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

Chapter 7

The Duke came to the Ashworth house the following afternoon, and this time Clara was not in the sitting room when he arrived. She was in the hall, and she watched her father lead him into the study, and she stood in the doorway of the morning room for fifty minutes with her hands clasped behind her back, waiting.

When Alexander emerged, his face told her nothing, which she had learned meant a great deal. Her father did not emerge at all. Clara found him later in the library, sitting in his chair with a glass of something he had not touched, looking at the fire.

“He has asked,” her father said, “to marry you.”

Clara had known it. She had known it the moment the words I would like to speak to your father again left his mouth in that study, with the morning light between them. And still, hearing it said aloud, she felt the floor shift under her feet.

“What did you say?”

Her father was quiet for a long moment. The fire ticked and settled. When he spoke, his voice was not the voice of the Earl of Ashworth. It was the voice of a man who had done arithmetic for twenty-five years and had just discovered the sums had never added up the way he had told himself they did.

“I said yes.”

Clara waited. There was more. She could hear it in the shape of the silence.

“He asked me —” her father stopped. Started again. “He asked me whether I knew, when we sent you to the Fenwick Ball, what your sister had done to his brother. Whether I knew the accusation was a lie.”

“And what did you tell him?”

Her father looked at her then, and there it was again — that strange, unfamiliar thing in his eyes. Seeing her. Actually seeing her.

“I told him the truth,” he said. “For the first time in a very long time, I told him the truth.”

Clara did not know what to do with that. She had spent twenty-five years being the one who absorbed what others discarded, the one who asked for nothing, the one who was sent. She did not know what to do with a father who was suddenly looking at her as though she had always been the answer and he had simply been reading the wrong question.

“Does mother know?” she asked.

“Your mother,” her father said, with a weariness that was new to her, “has known everything for a very long time and has arranged it all for the best. She will need to be told. I will tell her.”

Clara left him there, in the library, with the fire and the untouched glass. She went up to her room and took the pearls out of their case and sat with them in her hands, turning them over, looking at the worn letter on the clasp. A. It had meant nothing to her for eleven years. It meant everything now, and she still did not understand why, or what it would mean when Alexander finally explained it.

He came the next day, and they walked in the garden because it was the only place in the house where her mother’s voice could not reach them. The air was cold and clean, the gravel crunching under their feet, the bare trees throwing long shadows across the lawn.

“My brother,” Alexander said, “was sent to the Ashworth estate eleven years ago.”

Clara stopped walking.

“He was fourteen. You would have been twelve.” He did not look at her. He looked at the garden, at the trees, at anything but her, as though the memory required his full attention. “Our families were close then. There was a summer party — a hundred guests, a thousand small cruelties. My brother was shy. He was not the kind of boy anyone looked at.”

The bell in Clara’s chest began to ring.

“He was mocked,” Alexander said. “He was cornered in the garden by a group of older boys. He did not fight back. He did not know how. And a girl — a girl no one else had noticed either — came out of the trees and told them, very quietly, to leave him alone. She did not raise her voice. She did not threaten them. She simply looked at them until they went away. And then she sat with him, on the wall, and talked to him until the shaking stopped.”

Clara’s legs would not carry her. She sat down on a stone bench without meaning to.

“She gave him a book,” Alexander said. “A battered thing, a favorite of hers. She told him he could keep it. She told him the world was mostly noise and that he did not have to be part of it. And the next day, before the party ended, he gave her something in return. He gave her the only valuable thing he had.” He turned to look at her at last. “He took it from his mother’s jewel case without permission. A string of pearls.”

Clara heard the words as though from a great distance. The boy. The shy, shaking boy in the garden. The book she had pressed into his hands. The way she had found him again the next morning, red-eyed, holding out a box he could barely open, his voice cracking as he swore she must keep them, she must never let anyone take them, they were hers now.

She had kept them. For exactly one month.

Then her mother had found them, and the Countess of Ashworth had held them up to the light and pronounced them too fine for you, and they had disappeared into Rosalind’s jewelry case, and the boy had disappeared into a family that had stopped speaking to the Ashworths over a boundary dispute, and Clara had buried the whole summer so deep that even the name of the boy had become a bell she could not quite place.

“Thomas,” she said. It was barely a whisper. “The boy in the garden was Thomas. Your brother. The one who—” She looked down at the pearls in her lap. The one whose reputation her family had fed to the scandal. The one who had given her the only treasure he had ever owned, and whose name her sister had spent like a coin. “The one I have spent a decade watching be blamed for things he did not do.”

Alexander sat down on the bench beside her.

“He never forgot you,” he said. “He described you for years — the girl in the garden, the girl who looked at him like he was a person. When the scandal broke and he saw the Ashworth name in the papers, he wrote to me. He said, ‘She will tell the truth. She is the only one of them who will.'”

Clara stared at him. “You came to the Fenwick Ball—”

“I came to the Fenwick Ball expecting to see whether his description was true.” Alexander’s voice was quiet. “I came prepared to watch you perform the family’s apology like everyone else in that room. And then you walked in wearing the pearls my brother gave you eleven years ago, and you stood in front of Julian Warrick and told him the truth, and I understood that my brother had been right about you for eleven years before I ever laid eyes on you.”

He reached out and touched the pearls at her throat — a single, gentle touch, like a man confirming something.

“They were never Rosalind’s,” he said. “They were never anyone’s but yours.”