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 5

He was in his shirtsleeves, his cravat loosened, a book hanging from one hand—a man who had been reading late in his own house and had seen candlelight moving where no candlelight should be. He stopped a few feet away. His eyes went from her to the portrait and back to her, and something in his face sharpened.

Clara dropped into a curtsy so fast she nearly guttered the candle.

“Forgive me, Your Grace. The corridor was blocked. The footman said to come through. I lost my way.”

“It is half past one in the morning.”

“Yes, Your Grace. My mistress was late to bed.”

Silence. She kept her eyes down on the moonlit floor, on his boots—the same boots that had stopped in front of her on the gravel. Her heart was hitting her ribs so hard she thought he must be able to hear it.

He did not tell her to go. Instead, his boots moved, and she felt him come to stand beside her, facing the portrait.

“You were looking at this picture.”

“The candlelight caught at it, Your Grace. I meant nothing by it.”

“Most people walk past it,” he said. “It is not large, and it is not important. Two hundred years of Ashfords on this wall, and you stopped at this one.”

He paused.

“Why?”

Careful, said a voice inside Clara. The voice of survival. The thing that makes a creature go still in tall grass.

“The lady’s hair, Your Grace. The red. It is an uncommon color. It caught my eye. That is all.”

“Yes,” the Duke said slowly. “It is an uncommon color.”

He turned his head, and she felt him look at her—at the deep gray bonnet, at the shadow where her face was. When he spoke again, his voice was very quiet.

“Do you know this woman?”

The question stood in the dark gallery between them like a third person. And Clara, staring at her mother’s laughing painted face, with her mother’s miniature sewn into the hem of the dress she was wearing at that very moment, heard herself say:

“No, Your Grace. I have never seen her before in my life.”

The lie came out smooth and small and steady. She did not know why she told it. Only that every nerve in her body had insisted on it. The way you snatch your hand from a flame before you have even felt the heat.

The Duke looked at her a moment longer. Then he nodded once and stepped back, and the coldness came down over his voice again like a shutter.

“The far stairs are through the second door. Take a footman’s route in future. Good night.”

“Good night, Your Grace.”

She curtsied and went, forcing herself to walk and not run, her candle shaking light across the frames. At the gallery door, she could not help it. She looked back.

He was still standing in front of the portrait in the moonlight. Perfectly still. Looking up at the two painted women as if they might speak.

Clara slipped through the door. And it was only there, in the last reach of her candlelight, that she saw the small brass plate fixed to the frame’s lower edge. The plate was engraved with two names. The first said Lady Catherine Ashford.

The second name was there too. But someone had taken a blade to it. The brass was scored through with deep, deliberate scratches, gouged over and over until the letters beneath were almost gone.

Almost.

Because whoever had done it had missed the first three letters. Tiny and bright in the candlelight, they burned into Clara’s eyes as she stood alone in the dark stairwell.

R O S.

Her mother’s name had been Rosalind.