They Shaved Her Head and Branded Her a Thief Before the Duke Chose His Bride — But When He Reached for Her Bonnet Before Everyone, the Copper Stubble Beneath Revealed the Daughter He Had Spent Years Searching For

 PART 4

For three days, Clara barely saw daylight.

Beatrice required dressing four times a day—morning dress for breakfast, walking dress for the gardens, afternoon dress for tea, and then the long campaign of the evening toilette that took two hours and left Beatrice looking like a golden confection and Clara’s fingers cramped from curling irons and button hooks. In between there were gowns to press, hems to mend, gloves to clean, and endless trips up and down the back stairs.

And through it all, Beatrice talked about the Duke. Always about the Duke.

“He looked at me at dinner twice. Lady Marchwood’s daughter tried to sit beside him at the musical evening, and he moved to the window. But when I sang, he stayed. Mother says he stayed because of me.”

Clara pinned and curled and said “Yes, miss” in the flat voice of furniture. She had not seen the Duke since the forecourt. Servants of visiting families did not see dukes. They saw back stairs and sculleries and the inside of linen cupboards, and that suited Clara well enough.

What she could not stop seeing in quiet moments was the ash-gray face of Mrs. Hodge on the landing. The housekeeper had avoided her since that night. Twice their paths should have crossed in the servants’ hall at supper, and twice Mrs. Hodge had turned and found urgent business elsewhere. Once Clara had felt eyes on her while she ate, and had looked up to find the housekeeper watching her from the doorway with an expression she could not read at all—grief and fear and something almost like hunger. And then the doorway was empty.

On the third night, Beatrice kept her late. There had been a card party, and Beatrice came up flushed with triumph because the Duke had partnered her at whist for one entire rubber. By the time Clara finally climbed toward the attic, the great house had gone quiet and the clocks were striking half past one.

She was crossing the landing on the second floor, candle in hand, when she found the way blocked. Two footmen were maneuvering an enormous wardrobe out of a guest room, the corridor entirely filled with it.

“Go through the long gallery, girl, and down the far stairs,” one of them said, sweating. “Unless you mean to stand there all night.”

Clara went through the door—and stopped.

The long gallery of Asheford Hall ran the length of the west wing. Moonlight came through the tall windows in great silver panels across the floor. On the inner wall, stretching away into the dark, hung the portraits. Generations of them. Men in armor, men in velvet, women in ruffs and silk, children with dogs and dead pheasants—all of them watching her pass with the flat, patient eyes of the painted dead.

She was more than halfway down the gallery when her candlelight passed across a frame and a color caught the corner of her eye.

Copper red.

She stopped. She did not decide to stop. Her feet simply stopped, all on their own.

She raised the candle.

The portrait was more recent than its neighbors. The paint still bright. It showed two young women in a garden, sitting close together on a stone bench with roses behind them. One was dark-haired, elegant, with a serious mouth and kind eyes, and she wore fine silk and pearls—clearly a lady of the house. The other sat beside her, dressed more simply but not poorly, and she was laughing. Caught by the painter mid-laugh in a way that made the picture seem alive. And her hair fell over her shoulder in a thick, shining, unmistakable rope of copper red.

The two women were holding hands.

Clara could not breathe.

She knew that face. She knew it from a small oval miniature that her father had kept on his desk until the day he died—the one thing of her mother’s that Agnes had not managed to sell or hide, because Clara had taken it the night of the funeral and kept it sewn inside the hem of her gray dress ever since.

Her mother. Sitting in a rose garden at Asheford Hall. Laughing. Holding hands with a great lady. Twenty-five years ago or more.

“Mama,” Clara whispered to the empty gallery, and her voice cracked on the word. “Mama.”

Her mother had never spoken of this place. Her father had never spoken of it. Pointing at Asheford Hall from the hilltop, he had said the grandest house in three counties, sweetheart—the way you speak of a palace in a story, a place with no connection to your own life at all.

Why? Why would no one have told her?

She stepped closer, lifting the candle toward the dark-haired lady—

And that was when she heard the footsteps.

Boots. Unhurried. Coming down the gallery behind her.

She turned. The candle flame swayed. And the Duke of Asheford walked out of the darkness into its light.