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 4

The cottage on the edge of Cheapside had two rooms, a chimney that smoked when the wind came off the east, and a mother who had been confined to the better of the two beds since the previous winter.

Lydia stood in the doorway with the rain still drying on her bonnet and told her everything.

“Your father was a what?”

“An agent. For the Crown. Under Castlereagh.”

Her mother lay very still. Then she turned her face into the pillow, and her shoulders shook, and Lydia crossed the room and got onto the bed beside her and held her, and neither of them said anything for a long time, because there was nothing that could be said for two years of it.

When her mother sat up at last, she wiped her face with the heel of her hand and said, with an air of enormous practicality, “Well. He always was a better liar than he was a card player. I told him so. He said that was the point.”

That was the moment Lydia decided she would do it.

Not for the gowns, and not for the sapphires, and not remotely for the title. She would do it because her father had died with his name broken in a hundred drawing rooms, and she intended to be standing in the middle of one of them when it was put back together.

What she did not know, and did not learn until later, was what the last two years had cost the man who had spent them looking for her.

Nathaniel Harrington had come into the dukedom at twenty-six, when his father’s chest gave out in a hunting field, and he had come into it with a younger brother who idolised him and no idea at all what to do with a public life. His father had been a man who believed that feeling things in company was a species of weakness, and he had raised two sons accordingly, and the elder had learned the lesson so thoroughly that by thirty he had a reputation.

Ruthless in Parliament. Cold in person. Vengeful in his dislikes. The ton had assembled these out of very little and repeated them until they became true.

What the ton did not know was that the Duke of Ashborne kept a cabinet of letters in his study at Grosvenor Square, and that for twenty-six months the top drawer of it had contained a file with a name on it. Every dispatch the Crown had been willing to release. Every conflicting account of where a ruined family had gone after Fenmore’s debts came due. Three false addresses in Bristol. A dead end in Bath.

He had read the file so many times that he knew the handwriting of four different clerks.

He had been thirty-two when Arthur Penhallagan pulled his younger brother out of a ditch outside Calais and stopped an armed attacker before he could reach him. His brother, who was twenty now and studying law and still slept badly in the autumn, had never fully understood what it had cost the agent to walk away from that ditch with his own name intact enough to keep working. Nathaniel understood it. He had spent two years understanding it, and two more trying to repay it, and he had found a woman kneeling on a dress-shop floor with twelve shillings and four pence scattered around her.

That was, in his own private accounting, an obscenity. It was also, he had begun to suspect by the second week of their engagement, the best thing that had ever happened to him.

The engagement was announced in the Morning Post on a Tuesday.

By Wednesday, half of Mayfair was either delighted or sceptical, and by Thursday, Lady Arabella Wentworth had recovered enough from her terror in the shop to begin her work.

She did it well. Arabella was a coward, but she was a talented one, and she understood that the way to destroy a woman from a distance was never to attack her — it was to ask questions. To express concern. To say, with a hand pressed to the heart, I only mention it because I would want someone to tell me.

She did not repeat the story of the shop, because the story of the shop made Arabella look small.

She told a different one.

She told the whole of Mayfair — through Harriet, through Harriet’s cousins, through every dinner table she was still invited to while the invitations lasted — that the Duke of Ashborne had gone mad, that he had been taken in by an adventuress, that a girl with no connections and no fortune had clearly worked on a famously guarded man until he could no longer see straight. That there had been a betrothal arranged in a dress shop, of all places. That the family had a history of debt and disgrace.

And where, Arabella asked, with a gentleness that was worse than any insult, does a penniless girl learn to handle a duke?

The rumour travelled faster than any of the wedding preparations did.

Lydia heard the first version of it in a milliner’s fitting room, from two women who did not know who she was and who stopped talking the moment they looked up and saw her face.

She heard the second version from a footman, who was young and mortified to have said it.

She heard the third from Nathaniel, who told it to her himself that evening, over the tea in the blue drawing room, without softening a word of it — because, he said, he was not going to be the sort of man who managed her.

“Well,” she said, when he had finished. “She is not wrong about the dress shop.”

“She is wrong about every other thing.”

“She is not wrong that I have no fortune and no name worth having.” Lydia set her cup down carefully, because her hands were not steady and she did not want him to see it. “She is only wrong about the reasons.”

“No.” He leaned forward and put two fingers on the rim of her saucer and slid it an inch away from her, a small, precise act of taking her cup out of her hands and making her look at him instead. “She is wrong about the reasons, and she is about to be wrong about the outcome, and I would like you to be in the room when she finds out.”

“Your grace—”

“Nathaniel.”

“Nathaniel.” Her mouth moved around it experimentally and it felt far too natural. “You cannot fight a woman like that in public. Whatever you do to her, she will simply become the injured party. It is how she has survived since she was fifteen.”

He looked at her for a long moment.

“I am not going to fight her,” he said.

“Then what are you going to do?”

“I am going to attend the Countess of Leven’s masked ball,” Nathaniel Harrington said, “with my future duchess on my arm, and I am going to let Lady Arabella choose what she says next.”