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 7

Cordelia folded the letter along its old creases very carefully — the way one folds a thing that has to last.

“Your grace,” she said, “I would like to go downstairs now. It is four in the morning. I am aware of the time. Your uncle has had my father’s paper in his waistcoat since midnight, and he has had three years to learn how to make a document disappear. If I wait until breakfast, there will be nothing left to show anybody. I want that letter in your hands, and I want it in front of a magistrate before the post goes out at eight, and I want to be standing in the room when somebody reads it to him. Do not tell me to be careful.”

“I was going to say,” said the Duke of Rothmir, “that I will come with you.”

The staircase at Rothmir House turns twice as it comes down into the great hall, and there is a half landing where the family portraits hang. It was on the half landing, with the letter in her hand and the Duke three steps behind her, that Cordelia Vain looked down and saw that the hall was not empty.

The lamps had been lit, all of them. Lord Marcus Rothmir stood at the foot of the stairs in his evening clothes as though he had not been to bed at all. Behind him, by the door, stood the house steward with his hat in his hands, two grooms, and a man in a plain black coat she did not know. Augusta Verrell was sitting on the hall bench in her traveling cloak, looking at the floor.

Lord Marcus put his hand on the newel post and looked up the stairs, and he was smiling, and he had all the time in the world.

“Miss Vain,” he said. “I wondered how long it would take you.”

Nobody moved on the stairs.

“You are mistaken,” said the Duke. “This lady is my grandmother’s companion.”

“This lady is Cordelia Anne Vain of Bell Yard, daughter of the late Thomas Vain, and she has been living under this roof since January under a name that is not hers.” Lord Marcus did not raise his voice at all. “Mr. Howlett, you will oblige me by making a note of the hour. Julian, come down off the stairs. You have been awake all night, and you are about to say something that will be repeated. Who is that man?”

“Mr. Howlett is clerk to Sir William Latter, who is a magistrate for this county, and who is at present sitting in your own library, because I did not think it proper to bring him into the hall.” Marcus turned his head slightly. “Steward — you engaged this young woman in January. On what references?”

The house steward looked at the floor. “To my lord — a Mrs. Fairbairn of Chelsea, and the Reverend Dr. Speed of Bell Yard. And this morning, there is no Mrs. Fairbairn in Chelsea, my lord. Dr. Speed died in 1812.”

“Thank you.” Marcus looked back up the stairs. “Miss Vain, forgive me, but I must ask you a question in front of witnesses, and I would advise you to consider your answer. Did you forge those references?”

Cordelia said nothing.

“Did you forge them?”

“Yes,” she said. The clerk’s pen moved.

“Thank you. And the box under your bed, which was opened last night in the presence of Lady Augusta Verrell, contained a bundle of papers belonging to your late father — extracts from the accounts of this duchy. Is that correct?”

“They were his own copies.”

“Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“So we have a young woman who entered a private house by means of forged references under a false name, who is in possession of extracts from that family’s confidential accounts, and who has spent the last three hours in the muniment room.” Lord Marcus turned to the man in the black coat. “You will want to see the ledgers, I imagine. There is a page cut out of the volume for 1816. I noticed it myself some weeks ago, and I regret extremely that I did not act upon it.”

“He is lying to you,” said Cordelia. Her voice went up into the roof of the hall and came back down, steady. “That page was cut out three years ago, and I have the corner of it, and he took it out of my room last night, and it is in his waistcoat pocket at this moment. Search him.”

Something happened in the hall. Not much. The steward’s head came up. Lord Marcus put his hand into his waistcoat and produced a snuffbox and a pencil and a folded handkerchief. He shook the handkerchief out. He turned the pocket inside out with two fingers.

“By all means,” he said. “Mr. Howlett.”

Nobody searched him. Nobody was going to search him. That was not what the gesture was for.

“I have the letter,” said Cordelia. “What letter is that?”

“The letter you wrote to my father in February of 1816, in your own hand, signed with your initials.” She held it up. “You told him that if he went to the trustees, they would see a clerk in debt with a child to keep, and they would not see you at all, because you had been careful. You told him what would become of me. You told him to burn it. He did not burn it. He sent it to the Dowager Duchess, and she has kept it in a box beside her bed for three years.”

For the first time, Lord Marcus Rothmir was silent. It lasted perhaps two seconds. Then he put out his hand, palm up, and said quite gently, “May I see it?”

“No, Julian—” He did not look away from her. “You are a duke, and I am your uncle, and I have run this estate since your father died. I am asking you to take that paper out of the hand of a self-confessed forger who has been in your muniment room all night, and give it to the magistrate’s clerk unread, so it may be examined properly. That is all. Let it be looked at by somebody who is not in love.”

“I am not.”

“Then it will cost you nothing,” said Marcus.

And that was well done. Cordelia understood it even as it happened — not a denial. A reasonable man asking a reasonable thing in front of a steward and two grooms and a clerk with a pen. And the only way to refuse was to look like a man protecting a woman rather than the truth.

The Duke of Rothmir came down the stairs and stopped beside her and held out his hand.

She looked at him. She had known him four hours. She had hated his name for three years. He had carried her out of a burning building and had a white seam across the back of his hand to prove it. He had sat in a library at one in the morning and pushed the physician’s certificate of her own death across the table.

She gave him the letter.

He did not give it to the clerk. He held it up under the lamp and read it himself, from beginning to end, standing in his own hall in his shirtsleeves at four in the morning, with every servant in the house standing round the walls. Then he folded it and put it inside his coat.

“Sir William may see this,” he said, “in my library, in ten minutes, with me present. It does not go into any other hand. Uncle, you will wait here. Julian—” this to himself, half a laugh in it, gone as soon as it came “—you will wait here.”

He was gone perhaps twelve minutes. Cordelia stood on the third stair with her hands folded because there was nowhere to sit and she was not going to lean against anything in that house. Nobody spoke to her. Augusta Verrell sat on the bench in her traveling cloak, and once she raised her head and looked at Cordelia, and there was nothing readable in her face at all.

When the library door opened again, the Duke came out first, and he was not the same color he had been going in.

Sir William Latter was a heavy old man with a red face and the manner of somebody got out of bed who does not intend to enjoy it.

“Which of you is Vain?”

“I am.”

“Hm.” He looked her over. “You have made a great deal of noise this morning, madam. Now — this letter. It is not signed. It carries two initials. It has no direction, no seal, no postmark, and no date beyond a month. And it was produced at four in the morning from the bedroom of a lady of eighty-one who is blind and cannot swear to how it came into her hands, by a young woman who has this quarter hour admitted to forging two references.” He handed it back to the Duke without ceremony. “I am not saying it is false, sir. I am saying that if I take it into a court on Monday, it will be laughed at by luncheon, and the person laughing will be your uncle’s counsel.”

“Then take the ledger,” said Cordelia. “What ledger?”

“The duplicate book. My father’s second set. It is in the muniment room on the top shelf at the north end, behind the marriage settlements. It has the whole page in it, uncut. All eleven payments, with the dates and the account they were drawn against.” She was already moving. “It has been in this house three years, and nobody has ever looked at it. I will fetch it now.”

“Sit down, madam. I will fetch it, and you will see. Mr. Howlett went up an hour ago,” said Sir William Latter, “at Lord Marcus’s request. The north shelf, behind the settlements.”

She stopped.

“There is nothing there,” said the magistrate.

The hall was very quiet.

“There is a black volume,” said Cordelia. “Plain black, no title on the spine, lying flat. I held it in my hands at half past two this morning. His grace held the lamp.”

“I did,” said the Duke.

“Then it has walked,” said Sir William, “because it is not there now.”

She turned on the stair. Lord Marcus Rothmir was standing by the fireplace with his hands behind his back, and he was not smiling, and he was not gloating, and he did not look at her at all. He was looking at the magistrate with an expression of grave and slightly weary concern, and it was perfect, and it would have convinced her if she had not spent the last four hours reading his handwriting.

“Sir William,” he said, “I am reluctant to press this, but there is a page cut out of the family ledger, and a book missing from a locked room, and a young woman in this house under a false name who has been in that room since midnight. I do not accuse her of anything worse than a girl’s grief, which I understand better than you may think. Her father was a thief, and it broke her. But the paper must be found.”

“Where is it?” said Cordelia. “Where did you put it? It was there four hours ago.”

“Julian said, Marcus, for God’s sake, look at her.” And she heard it then — she heard exactly what he was building, and she heard how good it was, and she stopped talking, but it was two sentences too late.

Sir William cleared his throat. “Miss Vain, I am obliged to ask you to come with Mr. Howlett to Bow Street this morning, and I am afraid I must have you searched by a woman before you leave the house. If the duplicate book is found in your possession, you will be committed. If it is not, there remains the matter of the references, which is an offence in itself, and the matter of the extracts, which is another.” He blew out his cheeks. “Your grace, this is your house and your ledger and your servant. The prosecution is yours to make or withhold. What do you say?”

The Duke of Rothmir was looking at his uncle.

Cordelia watched him do the arithmetic. It did not take long. She had done it herself, standing on the stairs, and it came out the same way every time. The letter would not stand alone. The duplicate book was gone. The only proof that nine thousand pounds had ever been stolen was the missing page, and the man who had it would burn it within the hour. If the Duke of Rothmir stood up in his own hall at four in the morning and accused his uncle of theft and murder on the word of a woman who had entered his house under a forged name, by Monday every paper in London would print the words Rothmir and fraud in the same line. The banks would call in the Northumberland mortgages. His grandmother would die in a lodging house.

Whereas if he waited — if he let it be small, a servant girl and a forged reference, nothing whatever to do with the family—

“Julian,” said Cordelia.

He turned his head and looked at her, and she saw the exact moment he decided, and she saw that he knew what it would look like, and that he was going to do it anyway.

“Sir William,” said the Duke of Rothmir, “I do not know this woman.”