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 6 

“Hold your tongue, Lady Arabella.”

The voice came from the crowd, and it was not a young man’s voice, and it was used to carrying across rooms where people were hoping not to be noticed.

Every head turned.

A man of about fifty was stepping out from among the dowagers at the side of the floor — small, neat, in a plain black coat with a plain black ribbon, entirely unremarkable except that the Prince Regent’s own secretary had been seen bowing to him twice that evening.

Nobody needed the Major Domo to announce him. London was not so large a place that a man could fail to recognise the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

Viscount Castlereagh came to a stop at the edge of the dance floor, and looked down the room at Arabella Wentworth with the patience of a man who had spent fifteen years in rooms full of people shouting things that were not true.

“You speak of a man,” he said, “who gave his life for the Crown.”

The ballroom did not merely go quiet. It stopped.

“Arthur Penhallagan was a decorated agent of the British government, in the direct service of this office, for eleven years.” Castlereagh’s voice carried to the far wall without effort. “He died in that service in the autumn of the year eighteen hundred and twelve, having first expended his entire personal fortune on the business of keeping this country out of French hands. He did so without complaint, without recognition, and without permitting his family to be told why.”

The silence in the room had acquired a texture.

“His estate,” Castlereagh said, “was today fully restored by order of Parliament, with a substantial pension granted by his Royal Highness the Prince Regent himself in recognition of his supreme sacrifice. The relevant instruments were sealed this afternoon. I have the copies in my carriage.”

And then, and this was the detail that would be repeated for years, he turned his head slightly and looked directly at the woman in midnight blue.

“I am sorry, Miss Penhallagan, that you have had to hear the name of a good man defended in a ballroom. It should have been defended in the House, and in the newspapers, and it should have been done two years ago. That failure is mine.”

Lydia could not speak. Her eyes had gone hot and her throat had closed entirely, and the sapphires against her collarbone rose and fell with her breathing and the whole room watched her do it.

Nathaniel’s hand found the small of her back.

The ton, which had spent a week deciding that a penniless girl had somehow trapped the most powerful man in England, reversed itself in the space of about ninety seconds, which was entirely characteristic of it.

The whispers went round the room in a rising tide — a hero, a hero, a patriot, his estate restored, the Prince himself, and she was never a beggar at all, she was the daughter of a martyr — and by the time the tide reached the far end of the ballroom, the version of the story that had arrived there was that the Duke of Ashborne had spent two years searching for the daughter of the man who saved his brother, which was, as it happened, true, and which nobody in that room had the smallest right to know.

A woman near the orchestra began to cry. A dowager who had snubbed Lydia’s name at a card table on Thursday announced to the person beside her that she had always thought there was something about the girl.

Heads turned, one after another, to look at Arabella Wentworth.

She had shrunk back against the wall behind the orchestra, one hand still holding the ruined mask, and her crimson gown had gone from a declaration to a costume. She looked around the room once, quickly, looking for a face that was still on her side, and found not one. Her father’s debts at White’s were no longer a private humiliation. The Duke had said the word prison out loud in a shop, and the word would travel faster than Castlereagh’s copies.

She understood, in about four seconds, that her social reign had ended in the middle of a waltz.

By tomorrow she would be a pariah. Not for the cruelty — the ton did not care about cruelty, and never had. She would be a pariah for slandering a national hero in the presence of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and for having done it with her hair coming down.

She turned and walked out of the ballroom, and nobody moved to stop her, and Harriet Finch — who had come back from the retiring room halfway through Castlereagh’s speech and had been standing frozen by the door ever since — turned and went after her, and neither of them was ever invited anywhere of consequence again.

Nathaniel watched her go for exactly as long as it took her to reach the door.

Then he stopped watching.

He turned to Lydia, in the middle of a ballroom containing the most powerful people in England, and he took both her hands in his and did not care in the slightest who saw him do it.

“You knew,” she said. Her voice came out thin. “Castlereagh. The sealing this afternoon.”

“I have known for eleven days.”

“Eleven days.”

“The instruments required the Regent’s hand, and the Regent required persuading, and the persuading took eleven days.” His thumbs moved slowly across her knuckles, over the welt that had faded to a thin white line. “I did not tell you because I did not want you to sit in that cottage for eleven days waiting for a piece of paper to decide whether your father was a good man. He was a good man. The paper was never going to change that. It was only going to make the rest of them agree.”

Lydia looked up at him, and something in her careful architecture of the last six weeks gave way at a joint.

“Then what,” she said, “is the arrangement now?”

He did not answer her in the ballroom.

He led her out through the crush on the east side of the floor, past the Countess of Leven, who curtseyed to them both and looked as though she had just hosted the most successful evening of her life, and out into the long gallery where the candles were fewer and the music came through the doors in pieces.

He stopped at the end of it, by a window that looked out onto the dark garden.

“Lydia.”

“Your grace.”

“Nathaniel.” He said it gently, which was somehow worse than any command. “I asked you a question at Leven House tonight, and you answered it with a question, and I have decided to answer that instead.”