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 6

Nathaniel Ashford had not wanted a ball.

He had not wanted a fortnight of festivities or thirty families of the county installed in his house with their daughters polished and aimed at him like small cannons. What he wanted—what he had wanted for six years—was to keep a promise.

His mother had written to him in her last month, when her hands had begun to fail her, so the lines wandered like a tired traveler.

My dearest Nathaniel—when you read this, I shall be gone, and there is a thing I have left undone. Many years ago, I had a friend. She was dearer to me than any sister. Your grandfather considered her beneath this family, and your father agreed, and there was a quarrel, and a wrong was done to her in this house. A great wrong. She left us and married a good man far away, and I was forbidden to write to her, and I obeyed. That obedience is the sin I carry. She left a daughter. Find her, Nathaniel. What is in this house belongs to her. I never saw the daughter. I know only what my friend wrote—that the girl is the image of her mother. And her mother, my Rosalind, had hair like autumn fire.

The letter had not reached him at once. His mother had sealed it inside a book she asked to be buried with her copy of, a small volume of psalms kept at her bedside—and in the confusion after her death, the book had been packed away unopened with the rest of her private effects, the case not unsealed and sorted until ten years later, when Nathaniel had finally found the will and the strength to go through what remained of her. He had read the letter for the first time six years ago. And in the six years since, he had searched.

He had traced dead ends and burned records and pensioned-off servants who would not speak. His father had been thorough—account books gone, correspondence burned, the staff from those decades scattered. And the ones Nathaniel had traced were dead or ancient or would not speak of it.

The name Rosalind. Hair like autumn fire. A portrait in the long gallery with the second name gouged off the plate. That was his entire inheritance of truth.

So this spring, after every quiet channel had failed him, he had done the last thing left. He had opened the house that had stood shut for years. He let it be known that the Duke of Asheford sought a bride, and used the pretext to invite not only the great families of the county but every household that had ever held the smallest connection to Asheford—tenants risen to gentility, physicians’ families, the daughters and wards and dependents of old acquaintance, anyone who might, by some crooked path of years, have taken in a friendless girl. He made certain the invitations named daughters, cousins, and companions alike, so that no young woman travelling in another family’s shadow would be left behind. It was a wide net, cast in desperation, because every narrower one had come up empty. He would look at each young woman of the right age who came through his doors, one by one, and search her face for a dead woman he had seen once at four years old.

He was looking for fire. And finding none.

Every shade of gold and brown and black in three counties had passed before him at his own dinner table, and not one head of red hair among them. The fortnight was nearly half gone.

And now this.

A serving girl in a deep gray bonnet. A girl who shook like a leaf on the forecourt while her mistress apologized for her existence. A girl found at half past one in the morning, stopped dead in front of the one portrait in two hundred years of Ashfords that mattered. The one portrait he himself stood before more nights than he would admit.

She had lied to him. He knew it. The silence before her answer had lasted one breath too long. Her no had been too smooth—the practiced no of someone guarding something.

And that bonnet. She wore it like a wall. Indoors and out. In the heat of the kitchens and the cool of the halls. He had noticed it on the forecourt without knowing he was noticing—the way one notices a picture hung crooked.

What color is your hair? he thought. That is all I need. One inch of it.

He could simply order it. He was the Duke. He could stop her in a corridor tomorrow and tell her to remove the bonnet, and she would have to obey.

And if he was wrong, he would be a great lord who had cornered a friendless serving girl and stripped her covering off in his own house for a whim.

His father would have done it without a second thought. That was the final argument against.

He would ask the one person at Asheford Hall who had been here through everything. The housekeeper who had known his mother for forty years.

But when he found Mrs. Hodge in the stillroom the next morning, she was pale and strange, dropping things, forgetting orders. And when he asked about the girl in the gray bonnet, the color drained from her face so completely that he took a step toward her, afraid she would fall.

“Oh, Your Grace, forgive me—I was told I might find the housekeeper here.”

Agnes Thornfield stood in the doorway, all smiles. A shawl over her arm and honey in her voice, and eyes that went from the Duke to the gray-faced housekeeper to the closed distance between them, and understood in one sweep exactly what she had walked into.

“The girl in the gray bonnet? Surely you cannot mean our poor Clara.”

She laughed. A light, easy, rehearsed laugh.

“A kitchen girl, taken in by my late husband out of charity. We had an outbreak of lice in the village this summer. Dreadful. The girl’s head had to be shaved to the skin. Hence the bonnet, which I insist upon, for everyone’s comfort.”

She smiled.

“I do hope she has not been where she ought not to be.”