SHE WORE NO JEWELS TO THE BALL—UNAWARE EVERY NOBLEMAN THERE HAD COME FOR HER

Chapter 8

He came at ten the next morning, as he had said. He brought with him a small, neat man in a black coat, who was introduced as Mr. Hale — his man of business.

Clara brought down the small lacquered box that held her father’s papers. She had kept it on the high shelf of her wardrobe behind her winter cloak, where no one had thought to look.

Her uncle came into the room. He was pale.

“Your grace,” Lord Whitmore said. “I do not understand.”

“Lord Whitmore,” said the Duke pleasantly, “Mr. Hale has a few small matters to put before you. Nothing alarming. Merely a review of certain accounts held in trust for your niece. He is a very thorough man. I believe you will find the conversation interesting.”

It took three weeks.

There were letters. There were visits. There was, at one point, a meeting in a solicitor’s office on Lincoln’s Inn Fields that Clara attended in a borrowed bonnet and that left her uncle looking ten years older.

The sum of fifteen hundred pounds was found — with interest — in an account that had been opened five years ago and that had received deposits and withdrawals in patterns that Mr. Hale described, in a flat, dry voice, as irregular. It was paid out to Miss Ashworth in full.

A small house in Bloomsbury was rented for her in her own name. A cook and a maid were engaged. A standing arrangement was made with a respectable older widow, a Mrs. Godwin, who agreed to live with Clara as a companion for propriety’s sake — until such time as Miss Ashworth’s circumstances changed.

Clara moved out of Whitmore House on a Tuesday morning in early May.

The lilacs in the back garden were in full bloom. The smell of them came in through the open windows of her small upstairs room as she packed. She packed her plain gowns. She packed her father’s books. She packed the small portrait of her mother — the one her aunt had called plain, and which Clara knew to be the work of a careful painter who had loved his subject.

Her aunt watched from the doorway. Her aunt’s mouth was a thin, straight line.

“You will regret this,” Lady Beatrice said quietly. “Society will not have you, Clara. He has made a spectacle of you. They will say you went after his money. They will say worse than that. You think you are leaving this house with dignity. You are leaving this house alone, and alone is what you will remain.”

Clara closed the lid of her small trunk. She fastened the buckle.

“Aunt,” she said, “when I came to live in your house, I was thirteen. I had lost both of my parents in seven days. I had nowhere else to go. You took me in, and I have always understood that this was a thing you did for me, and not a thing I could repay. I shall not pretend tonight that the years between then and now were kind. They were not. But I shall not pretend either that I owe you nothing. I owe you a roof. I owe you food. I owe you the dresses I wore and the candles by which I read. I shall send you within the year a sum that I judge fair payment for those things. After that, we shall not speak again. I think that is best for both of us.”

She lifted the trunk. The footman behind her aunt stepped forward to take it from her.

“Goodbye, Aunt.”

She walked past Lady Beatrice. She walked down the stairs. She walked out of the front door into the May morning, into the carriage that waited at the foot of the steps. It was not the Duke’s carriage. It was a hired one — because the Duke had said, very firmly, that she would make this journey on her own terms, in her own name, so that no one could ever say she had been bought.

She leaned her head against the window frame as the carriage pulled away. The sun was warm on her face. The streets of London rolled past — ordinary streets, full of ordinary people doing ordinary things. She watched them, and she thought: I am free. I am free. I am free.

The house in Bloomsbury was small and clean. The front door was painted blue. There was a narrow staircase, a parlor with a window that faced the street, a kitchen at the back with a small garden where the previous tenant had planted rosemary. Mrs. Godwin was already there, a plump, quiet woman who asked no questions and seemed content to read novels by the fire.

Clara stood in the middle of her own parlor, in her own house, with her own name on the lease, and she did not know what to do with her hands.

She had never owned a room before.

She walked to the window. She counted the panes of glass. There were eight. She smiled. Then she went to find her father’s books and began to arrange them on the shelf.