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 4

The room did a slow half-turn around her.

“I was in Coleman Street on the night of the fourteenth of March. I had gone to your father’s office at nine in the evening because he had written to me twice that week, and I had not answered either letter. I had spent the day being told, by four separate men, that Thomas Vain was a nuisance who wanted to complain about the way the duchy conducted its business.” His voice had gone very flat — the voice of a man reading out a thing he has written down so he will not have to feel it while he says it. “I was twenty-four. I had been the Duke for eleven months. I did not understand one page in ten of my own accounts, and I was ashamed of it. So I did what ashamed men do. I let other people manage it. And when a clerk wrote to me twice, I told my secretary to deal with him. And then on the Thursday I could not sleep, and I got up and called a cab and went down there myself to hear what he had to say.”

“Stop,” said Cordelia.

“When I turned into the street, the upper floor was already alight.”

“Stop.”

“There was a man standing in the road, not going in — standing, watching the windows — and when he saw my cab, he walked away quite calmly toward Lothbury. I did not see his face. I have thought about that man every night for three years.” He turned his hand over on the table, palm up, so the white seam showed. “The street door was open. The staircase was gone. There was a girl on the floor of the front room, with a beam across her back and her hair burning, and I could not lift the beam by myself, and a coalman from the corner came in behind me, and we did it together, and we carried her out into the road.”

Cordelia had stopped breathing somewhere in the middle of it.

“You were not conscious. You did not say a word. There was a scrap of paper in your hand, and when I tried to take it, to see what it was, your fist closed on it so hard I could not open your fingers.” He said it almost gently. “So I let you keep it. A coalman said there was a charity ward at Bartholomew’s that would take you that night, and I put you in my own carriage, and gave him a sovereign, and told him I would follow within the hour.”

“You did not follow.”

“I went back to the building,” he said. The dowager made a small sound in her chair. “I could hear a man shouting inside, on the ground floor, at the back. I got as far as the passage when the ceiling came down across it, and that is where I got this hand, and two men from the fire office pulled me out of the doorway by my coat and held me in the street while it burned.”

He was quiet a moment.

“By the time I reached Bartholomew’s it was four in the morning, and there were nine women in that ward, and none of the names meant anything to me. I did not know your name. I never learned it. I asked at the desk for a girl brought in from a fire, and they said there were four, and one of them died at two o’clock, and I looked at that one, and it was not you.

“And then I read in Monday’s papers that Thomas Vain had killed himself. And I went to my uncle, who had managed the duchy for me since I was fourteen, and I said there had been a daughter, and that I wished her found and provided for. And my uncle told me the daughter had died of her injuries on the nineteenth.”

He opened the leather folder at last and turned it round, pushing it across the table to her.

“You are looking at your own physician’s certificate of death, and the burial entry beneath it, Miss Vain. It cost my uncle four guineas, and it is the only reason I stopped looking for you.”

She looked down at it. Cordelia Anne Vain, Spinster, aged 20 years, of Bell Yard, died the 19th of March of burns and fever. A physician’s name at the bottom she had never heard in her life, and beneath it, a note in another hand, small and level, recording that the deceased had been buried at the expense of the Duchy of Rothmir as an act of charity.

She had been living in a back room in Southwark, turning her collar, eating once a day. Somebody had paid four guineas to bury her.

“Why,” she said. Her voice came out wrong. “Why would anybody trouble to do that? I had nothing. I was nobody. I was a clerk’s daughter with forty pounds and a burnt back, and I could not get a solicitor to read my letter. And somebody in this house sat down and paid four guineas to write me into the ground.”

“Yes,” said the Duke. “Why? Because you were in the building. And because you kept your father’s books.”

She sat very still.

“Miss Vain, I have spent three years learning to read an account. I am not good at it. I am better than I was. And there are nine thousand pounds missing from the Rothmir accounts between 1812 and 1816, and your father’s hand is on the entries. And I do not for one moment believe he took a shilling of it — because a man who steals nine thousand pounds does not write to his duke twice in a week asking to be received.”

“He wrote to you,” she said. “Twice? What did they say?”

“I do not know,” said the Duke of Rothmir. “They were not in the house when I looked for them. They were not in my secretary’s book. They were not anywhere.” He shut the folder. “Which is how I came to understand — rather slowly, and about two years later than I should have — that somebody in this family has been very careful with paper.”

The dowager’s cane came down twice. “Julian, it is nearly two. Take her upstairs.”

Both of them turned.

“Not to bed,” said the old woman, with enormous contempt. “Good God. To the muniment room. You have been walking around that door for two years like a dog around a hedgehog because you cannot read a ledger, and I cannot see one, and there has been a girl in this house since January who could take a column of your uncle’s figures apart before breakfast.” She sat back. “Give her the key, Julian. Take a lamp, go up the back stairs, and do not let Pritchard see you.”