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 6

The Dowager Duchess of Rothmir was sitting up against six pillows with a shawl round her shoulders when they came in.

“Well?”

“His signature is on every payment,” said the Duke.

“Of course it is,” said the dowager.

Cordelia stopped just inside the doorway. “You knew.”

“I knew nothing. I am eighty-one and I am not permitted to know things. I am only permitted to be visited.” The old woman’s mouth was hard. “But I have been sitting in this house since 1787, and I am not deaf, and I was not always blind. Come here, child. Nearer than that. Sit on the bed like a Christian.”

Cordelia sat.

“Now,” said the dowager, “when did Julian’s uncle begin to buy horses?”

“Grandmother.”

“Answer me, Julian.”

“1813,” said the Duke slowly.

“And the shooting box in Perthshire?”

“’14.”

“And in 1815 he settled eleven hundred pounds on that woman in Half Moon Street, which he thinks I do not know about, and which I know about because I have been having my letters read aloud to me for nine years by a succession of girls who cannot spell and do not think.” She turned her face to Cordelia. “That is the thing about being blind, my dear. People stop hiding the paper. They only stop saying it out loud.”

“Your grace,” said Cordelia. “The money was drawn against the Northumberland rents. Lord Marcus could not have drawn it. The signature—”

“Naturally he could not draw it. He was not the trustee. He was the guardian. He could not touch a shilling of Julian’s money without a clerk to enter it and a duke to sign it. And there was no duke, because the duke was fourteen years old.” The dowager’s hands closed on the counterpane. “So he needed a clerk who would enter it. And when the Duke turned twenty-one and began, however slowly, to ask questions, he needed the clerk to be a thief.”

“My father was not—”

“Child,” said the old woman. “Listen to me. I do not say your father was innocent. I say he was used. There is a difference, and you had better learn to live in it, because it is where you are going to spend the rest of your life.”

She put her hand out sideways, feeling along the table beside the bed, and found a little rosewood box. “In the February before he died, your father wrote to me. Not to my grandson, who was young and proud and would not have received him. To the old woman in the upstairs room, because he had met me twice in 1811 and asked me a sensible question about the Northumberland drainage, and I never forgot it.”

She worked at the lid with her thumbnail. “The letter came the second week of February. My maid read it to me. I could not answer it because I could not write, and because I was a coward, and because if I had dictated an answer to a girl in this house, it would have been in Marcus’s hands within the day.” She got the lid open. There was a folded paper inside, gone soft at the creases. “So I did the only thing I could think of. I kept it.”

Cordelia took the letter. It was not her father’s hand. That was the first thing, and it stopped her breath. The paper was heavy and cream, the writing large and easy and quick — a gentleman’s hand — and it was not a letter to the dowager at all.

“Read it aloud,” said the old woman. “I have waited three years to hear it in a voice that is not my maid’s.”

Cordelia turned it to the lamp.

“Vain, you will not write to me again on this subject. You mistake your position entirely. You did not discover the payments. You entered them. You did not object in 1813, nor in 1814, nor in the spring of 1815 when you accepted forty pounds against your daughter’s school fees. A man who has entered eleven payments in four years is not a witness. He is the thing itself.

“You tell me your conscience will not permit you to continue. Let us be practical. If the matter goes before the trustees, they will see eleven entries in your hand and one signature which is also in your hand. They will see a clerk of no family in debt with a child to keep. They will not see me at all, for I have been careful, and you have been useful. And the difference between us is that I have never once put my pen to paper.

“You will be transported, Vain. That is the best of it. Consider what becomes of a girl of twenty with a father in Botany Bay and no money and no protection whatever. Consider it seriously. I have made inquiries about your daughter’s situation, and I confess I did not find it reassuring.

“Burn this. Continue as you have done. In September I shall be in a position to replace the whole sum from my wife’s settlement, and there will be nothing to find, and you and I will never speak of it again.

“M.”

There was no more.

Cordelia Vain sat on the edge of an old woman’s bed with the letter in both hands, and the room was entirely silent, and outside the window the first gray was beginning behind the trees.

“He signed it,” she said. “He wrote it down. He said he never put his pen to paper, and he sat down and he wrote it down.”

“Men like that always do, in the end,” said the dowager. “They cannot help it. It is not enough for them to win. They must be seen to have been clever.”

“He threatened me. By name.” Her voice was not shaking. It had gone somewhere past shaking, into a place that was very clear and very cold. “My father entered those payments because if he had refused, Lord Marcus would have laid the whole nine thousand at his door and let him hang for it, and I would have been on the street at twenty with nothing. So he signed every quarter for four years. He sat down at that desk and signed his own name to another man’s theft. And he came home and ate his dinner with me, and never said one word.”

“He was buying you four years,” said the Duke quietly. “He was waiting for September. And in February, he stopped waiting.”

He had gone to the window, standing with his back to the room. “He wrote to my uncle to say he would not go on. My uncle wrote that, and your father read it, and understood at last that there was never going to be a September, and that the only thing standing between his daughter and the street was a man who had just put in writing that he had made inquiries about her situation.”

“And then he wrote to you twice,” said the Duke of Rothmir, “in the first week of March, and I did not answer, because I was ashamed of not understanding my own accounts, and because a clerk who wishes to complain about the way the duchy conducts its business is a matter for one’s secretary.”

Nobody said anything for a while.

“He was going to give it to you himself,” Cordelia said. “That is what he meant. I have done a thing I cannot undo, but I can still put it right. He had the duplicate book, and he had cut the page out of the office ledger to carry it, and he was going to bring both of them to you on the Friday and lay it in front of you and take whatever came.”

“Yes. And on the Thursday night, his office caught fire.”

The Duke turned round.

“Yes,” he said.