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

Chapter 6

The new story began circulating three weeks after the Fenwick Ball.

It moved through drawing rooms and morning calls with the particular momentum of something that confirmed what people already half wanted to believe. It was a better story than the truth — a lovelier story, a story with a wronged heroine instead of a careless one. It was, Clara learned, the story that Rosalind had spent the past three weeks perfecting.

According to the new account, the Duke of Alderley’s younger brother had not been an innocent bystander in Rosalind’s broken engagement. He had pursued her with an inappropriate intensity that had made her position with Julian Warrick untenable. Rosalind had broken the engagement to protect herself. She was a victim, not an architect. The poor Ashworth girl, pursued by a Mercer—an Alderley—she could not escape, forced to sacrifice her happiness to spare the man she loved any further embarrassment.

Clara heard it from three separate sources in a single afternoon.

By evening she had traced it back to its origin with no difficulty at all, because Rosalind had never been as subtle as she believed herself to be. It had begun, as all of Rosalind’s rumors began, in the breakfast room of the Ashworth townhouse, over her sister’s shoulder, in her sister’s voice, directed at a girl with a talent for repeating things.

Clara sat with it for one night.

One night of understanding exactly what her sister had done, and why, and what it would cost Thomas Alderley if it took hold — and what it would cost Clara herself if she moved against it. She understood the arithmetic perfectly. She had always been good at arithmetic.

If she said nothing, the story would grow. Thomas Alderley’s name would be stained beyond recovery. The Duke — Alexander — would never believe she had not known, had not been complicit. Their courtship, whatever it was, would end. Her family would be satisfied. Her mother would be triumphant.

If she spoke, she would be publicly betraying her own blood. Her family would never forgive her. She would be exiled from everything she had ever known. And it might not even work — Rosalind had already won, because the story was already out, and a story, once told, is very hard to untell.

Clara Ashworth sat in the dark of her room with the pearls in their case on the dressing table, and she thought about a boy with a shy face and a summer she had almost forgotten. She thought about the unsealed letter on her father’s desk. She thought about the word reckless, underlined twice.

In the morning she put on her coat and walked to the one place she had not planned to go.

Alderley House rose against the gray November sky like a held breath. The footman who opened the door did not recognize her, and then did, and she watched the recognition pass over his face like weather. She gave her name. She asked, with a steadiness she did not feel, whether his grace was at home.

She was shown into a study that smelled of old paper and woodsmoke. The Duke rose from behind his desk the moment she entered, reading her face with the unhurried attention he brought to everything. He did not ask what had happened. He simply waited, the way a man waits when he knows the important thing has not been said yet.

“Your brother,” Clara said. “There is a new story. About your brother.”

She told him all of it. The new story and its source. The full sequence of what had happened and what she believed her family had known from the beginning. She did not protect anyone in the telling. She had carried other people’s comfort for a very long time, she told him. She was done with it.

She told him about Rosalind — the real Rosalind, not the one who smiled at balls. She told him about the breakfast room, about the way her sister collected people’s secrets the way other women collected gloves, about the girl with the talent for repeating things. She told him about her mother’s letter, and the word reckless, and the way her father had looked at her — actually looked at her — for the first time in twenty-five years.

She told him about the unsealed letter on her father’s desk. The two pages of cold, formal fury. The name that had struck her chest like a bell she could not quite place.

When she finished, the room was quiet.

“You came here knowing this makes your own position worse,” the Duke said.

“Yes.”

“Your family will not forgive it.”

“No.” Clara met his eyes. “They will not.”

He was still for a moment. Then he crossed to his desk, sat down, and wrote two letters with the focused efficiency of a man who had already decided what needed to happen and was now simply executing it. He sealed both. He handed one to his footman with instructions she did not hear. The other he held for a moment, looking at it.

“I am sending Julian Warrick a full written account of what my brother can confirm,” he said. “Which is considerable. Warrick has the standing and the motive to put this to rest publicly. He will do it.”

“A story, once told, is very hard to untell,” Clara said quietly.

“Unless,” the Duke said, “it is a story. And you are holding the truth.” He set down the second letter. “Thomas will be embarrassed. But he will be vindicated. Which matters more.”

He looked at her steadily across the desk, and the morning light came through the tall windows and lay across the carpet between them. Outside, London carried on its ordinary noise — hooves on cobblestones, a vendor’s distant call, the particular texture of a city that did not stop for private reckonings.

“I would like to speak to your father,” the Duke said.

“You have already spoken to my father.”

“I would like to speak to him again.”

Clara held his gaze. “Your mother will not approve.”

“My mother,” the Duke said, “approved of very little that has ultimately proven worthwhile.” Something crossed his face — not quite a smile, but its near neighbor. “She also told me last week that you were not what she expected. From her, that is significant endorsement.”

Clara looked at the man who had crossed a ballroom for no reason she had asked for. Who had stood beside her when standing cost something. Who had told her difficult truths without using them as weapons. Who was now sending letters on behalf of a brother he loved, and looking at her like she was the fixed point in the room.

“It is not entirely impossible,” she said. “In case you were wondering.”

The Duke understood her immediately. “I was,” he admitted. “Wondering.”