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 8

The hall did not make a sound.

“She has been eleven weeks in my grandmother’s service, and I could not have told you her name before last night. She came into this house on false papers, and she has been in my muniment room in the dark. I will not stand between her and the law.” He was not looking at her anymore. “Take her to Bow Street. I shall be occupied in the country for some days on estate business, and I do not wish to be applied to on the subject.”

That was all.

They came for her from both sides. The steward’s wife searched her in the little room behind the hall, unkindly and thoroughly, and found forty shillings’ worth of nothing, and Cordelia stood with her arms out and looked at the wall.

They brought her out through the front door — which she had never once been permitted to use — into a gray, wet six o’clock, with the lamps still burning along the square. At the bottom of the step, she stopped.

“Ask him what he was doing in Coleman Street on the fourteenth of March,” she said, to the magistrate’s clerk, to the grooms, to anybody. “Ask him who was standing in the road watching that building burn. Ask him who paid four guineas to bury a girl who is standing here.”

Nobody wrote it down.

She looked back once from the carriage step. The Duke of Rothmir had not come out. The door of the house was shut, but at the top of it, in the long window over the porch, there was a lamp burning and a figure standing perfectly still behind the glass, with its hand flat against the pane.

She turned her back on it and got into the carriage.

They kept her at Bow Street through the day, and at seven that evening moved her to the house of correction at Cold Bath Fields, and put her in a room eleven feet by seven with a woman who had been taken for coining and did not speak at all. There was one window, high up and barred. There was straw. She sat down against the wall with her knees drawn up and her back against the cold stone, and it hurt where the scar was, because the scar always hurt in the cold. For the first time in three years, she did not mind.

At some point in the night, the coining woman said, “You are the Duke’s one.”

“No,” said Cordelia. “I am nobody’s one.”

Word had come up from the Rothmir kitchens by the middle of the next morning that the Dowager Duchess had been found on the floor of her bedroom at half past six, that her right side would not answer, and that she had been trying to reach the bell rope, and could not now speak a word that anybody could understand.

Cordelia heard it from a turnkey who thought she would like to know. She thought about the old woman’s hands closing on the counterpane. I have never in my life liked a girl who runs. She put her forehead down on her knees and stayed like that a long time.

On the third day, a little after eight in the evening, the door opened, and a turnkey came in with a lantern and held out his fist. There was a piece of paper in it, folded very small.

“Who gave you this?”

“A man on a black horse,” said the turnkey. “Not liveried. He knew the yard gate and he knew my name, and he gave me a guinea and rode off toward Islington. And I never come in here tonight. Do you hear?”

She waited until he was gone. The paper was one strip torn off the bottom of a larger sheet, in a hand large and quick and impatient, and she had seen it exactly twice before.

Say nothing, not one word, to any man who comes, whatever he tells you. Nine days. Trust me. Nine days. — J.

She read it four times, standing under the barred window in the last of the light. Trust me. She thought about a hall full of servants and a man saying I do not know this woman in the flattest voice she had ever heard. She thought about her father coming home to Bell Yard for four years and eating his dinner and never saying one word to protect her, and how that had been love, and how it had killed him, and how nobody had ever asked her whether she wanted to be protected.

Everybody in my life keeps deciding things about me in rooms I am not in.

The lantern was still burning in the passage. She put the corner of the paper into the grill of it and held it until it caught, and dropped it on the stone floor, and watched it curl. It was the first time in three years she had willingly looked at a fire.

“Nine days,” said Cordelia Vain, to the empty room.

The sessions house at Clerkenwell was full by nine in the morning, which was not usual for a case of forgery, and everybody in the room knew why. A duke’s household. A girl with a burnt back who had stood in the middle of a ballroom and refused to cover herself. Half the women in the public gallery had been at that ball, and when she was brought up from below, they looked, all of them, and Cordelia Vain stood in the dock in a gray dress with her hands folded and let them.

She had not spoken to a living soul in nine days. Not to the clerk of the arraigns. Not to the man on the fifth day who said he was sent by a friend and could arrange things quietly if she would sign a short statement. Not to the second man on the seventh day, who mentioned a passage to Halifax and forty pounds a year for life, and went away with a face like a slammed door.

Not one word to any man who comes, whatever he tells you. She had done it out of stubbornness, not faith. She wanted that understood, if only by herself.

Lord Marcus Rothmir was in the second row, in gray, with his hat on his knee, wearing the manner of a man performing a painful family duty in public. Twice he shook his head slowly at something and let people see him do it. The Duke of Rothmir was not in the room.

The indictment was read: two counts of uttering a forged character with intent to obtain a situation. One count of larceny of a book, value forty shillings, the property of the Duke of Rothmir.

“How say you — guilty or not guilty?”

“Not guilty,” said Cordelia.

The prosecution took forty minutes, and it was very good, because it was true. Have you anything to say in your own defense?

She opened her mouth. Nine days. Four hours’ sleep and no counsel and one letter a magistrate had laughed at. She could feel the whole shape of what she wanted to say pressing up behind her teeth — my father was not a thief, that man in the second row wrote to him and threatened me by name, ask him what he was doing in Coleman Street — and she would say it badly, in a hurry, in a room that had already decided, and it would go into the papers as the ravings of a forger and never be able to be said properly again.

“Not yet,” said Cordelia Vain.

The recorder raised his eyebrows. There was a movement at the back of the court, and the door swung, and a voice said, “My lord, I beg the court’s pardon.”

The Duke of Rothmir came up the center of the floor in a traveling coat with nine days of the road on it — and behind him a small round man carrying a japanned box with both arms, and a clerk with an armful of ledgers, and two men who plainly did not want to be there at all.

“My lord, the prosecutor in this matter is myself. I withdraw the count of larceny. I withdraw the two counts of forgery. And I ask leave to lay evidence in a different matter before this court.”