They Tore Her Gown at the Bride Selection and Three Hundred Guests Laughed — But the Feared Duke Had Heard the Tear, Seen the Cruel Hand Behind It, and Refused to Let Her Shame Become Their Triumph

PART 3

The Dowager Duchess Augusta received him in her private sitting room an hour later, when the last carriages of the lesser guests had rattled away down the long drive, and only the candidates and their families remained under Gcoat’s roof for the weeks of trial ahead.

She sat very upright in her chair by the fire, her silver hair dressed high, her rings catching the light as she folded her hands and regarded her grandson with the particular expression she reserved for the rare occasions he had surprised her.

“You gave that girl your coat,” she said without preamble. “In front of every family of consequence in three counties.”

“I gave a guest of my house a covering for her shoulders,” Oscar said, lowering himself into the chair opposite. “I would have done the same for any woman so treated.”

“You would not,” his grandmother said, “and we both know it.”

She studied him a long moment, her sharp eyes missing nothing — not the set of his jaw, not the way his hands, usually so still, had curled slightly against the arms of the chair.

“I have known you since you were an infant in this house, Oscar. And I have watched you become, these eleven years past, a man half the kingdom crosses the street to avoid offending. I have never once seen you cross a ballroom for anyone.” She paused. “Tell me what you saw.”

He told her plainly, without embellishment, exactly what his eyes had caught in the space of two heartbeats — the deliberate grip at the shoulder seam, the timing calculated to the candlelight, the satisfaction in Lady Cresida’s face before she had thought to hide it.

His grandmother’s mouth thinned as he spoke, and by the time he had finished, the fire had burned low, and her folded hands had gone tight enough that her rings pressed pale marks into her fingers.

“I built this selection to find a woman worthy of Gcoat,” she said at last, quietly, more to the fire than to him. “Not a den of vipers dressed in silk.”

“You built it on the assumption that cruelty announces itself,” Oscar said. “It rarely does. It wears blue silk and calls itself an accident.”

“And you are certain,” his grandmother said, “that what moved you tonight was outrage at cruelty and not—” she let the sentence hang, watching him with the frankness only a grandmother of seventy years could employ against a duke feared by half the peerage, “—something else.”

Oscar was quiet a moment, choosing his words with the same care he had once given to dispatches that might decide whether men lived or died.

“I do not yet know what moved me tonight, Grandmother. I know only that I will not stand by while it happens again.”

“That,” said the Dowager Duchess, rising slowly, gathering her shawl about her, “is precisely what worries me. Lord Rendell’s daughter is not a woman to be crossed lightly, Oscar, whatever her methods. His lordship’s support in the north is worth more to this house, this year of all years, than I care to explain to you at this hour. If you humiliate Cresida Ashworth publicly without proof beyond your own eyes, you hand her father grounds to call it slander, and you hand Gcoat an enemy we cannot presently afford.”

“I have no intention of humiliating anyone without proof,” Oscar said, and something in his voice — flat, certain, entirely without the heat he had shown Cresida in the ballroom — made his grandmother pause at the door and look back at him. “I intend to find it.”

She held his gaze a moment longer, and something in her stern old face softened just slightly into an expression he had not seen there in a very long time.

“Your father,” she said, “would have done exactly the same thing tonight. Walked the length of that ballroom for a woman in a torn gown, and dared the whole world to say a word against it.” She smiled, faint and a little sad. “I did not think I would live to see you do anything so like him. Mind you find your proof quickly, Oscar. I cannot protect you from Rendell’s temper forever. Not even as Duke.”

When she had gone, Oscar sat alone by the dying fire a long while, turning the signet ring on his finger, thinking not of Lord Rendell’s northern support, or the delicate architecture of alliances his grandmother had spent a decade building, but of a torn seam catching candlelight, and a chin lifted against three hundred strangers, and a voice that had said, low and unbroken — you needn’t have done that.

He summoned Pell before he retired. His steward found him still in his shirtsleeves, standing at the window of his study with his back to the door, looking out over the dark lawns, where the last candlelit windows of the guest wing still burned. Pell had served the house for eleven years — since Oscar had first come home from the war to bury his father and take up a title he had never wanted, and could not now escape — and in that time had learned to read his master’s silences the way other men read a book.

“Your Grace.”

“The gown,” Oscar said, without turning. “Miss Beauchamp’s gown. It did not tear itself, Pell. And I mean to know precisely how it was arranged, before Lady Cresida Ashworth has a chance to cover her tracks. Someone dressed that girl tonight. Someone laced her into that bodice, and someone, perhaps, weakened the seam beforehand, or arranged for it to be seized at the correct moment. Find out who her maid was for the evening, and whether that maid was in any way known to Lady Cresida’s household.”

“At once, Your Grace.” Pell hesitated at the door. “May I ask — does Your Grace intend to act on what he finds?”

Oscar turned from the window at last, and in the candlelight his face was unreadable — the mask he had worn for eleven years settled back into place, save for his eyes, which Pell, who had known him a very long time, recognized as burning with something the steward had not seen there since before the old Duke’s funeral.

“I intend,” Oscar said, “to see that no one under my roof is made to suffer for another’s cruelty, and call it chance. Find me the maid.”

Pell bowed and withdrew, and Oscar was left alone with the fire and the dark lawns and the slow, unfamiliar turning of something in his chest he did not, even now, have a ready name for.

He rose before dawn and walked the gardens alone, as he often did when sleep would not come, down through the yew hedges his grandfather had planted, and along the low stone wall that marked the edge of the formal grounds, where the mist still lay thick over the grass. It was there, rounding the corner by the old sundial, that he came upon her.

She had not expected to meet anyone at such an hour. She wore a plain wool cloak over a morning gown, far simpler than the ruined silk of the night before, her dark hair loosely pinned, a basket of early-cut flowers over one arm — as though she had risen with the birds to walk the gardens rather than lie abed, letting the previous night’s shame turn over and over in her mind until it wore a groove.

She stopped short at the sight of him, color rising in her cheeks, and dropped a quick, startled curtsy.

“Your Grace. Forgive me. I did not think anyone else would be about so early.”

“Nor did I expect company,” Oscar said, and found, to his own faint surprise, that the words came easier than he had expected. “You are an early riser, Miss Beauchamp.”

“I have always been,” she said. “My aunt says it is a habit left over from years when there was work to be done before the household woke, and no maid to do it for us.”

She said it plainly, without apology, meeting his eyes as she said it, and Oscar understood that she had decided, somewhere in the sleepless hours of the night, that she would not spend her time at Gcoat Hall pretending to be other than what she was. It struck him as a rare and considerable courage, in a house full of women who had spent their whole lives being taught that survival lay in careful pretense.

“You have taken no harm from last night, I hope,” he said. “Beyond the gown.”

“The gown will mend,” she said, with the ghost of a smile that did not quite reach her eyes. “I have mended worse. It is only—” She paused, looked away from him, out across the misted lawns. “It is only that I had hoped, foolishly perhaps, that if I came here with nothing to recommend me but my father’s memory, I might at least be permitted to fail quietly. Not like that. Not in front of everyone.”

“You did not fail,” Oscar said, more sharply than he intended, and she looked up at him, startled. He gentled his voice. “You stood in front of three hundred people who wished to see you break, Miss Beauchamp, and you did not give them the satisfaction. That is not failure. I have commanded men who could not have managed it.”

Something moved across her face then — surprise, and beneath it, something warmer, something almost hopeful, quickly guarded again, as though she did not quite trust herself to believe a duke’s plain words after a night of cruel ones.

“You are kinder than your reputation allows for, Your Grace.”

“My reputation,” Oscar said, “is mostly earned by men who mistake silence for indifference. I find I am rarely as indifferent as they suppose.”

He glanced down at the basket over her arm — the early roses and sprigs of lavender she had gathered — and felt, absurdly, a boy’s impulse to prolong the conversation.

“Walk with me a little, Miss Beauchamp, if you are not otherwise engaged. The gardens are more pleasant at this hour than at any other, before the house wakes and remembers all its rules.”

She hesitated only a moment before falling into step beside him.