polished wood.

It was over. She was utterly broken.

Then the bell above the door chimed, and cold air came into the room like a blade, and the chandeliers rattled above them.

The laughter died.

Footsteps crossed the floorboards — not the light quick steps of a society matron, but the heavy, deliberate tread of riding boots.

“Your grace.” Madame Vivien’s voice cracked into pure panic. “Your grace, we were not expecting you. We are so honoured.”

Lydia did not look up. She kept her head bowed and her hands moving, gathering the last of her shillings, wishing the floor would open and take her.

“Your grace,” Arabella breathed, dropping a full octave into a sultry purr. “What an unexpected delight. Are you perhaps commissioning a gift for your sister?”

Silence.

It stretched until it felt fragile. And then Lydia looked up through the curtain of her hair.

He stood in the centre of the shop, silhouetted against the window light, in a dark riding habit that filled the space around him. A riding crop hung loose in one black-gloved hand. His face was handsome and hard and made of lines that had never once been softened for anybody’s comfort.

His eyes were grey. Steel grey, and cold, and they were not on Madame Vivien. They were not on Arabella’s curtsy or her smile.

They were on Lydia, kneeling on the floor among her coppers.

He walked past Arabella as though she were a coat rack.

He stopped directly in front of Lydia, close enough that she could smell leather and cold autumn air and something faint and expensive — sandalwood — and she found herself staring at the gleaming black leather of his Hessian boots.

A single tarnished sixpence lay resting against the toe of his boot.

Slowly, deliberately, the Duke of Ashborne crouched down.

The fine wool of his riding breeches strained as he lowered himself, and he did not stop until he was at eye level with her, which no one had done in two years.

He reached out with one black-gloved hand and picked up the dirty coin.

For one breathless second she was certain he would mock her too — that the most powerful man in England had come to deliver the final blow himself.

Instead he held it out to her.

Lydia looked from the coin to his face. There was no pity in those grey eyes. There was something else, something fierce and banked, and it made her breath catch in her throat.

“I believe you dropped this, Miss Penhallagan,” he said.

His voice was a low, resonant thing that she felt in her very bones.

He knew her name.