The Duke Thought the Girl He Had Carried from a Burning Building Three Years Ago Was Dead — Until His Grandmother’s Quiet Companion Was Humiliated Before an Entire Ballroom, Revealing the Scar That Made Him Go White and Whisper, “Where Did You Get That?”

PART 3

“Your grace, if you wish me to leave the house, I will go tonight, and I will not ask for the quarter.”

“Sit down, child.”

“Your grace—”

“Sit down.” The cane came down once. “You will stay. Because I am eighty-one years old, and nothing has happened in this house for nine years, and tonight something has happened, and I intend to see what it turns into.” She turned her head, listening for the chair. “Also because I have never in my life liked a girl who runs. Now pour the tea. My grandson will be an hour yet. He has gone to look at a fire report from 1816, which he keeps in his own desk, and which he takes out rather more often than he thinks I know about.”

Cordelia’s hands stopped on the pot.

Two floors above them, at the end of the east corridor, the door of the small blue bedroom opened. Lady Augusta Verrell had been very careful to be seen going up with a headache. She had shut her door loudly, and then walked the length of the passage in her stockings.

She did not know what she was looking for. She only knew what she had felt in the ballroom when Julian crossed the floor at a run, and it had nothing to do with a servant’s back, and everything to do with the look on his face.

She went through the drawers first and found nothing. The presses held four gray dresses and one blue. The desk held ink and forty shillings’ worth of nothing. Then she knelt and pulled the box from under the bed. It was locked. The lock was cheap, and Augusta had a hairpin.

Inside there was a bundle of papers tied with string, a black-edged funeral card for a man named Thomas Vain, and folded into a square of clean linen — the way one folds a relic — a scrap of burnt paper no bigger than a playing card. Half a column of figures, and one word above them, cut through the middle so that only the first part remained.

She almost put it back. But she had been raised in a house where money was discussed at breakfast, and her father owed eleven thousand pounds he could not pay, and her engagement was the only thing standing between her family and ruin. And she had just watched her future husband run across a ballroom for another woman.

So she took it downstairs. Not to the Duke. To the only man in that house who had ever treated her as an equal — who had told her, within a week of her arrival, that Julian was a difficult boy but she should not be discouraged, who lent her novels and asked after her mother, and had twice quietly paid a dressmaker’s bill she could not have explained.

Lord Marcus Rothmir was still awake. He was always still awake. He took the scrap from her with a smile and held it up to the lamp — and the smile did not go anywhere. It simply stopped meaning anything.

“Where did you get this?”

“From the companion’s room, Lord Marcus. It is nothing. A piece of an old account.”

“Where is she now?”

“In the library, with the dowager. Lord Marcus, you are hurting my hand.”

Lord Marcus let go of her wrist. He turned back to the lamp and looked at the burnt corner of paper the way a man looks at a face he has been assured, on excellent authority, was in the ground three years ago.

“No,” he said softly. “No, my dear, you were quite right to bring it to me. Quite right.” He folded it into his waistcoat. “Now go to bed. And Augusta — you will not mention this to Julian. Not tomorrow, not ever.”

“Why not?”

Lord Marcus smiled at her, and Augusta Verrell, who was not a kind woman and had never pretended to be, felt something cold move across the back of her neck.

“Because I am extremely fond of you,” he said, “and I should hate for anything to happen to your father.”

He came into the library at twenty minutes past one with a leather folder under his arm. He had not changed his clothes. He had not slept. There was a mark on his shirt cuff where he had put his hand against a wet window somewhere in that house and stood there a while.

“Grandmother.”

“You took your time.”

“I went to fetch something.”

“I know what you went to fetch,” said the dowager. “You have been fetching it for three years. Sit down, Julian, and put it on the table, and stop standing over the girl like a man about to say something he will regret.”

He put the folder between them and did not open it.

Cordelia looked at his hands rather than his face. They were not a duke’s hands. There was a white seam across the back of the right one, running from the knuckle of the thumb toward the wrist, old and flat and shiny, and she had seen enough of those in the charity ward to know exactly what had made it.

“Miss Gray,” he said. “Your grace, that is not your name.”

She said nothing.

“You may as well tell me. I have had a man in Southwark since Tuesday. He said it without any pleasure at all. You gave the agency an address in Bell Yard. There has been no family of the name of Gray in Bell Yard for twenty years. I did not know what I was looking for. I only knew that you read to my grandmother every morning, and that you flinched when the footmen lit the lamps.”

“A great many people dislike fire, your grace.”

“Not the way you dislike it.”

The clock on the chimneypiece went on with its work. Somewhere below them a door closed, and the last of the carriages ground away over the gravel, and three hundred people went home to talk about what they had seen.

She had rehearsed this for three years. She had built the conversation a hundred times, and in every version of it she was the one holding the knife, and she said the name like a blow. She had not once imagined saying it to a man who looked as if he already knew.

“My name is Cordelia Vain,” she said. “My father was Thomas Vain. He kept the books for your duchy. Three years ago your family’s solicitors told a coroner that he stole nine thousand pounds and burned his own offices to hide it, and let himself die in the fire. They buried him outside the wall. And I have spent every day since trying to make somebody, anybody, look at his ledgers again.”

She had expected him to stand, ring the bell, go cold and courteous, and have her taken out to the street with her box.

The Duke of Rothmir put both hands flat on the table and lowered his head, and for a moment he did not seem able to speak.

“Vain,” he said. “Her name is Vain. Julian. Three years.”

“Julian.” The cane came down. “Tell her. Look at her and tell her, or so help me I will do it for you, and I will do it badly.”

He lifted his head. “Miss Vain. I was there.”