She Climbed Out of a Second-Story Window at Dawn to Escape the Man She Was Being Forced to Marry — But When She Fell Into the Arms of a Feared Duke Who Had Buried His Heart for Twelve Years, Neither Knew That One Desperate Fall Would Change Their Lives Forever

PART 7 

“That is a serious accusation,” Puit said, though the color rising in his face rather undercut the outrage in his voice.

“It is a serious forgery,” Alfreda returned. “And I begin to think, sir, that you are considerably more accustomed to purchasing what you cannot earn than you would like the county to know. Tell me — did you write this yourself, or did you pay some clerk to imitate my hand? I should like to know precisely how much of an insult I am dealing with before I decide how to answer it.”

Turald, who had been holding his temper on a leash grown very short indeed, found himself almost admiring the precision with which Alfreda was dismantling the man before either of them had needed to raise a voice. He stepped in now only to close the trap she had already sprung.

“You will produce, Sir Aldus, the clerk or forger who penned this letter within the week. Or I shall have my own solicitor examine it, along with three genuine samples of Miss Trevenian’s hand that I can procure within the hour from her aunt’s household accounts. If the comparison proves what I expect it to prove, I will bring the full weight of a ducal solicitor’s attention to bear not on a breach of promise suit — which you have no grounds to bring — but on the forgery itself, which is a criminal matter. And one that will end considerably worse for you than a refused proposal ever could.”

Puit’s bluster faltered visibly. The color drained from his face nearly as fast as it had risen.

“Your grace, I only meant — a man in my position — having been publicly humiliated —”

“You were not humiliated, Sir Aldus. You were refused by a woman under no obligation to accept you. And rather than accept that refusal with whatever grace you could manage, you have spent the intervening weeks attempting to manufacture a claim on her that never existed. That is not humiliation. That is simply the consequence of your own poor judgment.”

Puit’s last shred of composure crumbled entirely. “I meant no lasting harm. I thought only that if the letter forced a settlement — some small sum to withdraw the claim quietly — no one need be the wiser. I might yet recover what this business has cost me.”

“You intended blackmail,” Alfreda said quietly, “dressed up as a lawsuit. Aimed at a woman with no fortune to pay it, and a duke with every resource to expose it. I confess, Sir Aldus, I find myself almost grateful for the attempt — if only because it has shown me, and shown the Duke, and shortly I expect the whole county, precisely what manner of man I so narrowly avoided marrying. I would rather have climbed out of a hundred windows than spent one evening bound to someone who would forge my own hand against me the moment I proved inconvenient to his finances.”

Puit had no answer to that. He stood a moment longer, visibly searching for some remaining shred of dignity to retreat behind. Finding none, he gathered his hat and departed, his carriage rattling away at a speed that suggested he had no intention of showing his face in the county again.

Turald’s solicitor confirmed within the fortnight what neither of them had truly doubted. A clerk in Sir Aldus’s own employ, pressed gently but firmly by the solicitor’s inquiry, admitted to copying Alfreda’s hand from an old note of household accounts Sir Aldus had borrowed under the pretense of a neighborly loan. Faced with the clerk’s signed confession, Sir Aldus withdrew every threat in writing and quietly settled, on his own initiative and at his own considerable expense, whatever remained of Mrs. Yarnell’s debt to his family — a debt Turald’s solicitor discovered, in the course of the inquiry, to have been inflated well past its original sum through interest Sir Aldus had never been legally entitled to charge. Mrs. Yarnell, informed of the correction by letter, wept for the better part of an afternoon, this time from a relief entirely unclouded by fear.

The great hall, once the sound of Puit’s wheels had faded that first evening, seemed suddenly very quiet. Turald turned to find Alfreda still holding herself with the same rigid composure she had maintained throughout. It was only when he reached for her hand that he felt beneath the steadiness of her grip a fine, betraying tremor.

“You did not need me at all,” he said gently, drawing her toward the drawing room fire. “You had dismantled his entire scheme before I said a single word in your defense.”

“I needed you standing beside me. Even if I did not need you to speak. There is a difference, Turald, between fighting a battle alone and fighting it knowing someone stands ready to catch you if your strength should fail partway through.”

She managed a small, unsteady laugh.

“You have caught me twice now — in falling, and in this. I begin to wonder whether it is becoming a habit of yours.”

“I find I have developed rather a taste for it,” he said, and drew her, without further ceremony, into an embrace that held nothing of practiced courtship, and everything of simple, overwhelming relief.

The weeks that followed passed with the particular swiftness of a season a man wishes he could hold still. The story of the forged letter spread through the county nearly as fast as the story of the window had. And where before the gossip had painted Alfreda as an opportunist who had fallen conveniently into a duke’s arms, it now painted her as a clever, plain-spoken young woman who had outmaneuvered a scheming baronet without once raising her voice.

The first true test of Alfreda’s new standing came a fortnight later, when the Marchioness of Selby held her annual Midsummer ball — an event that drew the whole of the county’s fashionable society into one glittering, chandeliered room, and to which Turald, as a matter of long habit, had always sent his regrets.

“We shall go,” he told Alfreda when the invitation arrived. “I have avoided that room for a decade because I had no wish to be examined by people whose good opinion I did not value. I find I no longer mind the examining — provided I am permitted to stand beside you while it happens.”