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

Chapter 7

The hearing was on the eleventh of February. It lasted two hours and twenty minutes. Clara was not permitted to speak at all.

She sat at the back with Aunt Helena and listened to Colonel Croft’s counsel describe her for forty minutes as a nervous, unfortunate, publicly unstable young woman about to be introduced into a household containing a child. Every particular of it was true. She sat with her hands folded and did not move her face once.

Then Mr. Graves stood up.

He did not attack Clara’s character, because there was nothing to defend. He did not call Della Rose, because Della Rose’s affidavit was on the other side, and Graves had said from the beginning that a witness who contradicts herself is a gift to the opposition.

He did something much worse.

He observed that the petitioners relied on an affidavit from a Mrs. Catherine Rose. He observed that Mrs. Rose resided at eleven Devonshire Place. He produced the lease of that house, signed on the ninth of February 1826 by Mrs. Rose and by Mr. Dominic Hawthorne. And he laid beside it the dates on which Mr. Hawthorne had been the affianced husband of Miss Clara Ashworth—the twelfth of March 1824 to the eleventh of March 1826.

Then he asked the court to consider one thing only. It took him eleven words.

“Who,” said Mr. Graves, “found this witness for the petitioners?”

And it came apart in about nine minutes.

Colonel Croft had not known. That was clear inside the first three minutes. He was a hot, honest, stupid man who had been handed a solicitor and an affidavit by his daughter’s intended and had asked no questions at all. And when he understood—publicly, in a courtroom, with the whole thing spread on a table—what had been done in his name and to whose account it would be laid, he stood up and asked leave to withdraw the petition.

Guardianship of Lily Blackwood was confirmed to her uncle on the eleventh of February 1828.

Isabelle Croft’s engagement was ended by her father within a week.

Nobody ever accused Dominic Hawthorne of anything at all. There was nothing to accuse him of. There never had been. But a courtroom had heard the dates read out in order, and eleven people repeated them. And by March, the thing that London knew about Dominic Hawthorne was the calendar. January, February, March. And no charming version of it existed, because he had never in his life prepared one.

He went abroad in the summer. He did not come back for nine years.

Della Rose was turned out of Devonshire Place in April. Clara went to Highgate in the last week of March and paid the summer term, and then the next four years of them, in her own name, out of a hundred and twenty pounds a year from a house at Fen Ditton that she was still nine hundred pounds in debt on.

She and Della Rose never became friends. They were not built for it. But they wrote at Christmas for twenty-six years. Four lines each. And Della’s boy went to Cambridge and became a very dull and extremely respectable land agent, which his mother regarded as the finest joke God ever played.