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 5

Leven House was ablaze with a thousand wax candles.

The Countess of Leven’s masked ball was the first event of any consequence that the Regent’s peace celebrations had produced, and it had produced it extravagantly, held under the Prince Regent’s own patronage. The air in the ballroom was thick with crushed roses and French perfume and the particular electricity of several hundred people who have all decided, simultaneously, to be scandalised about something.

Doors: thrown open, one after another. Dominoes of every colour. Feathers, gold thread, painted masks. Political intrigue conducted in whispers behind fans. Every dowager in London arranged along the wall like a row of cannon.

Lady Arabella Wentworth stood near the orchestra in crimson silk, her mask pushed up onto her forehead, scanning the room the way a hawk scans a field.

She had spent the entire afternoon making certain that everyone who mattered knew what she thought of the Duke of Ashborne’s sudden and inexplicable engagement. She had been careful. She had been kind about it. She had said things like I hope I am wrong and of course one wishes them every happiness in exactly the tone that makes sure everyone remembers the opposite.

She had not been able to buy a single gown for weeks, because word had gone round about what happened in Madame Vivien’s, and the shops had all become mysteriously unable to fit her.

That was not going to matter after tonight. Tonight she intended to finish it.

“Where is Miss Finch?” she asked the woman beside her.

“Gone to the retiring room a quarter of an hour ago.”

Arabella’s mouth thinned. Harriet had been useless since the shop. Harriet had been useless, in fact, since the moment the Duke said the words debtor’s prison, which was the exact moment Arabella had learned the true extent of what her own father owed at White’s, and had been unable to think about anything else since.

Never mind. She did not need Harriet.

The door opened at the far end of the room, and the crowd made the small collective sound that means somebody has arrived.

The Major Domo’s staff struck the marble floor three times, and the orchestra faltered on a bar, and into that ragged silence the voice came across the ballroom like water finding a crack.

“His grace the Duke of Ashborne, and his fiancée, Miss Lydia Penhallagan.”

The gasp went round the room in a wave, and the sea of aristocrats parted the way the Red Sea is said to have parted, and every single person in that room turned at once to look.

Nathaniel came in first, in stark black evening dress, and he was exactly what the ton had spent a decade describing — cold, immovable, decidedly dangerous. Every eye in the room found him and then went straight past him.

Because of the woman on his arm.

Lydia stood in the doorway of the Countess of Leven’s ballroom wearing midnight blue silk, the exact colour of the sky over the river at midnight, with a frost of silver-threaded embroidery cascading down the skirt like falling stars.

The gown fitted her perfectly. Of course it did. Madame Vivien had measured her three times and had not been permitted to make one of those measurements twice.

There was a diamond tiara on her dark hair — the Ashborne heirloom, brought up from the vault in its case that afternoon by a footman who had not been permitted to be in the room while she tried it on — and a sapphire necklace heavy enough to ransom a minor king lying against her collarbone.

She did not look like a ruined beggar.

She looked like a queen who had finally come to claim her throne.

Lydia moved into the room with her spine straight and her chin high and her arm held steady, and only Nathaniel — standing so close that their sleeves brushed — could feel the tremor running through her that she had spent three hours training out of her walk.

Arabella’s jaw came unhinged.

The champagne glass slipped out of her fingers and shattered on the marble at her feet, and nobody noticed, because every person in that ballroom was watching the woman in blue.

Nathaniel led her straight to the centre of the floor.

He raised two fingers to the orchestra, and the leader, who had been staring like everybody else, collected himself and brought the musicians in on a waltz.

Nathaniel took her in his arms.

The room watched them dance in stunned, jealous silence — a hundred people who had spent a week believing a rumour, watching it be disproved by the simple fact of a woman crossing a floor without lowering her eyes.

“You are trembling,” he said.

“I am terrifyingly out of my depth.”

“You belong exactly where you are.” His hand rested firmly at the small of her back, and he turned her through the second figure without once looking at anyone else. “Look at them, Lydia. Every one of them. They are nothing but shadows compared to your light.”

She looked. She made herself do it. Down the long room, past the fans and the feathers and the masks pushed up onto powdered foreheads, and every single face turned away as she met it, which was a strange kind of power and she did not yet know what to do with it.

She found Arabella in the crowd, standing over the broken glass, her face a ruin of fury.

And she understood, with sudden cold clarity, exactly what was about to happen.

The music was still playing when Arabella pushed her way through the crowd.

She tore her velvet mask off her face as she came, and her hair came with it at one side, and she did not care. She stopped at the edge of the dance floor with one trembling finger pointed straight at the woman in midnight silk.

“This is a farce!”

The orchestra stumbled. The dancers nearest them stopped dead. Within three seconds, the music had died entirely, and there was no sound in that vast room but Arabella’s voice and the crack of it.

“She is a fraud!” Arabella’s voice had gone high and thin and she was already past the point where she could have stopped. “Look at her! Six weeks ago she was begging for scraps in a shop on Bruton Street, and tonight she is wearing the Ashborne diamonds as though she has a right to them. This is a lie, and everyone in this room knows it. Her father was a penniless cheat who died in the gutters —”

Lydia’s heart had climbed into her throat.

Every face in the room turned, and every face was waiting, and she understood with absolute clarity that there was not a single person standing in that ballroom who was going to speak for her — because they had spent a week believing what Arabella wanted them to believe, and because there was nothing she could have said in her own defence that would not have sounded like exactly what Arabella had just called it.

She drew breath to answer anyway.

And then, from somewhere to her left, a voice cut across the ballroom like a whip.