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

Chapter 5

Dominic moved on the twentieth of January, and he did it perfectly.

It came through Mr. Graves, the Duke’s solicitor, who arrived in Grovener Square before breakfast with a face like a wet Sunday.

“They have amended their petition.”

“On what ground?”

“On the ground of the proposed marriage.” Mr. Graves put the papers down. “They do not attack you, Your Grace. They have been very careful about that. They say—and I am summarizing eleven pages—that His Grace’s household is shortly to include a lady whose fitness to have the care of a young girl is a matter of public question. And they have particularized.”

Clara, standing by the window, said, “Particularized?”

“There are four instances, Miss Ashworth. I am sorry.”

He read them out.

The scene in the supper room at the Ashworths’ in twenty-six, when she had broken her engagement at the top of her voice in front of thirty people. The gallery at the Blackwood ball in November. A statement from a physician in Bath who had attended her in the spring of twenty-six, when she had not slept for nine days after her father’s funeral and her aunt had called somebody in. A statement that used the word nervous four times and was not technically untrue in any particular.

And the fourth was Della Rose.

“There is an affidavit from a Mrs. Catherine Rose—Della Rose,” said Mr. Graves, “who deposes that in March of twenty-six, Miss Ashworth accosted her at the theater in a public box and accused her before witnesses of wearing stolen jewelry.”

Clara sat down.

“I did not accost her,” she said. “I looked at her. I looked at her across a theater for about four seconds, and then I left.”

“Did you say anything to anybody?”

“I said to my aunt in the corridor that the woman was wearing my mother’s garnets.” Her hands were shaking now, and she put them in her lap. “There were people in that corridor. I do not know who. I do not know what they heard. It was two years ago. And I was—”

She stopped.

“It was two years ago.”

The room was very quiet.

“Mr. Graves,” said the Duke of Blackwood, “whose hand is behind this?”

“The petition is Colonel Croft’s, Your Grace.”

“That is not what I asked you.”

Mr. Graves hesitated. “It is not a thing I can put in a document.”

“Put it in the air.”

“Then—the physician’s statement was obtained by a Bath attorney who has never acted for the Crofts in his life. And who has acted eleven times for the Hawthorne family.” Mr. Graves took his spectacles off. “And Mrs. Rose is now living in a house in Marylebone on which the rent is paid quarterly by a bank draft I have not been able to trace. And would very much like to.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“He is going to put her in a witness box,” Clara said. “The woman who wore my mother’s jewelry is going to stand up in front of a court and say I am mad. And be believed. Because everything she says will be true.”

“Miss Ashworth—it is all true. Do you not see?”

Clara was on her feet.

“I did shout in a supper room. I did not sleep for nine days. I did hug a stranger in a gallery in front of forty people. Every single fact in that petition is a fact.” Her voice cracked. “That is what he does. He has never told a lie about me in his life. He simply arranges it so that the true things are the ones that finish you.”

“Then we make him tell one,” said the Duke of Blackwood.

Clara turned around.

“He has been careful for two years,” he said. “And careful men are only careful about the things they think of. Mr. Graves—how long has Mrs. Rose been in that house?”

“The lease was taken in the spring of twenty-six, Your Grace.”

“Before or after March?”

Mr. Graves looked at his papers.

“The seventeenth of February, twenty-six.”

The Duke of Blackwood sat forward very slowly.

“Miss Ashworth,” he said. “When did Hawthorne take your mother’s jewelry to be cleaned?”

Clara stood in the middle of the room with her heart going.

“January,” she said. “The second week of January, twenty-six.”

“And he was engaged to you until March.”

“Yes.”

“So in January, he takes a dying man’s daughter’s jewelry on a promise. In February, he signs a lease on a house in Marylebone for another woman. In March, that woman wears the jewelry in a public theater directly opposite his fiancée.”

The Duke was already standing.

“Graves—I want the lease. I want the name on it and the name of whoever paid the deposit. I want to know who witnessed the signature. And I would like to know today whether a dealer in Bath bought a piano in the spring of twenty-five, and from whom, and on whose authority.”

“Your Grace—none of that is a crime.”

“No,” said the Duke of Blackwood. “It is a diary. And he has spent two years telling England that this woman is mad. Which means every single date in it is a date on which he was doing something he would very much rather nobody laid beside another.”

He stopped at the door.

“The hearing is on the eleventh of February. That is twenty-two days. Miss Ashworth—I am going to ask you something. And you may refuse it.”

“Ask.”

“I need you to go and see Della Rose.”