She Grabbed a Stranger to Escape Her Ex — Not knowing He’s a Duke!

Chapter 3

Clara sat in her room until four in the morning with a candle she did not need, going over it, and could not make it come out any way but one. She had been ruined for two years. She had not understood, until ten o’clock that evening, that she had not been ruined all the way. There had still been something left. The eleven Christmas cards. The aunt who would still go about with her. The possibility of some quiet marriage in three or four years to a widower with children who did not care what had been said in twenty-six.

All of it small. All of it real. She had spent it in four seconds to avoid a man’s eyes.

And a stranger had stood in a card room and offered to spend a great deal more than that to buy it back for her.

She wrote her answer at four and sent it at eight. It was one line long.

Yes. And I will tell you the whole of it before Monday, and you may withdraw when you have heard it.

He came at eleven. Aunt Helena sat in the corner with her needlework and heard every word of it, which Clara had insisted on, and which the Duke had not argued with for a second.

“Before I begin, Your Grace, there is something I want said aloud.”

“Say it.”

“You have offered me the better half of this. I know that you could have finished me on Thursday and kept your niece and never thought about it again.” Clara had her hands folded in her lap, and she made herself keep them still. “So I am not going to pretend I am doing you a favor. And I am not going to hold anything back to make myself look better. Because if this comes apart in February, it comes apart on your niece. Not on me.”

“Miss Ashworth,” said the Duke of Blackwood, “you will want to hear it before you are kind to me.” He sat back. “Tell me.”

She had met Dominic Hawthorne when she was nineteen, and he was twenty-six, and he had been the most charming man in three counties. He had wanted her obviously and publicly, when nobody else particularly had. They were engaged for two years. Her father was dying through the whole of it—a long, slow, wasting business—and Dominic had made himself indispensable in that house. He carried messages. He sat with her father. He took the accounts off Clara’s hands in the second winter because she was worn thin with nursing.

And everybody said, What a comfort. What a fortunate girl.

He had the run of the place for eighteen months.

“I gave it to him,” Clara said. “Nobody made me.”

Her mother’s piano had gone in the spring of twenty-five. Sold for a debt Clara never saw the paper for, to a dealer in Bath. The house at Fen Ditton—her mother’s, left to Clara in her own right, which was the one thing her father’s illness could not touch—had been let, then let badly, then let to a man who kept sheep in the orchard and pulled out the glass house for the lead. By the time Clara went down herself in the autumn, there was eleven hundred pounds of damage on a property worth four thousand.

And Dominic had signed every one of the agreements as her agent. She had given him that authority in writing when she was twenty and her father was dying upstairs.

“None of it is theft,” she said. “That is the thing I have had two years to understand. Every single piece of it—he had my hand on a paper. There is no crime anywhere in it. There is just a girl of twenty, signing whatever was put in front of her, because the man holding the pen was the only person in the house who was not dying.”

The Duke of Blackwood did not say anything.

“Then there is my mother’s jewelry.”

Aunt Helena’s needle stopped.

“It was not much. A garnet set and a pair of pearl drops and a locket. It was not worth two hundred pounds altogether. And it was all I had of her.”

Clara’s voice had gone very level. She had practiced this part. She had told it to herself in the dark so many times that the words felt like stones in her mouth.

“He said he would have the settings cleaned. That was in January. In March, I saw the garnets at the theater on a woman named Della Rose, in a box directly opposite ours. Dominic was in the box with her. He saw me see it. And he raised his glass to me.”

She stopped.

“That is the point of it. That is what I did not understand for another year. He did not need the garnets. Two hundred pounds is nothing to him. He put them on that woman and sat her opposite me so that I would see. Because the whole of the last year was arranged so that I would see.”

“He wanted you to break it off,” said the Duke slowly.

“He wanted me to break it off badly. Publicly. Hysterically.” She almost smiled. “A man cannot jilt a dying man’s daughter and stay in society. But if she runs mad and throws him over in front of the Ashworths—which I did, Your Grace. I did exactly that in a supper room at the top of my voice. Then he is a very patient man who bore a great deal. And the two years since—he is charming about me.”

Clara looked at her hands.

“That is the whole of his method, and it is unanswerable. He is never cruel. He says my name kindly. He says that poor Miss Ashworth was always highly strung and that he blames himself and that he ought to have seen how it was with her. He said in a room in June that he had never been able to reach me. That I was the coldest woman he ever knew. And that it was nobody’s fault.”

She looked up.

“There are eleven people in London who will tell you that Dominic Hawthorne behaved beautifully and has never said one hard word about me. All eleven of them believe I am cold and mad and that a man who tried for two years could not warm me.”

The Duke of Blackwood sat perfectly still for a long moment.

“Miss Ashworth,” he said, “did you understand what you were doing last night when you turned around?”

“I don’t follow.”

“You put your arms around a stranger in front of forty people. In front of him.” He leaned forward. “You handed a man whose entire method is that you are cold and unreachable—the one story that proves it. He has been building the ground under that for two years. And you walked out onto it. And you did it on purpose to avoid his eye.”

Clara found she could not answer for a moment.

“Yes,” she said at last. “I have been sitting up all night with that.”

“Then hear the rest of it,” said the Duke of Blackwood, “because you are going to be told in about a fortnight, and I would rather it were me. He will not attack you. He will be heartbroken for you. He will go about London saying that he always feared something of this sort, and that the poor creature has thrown herself at a duke in a public gallery, and that he wishes there had been somebody to look after her.”

He paused.

“When the engagement is announced on Monday, he will say, kindly, sadly, to everybody—that he only hopes His Grace knows what he is taking on.”

“Yes,” Clara said. “That is exactly what he will say.”

“Then let him,” said the Duke. “And let him do it for five months while nothing whatever happens to prove it. That is the whole of my plan, Miss Ashworth. It is not very clever. And it will work. Because a man who says a woman is mad is a man who needs her to do something mad. And if she simply goes to dinners and behaves herself for five months, he begins eventually to look like a man with a grievance.”

Aunt Helena set down her work.

“He will not wait five months,” she said.

Both of them turned.

“Forgive me, Your Grace. I have sat here and said nothing for an hour, and I will say this one thing.” Clara’s aunt folded her hands. “That man is to marry Isabelle Croft in April. The Crofts are your sister-in-law’s cousins. There is a hearing on the eleventh of February about a child. He is not a bystander in your business. He is inside it.”

She looked at the Duke.

“The day that engagement is announced, he will understand that my niece is about to be respectable again. Standing next to a duke. In a position to be believed for the first time in two years. What do you suppose a man like that does then?”

Nobody said anything.

“He moves first,” said Aunt Helena. “That is what he does. He has done nothing else his whole life.”

The Duke of Blackwood looked at the old woman for a long moment.

“Ma’am,” he said, “would you be very much offended if I asked you to come and live in Grovener Square for six months?”