The Plain Sister Was Sent to Apologise for Her Sister’s Scandal — The Duke Married Her Instead

Chapter 4

They reached the edge of the forming set before Clara spoke.

“You did not need to do that.”

“No,” the Duke agreed simply. “It will cost you something.” He positioned himself across from her as the musicians tuned. “Most worthwhile things do.”

The reel began, and it required their separation — carrying her down the line and back again, her hand passing through the hands of strangers, her skirts catching the candlelight. Twelve beats to process that the Duke of Alderley had come to this ball knowing the full shape of the thing. Knowing what Rosalind had done to his family. Knowing what Clara had been sent here to do. And had still crossed the room to stand beside her.

She did not understand it entirely. She filed it alongside the other things she did not yet understand about this evening, which were accumulating rapidly.

When the figure brought them back together, she said, “Your brother. Is he well?”

The Duke’s jaw tightened, the smallest degree. “He is in the country. He finds London disagreeable at present.” A pause. “He is twenty-three years old, and he was named in a scandal he had no part in.”

“I know,” Clara said. “That is why I told Mr. Warrick.”

He looked at her directly then — not the assessing glance he had offered the room all evening, but something more deliberate. “You understand that telling Warrick publicly made your own position worse tonight. Not better. Your family will hear of it before morning.”

“Yes.”

“Then why?”

Clara turned with the reel, came back. The music carried her to him and away, and in the beat before she passed his hand, she said, “Because he is twenty-three years old and he did not do anything. And I am very tired of watching damage be redirected toward people who do not deserve it.”

The reel ended. He returned her to the edge of the room, and then he did not leave. He stood beside her, and this Clara understood was a different thing entirely from the dance. The dance could be dismissed as courtesy. This was a declaration — small, quiet, and absolutely legible to every person in the room who understood how these things worked.

She did not ask him to leave. She was too tired, and he was too steady, and the evening had already cost her more than she had brought with her.

“You asked,” the Duke said presently, “whether my brother is well. It was the first question anyone has asked me about him since the papers began. Not what damage he might do, not how to contain the rumor. You asked if he was well.”

“Someone should.”

“Yes,” he said. “Someone should. I confess I did not expect it to be you.”

“You are not the only one,” Clara said, “who did not expect it to be me.” She looked out across the room, where Lady Fenwick’s court had resumed its murmuring, where the current had shifted and everyone could feel it. “I came here tonight expecting to be a footnote. I find I have become a headline.”

“You have become,” the Duke said, with a precision that felt almost like a gift, “yourself. Which is rarer in this room than you could possibly imagine.”

He was quiet for a moment. Then, with the unhurried attention he brought to everything, he asked, “Your pearls, Miss Ashworth. Where did they come from?”

The question landed oddly. Clara’s hand moved to her throat. “They are my sister’s. Borrowed for the evening.”

“Your sister’s.” He repeated it, tasting it, and his eyes did something she could not read. “And your sister is quite certain of that?”

“I… yes. Of course.” The pearls were suddenly heavier. “They have been Rosalind’s for as long as I can remember. My mother—” She stopped. Something in his stillness had changed. “Why do you ask?”

The Duke looked at her for a long moment. The music was starting again, and the room was watching them both, and there was something in his face that she could not name — recognition, and something tender underneath it, and something else entirely that looked almost like grief.

“Because I know where they came from,” he said. “I have known since the moment you walked through the door. And I think, Miss Ashworth, that you do not know whose pearls you are wearing.”

The reel began. He offered her his hand.

“But I believe,” he said, “that is a conversation for another night.”

Clara took his hand again, because there was nothing else she could do. The candles blurred. The music rushed. And somewhere in the darkest corner of her memory, the bell rang once more, louder than before — a boy’s shy face, a summer she had almost forgotten, and a string of pearls pressed into her hands by a child who had sworn she would keep them forever.

She had kept them. And then her mother had taken them.

And the Duke of Alderley knew.