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 2

Behind him, Arabella made a strangled, undignified sound.

“Your grace.” All the purr was gone. “You cannot be speaking to her. She is a beggar. A ruined—”

The Duke did not turn his head.

“Lady Arabella.” He said her name the way a man reads out a sentence. “If you speak another word in my presence, I will personally ensure your father’s gambling debts at White’s are called in before sundown. You will be residing in a debtor’s prison by morning. Am I understood?”

The colour left Arabella’s face all at once, leaving something ashen and sickly behind.

She closed her mouth.

Harriet was already backing toward the door, trembling like a leaf in a wind she could not feel.

The Duke turned back to Lydia, and held out his other hand — not the one with the coin in it, but an open palm.

“Take my hand, Lydia.”

The command had gone soft at the edges. It was not for the room. It was for her alone.

Lydia’s hand was bare and reddened and still stinging where Arabella’s heel had come down. She put it into his black glove anyway, because she could not think of a single reason not to, and because she had spent two years making every decision from a position of no choice at all.

His grip closed around her fingers.

It was warm. It was strong. And it was the most secure thing she had felt in her entire adult life.

He drew her to her feet, and he did not let go.

Then he turned that cold, formidable gaze on Madame Vivien, and his voice was chillingly polite.

“Madame. It seems my fiancée has been terribly mistreated in your establishment.”

The room stopped breathing.

Fiancée.

Lydia’s head whipped round. She stared at him, wide-eyed, mouth open — and the pressure of his fingers around hers tightened, half warning, half anchor, the grip of a man who had just thrown a rope and was not about to let it slip.

“My—” Madame Vivien’s face had gone the colour of spoiled milk. “Your grace, I had no idea. I swear on my life—”

“Save your breath.” His eyes moved, unhurried, to the gown displayed in the centre of the room — the midnight blue silk, the silver embroidery, the whole impossible beautiful thing she had not dared to touch. “That dress will do for a start.”

Madame Vivien staggered back as though she had been struck. The gown was her crowning achievement. Eighty guineas.

“Your grace. The gown, it requires fittings. The lace—”

“Box it. And every gown in her size — the pelisses, the walking dresses, the Venetian slippers. All of it. Send the bills to Ashborne House in Grosvenor Square.”

Then he looked down at Madame Vivien, and his voice dropped into a register that made the woman flinch before he had finished the sentence.

“And if I ever hear a whisper of how you treated my future duchess today, I will buy this building and turn it into a stable for my hounds.”

Arabella and Harriet had already gone — out the door and into the fog like frightened rats, their cruelty no match at all for the real thing.

Nathaniel Harrington tucked Lydia’s cold hand into the crook of his arm, and led her outside, where a black carriage with the ducal crest stood waiting at the pavement.

The door clicked shut behind them and sealed them into a world of private silence.

Lydia pulled her hand free.

“Your grace. I am deeply grateful for your intervention, and I will find a way to repay the kindness of the gesture. But you must know I cannot pay for those gowns.” She swallowed. “And this — this charade about a betrothal.”

“It is no charade, Miss Penhallagan.”

His grey eyes locked onto hers.

“Unless you refuse me.”

PART 3 

The carriage lurched forward into the Strand traffic, and Lydia sat with her back rigid against the velvet squabs and her hands folded in her lap, one of them still burning where Arabella’s heel had pressed into it.

She had refused. Or she had tried to. What had come out of her mouth instead was:

“You do not know me.”

“I know a great deal about you.”

“You are the Duke of Ashborne, and I am a ruined woman living in a draughty cottage on the edge of Cheapside with a mother who cannot get out of bed. You cannot possibly know my name, let alone anything else.”

He leaned back and let the shadows of the carriage move across his face. He did not answer immediately, which was the first thing she learned about him — that he was a man who thought before he spoke, and did not consider silence an emergency.

“Because, Lydia,” he said, “I owe your father a debt that money alone cannot repay.”

Everything in her went still.

“My father was a gambler.” The words came out flat, rehearsed, and she had said them to herself so many times that they had worn smooth. “He drank away our fortune at Brooks’s and left us with his debts. That is what the world was meant to believe.”

“It is what the world does believe.” He looked out at the wet street, where lamps were coming alight, one after another, against the darkening afternoon. “It is not true.”

“Then tell me what is.”

“Arthur Penhallagan was not a gambler. He was a covert agent for the Crown, working directly under Viscount Castlereagh.”

Lydia did not move. She was not entirely certain she was breathing.

“Two years ago he uncovered a treasonous plot involving a ring of French sympathisers with seats in the House,” Nathaniel said. “To hold his cover and fund his informants, he had to look like a degenerate with a card habit. So he made himself one, in public, at his own expense. He funnelled his personal fortune into the operation — your fortune, Miss Penhallagan. Every penny your family lost, he spent himself, on his own instruction, on the business of keeping this country upright.”

Her hands had gone entirely numb.

“That same autumn he saved my brother’s life in a skirmish outside Calais,” Nathaniel said. “And earlier that summer he secured the intelligence that prevented three ships of gunpowder from reaching a French garrison, which I mention only because I have read the dispatches myself and they are the reason four hundred men are alive today who would otherwise not be.”

Lydia’s voice, when she finally found it, was very small.

“He died before anyone could say so.”

“He died before the Crown could publicly exonerate him or restore his estate.” Nathaniel’s jaw worked once, and it was the only crack in the composure, and she did not miss it. “He died with his neighbours calling him a cheat and his daughter mending sheets in a cottage. That is a debt I have been attempting to pay for two years.”

“He—” The breath she had been holding went out of her all at once. “He was a hero.”

“The finest I ever knew.”

And then her face crumpled, and she was crying — not the hot, choking tears of the shop floor, but tears of a completely different substance, the kind that come loose from somewhere lower and older, and she turned her face to the curtain so that he would not have to watch.

Two years. Two years of believing that her father had taken everything from them out of nothing but appetite, and she had grieved him with love and with anger at once, which is the hardest way to grieve anyone.

Nathaniel said nothing while she wept. He did not hand her a handkerchief, or pat her hand, or tell her it was all right. He simply sat there across from her and let her do it, and did not once look away as though it were an embarrassment, and afterwards she thought that was the moment — that was the exact point at which something began.

She got herself back under control. She straightened her bonnet with fingers that still shook.

“You said you have been trying to pay it for two years.”

“I have.” He said it evenly. “My secretary has been looking for a woman named Penhallagan for twenty-six months. It proved more difficult than anticipated, because your father’s handlers wiped his records clean when he died — to protect you and your mother from the French agents we never identified. Which also meant that for two years, you did not exist.”

“Then how did you find me?”

“Your father’s handlers made you impossible to find until my secretary intercepted a misdirected invitation to the Countess of Leven’s masked ball.” His mouth moved very slightly at one corner. “Addressed to the Penhallagan name, on the strength of a social secretary who remembered it from a decade ago. I came to Mayfair today hoping to intercept you before anyone else did.”

“The invitation.” Lydia stared at him. “That was a mistake.”

“It was.”

“It was the only thing I had.”

Something crossed his face that she could not read.

“I know,” he said. “I read the file.”

He let her sit with it for the length of two streets. Then he said:

“The betrothal serves a dual purpose.”

Lydia looked up.

“I require a wife,” Nathaniel said. “I am thirty-four years old, I hold one of the largest unentailed fortunes in the kingdom, and I am the single most hunted bachelor in the peerage. I have spent six Seasons deflecting the matchmaking mothers of the ton with various undignified stratagems, and I am tired of it. I want a duchess who will stand beside me without wanting my title for itself, and I want the matter finished.”

“And I require protection, status, and the fortune that is rightfully mine.”

“You require all three, and a great deal more than that. Your mother requires a physician. Your father requires what remains of his name — which I intend to restore, publicly, and which will be considerably easier to do if you are not a governess in someone else’s house when it happens.” He paused. “It is a mutually beneficial arrangement, Miss Penhallagan. That is all it is.”

“That is all it is.”

“For now.”

He said the last two words very quietly, and his lips curved into something faint and entirely devastating, and Lydia discovered that she was not, in fact, in control of the situation at all.

“A business arrangement, your grace.”

“For now,” he agreed. “But I have a feeling we shall be quite formidable together.”

He rapped on the roof, and the carriage rolled on toward Cheapside — toward a cottage whose roof leaked, and a mother who would not believe a word of it, and a night Lydia would spend lying awake, running the last hour over and over like a coin between her fingers.

“We have a ball to prepare for,” Nathaniel Harrington said, watching the rain silver the window between them. “And a certain Lady Arabella to destroy.”