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 4

They walked together in the gray morning light along the low stone wall, past the sundial and the yew hedges, saying little of consequence, and yet Oscar thought, saying a great deal — of her father’s old campaign stories, half remembered from childhood, of her aunt’s still room and its lavender and rose water, of small, ordinary things no one in that glittering ballroom the night before would have troubled to ask her.

He found himself, for the first time in longer than he cared to reckon, entirely unguarded. It did not frighten him nearly so much as he might have expected.

By the time the first servants began to stir in the kitchen wing, and the mist had begun to burn away off the lawns, Oscar understood two things with perfect clarity — the way he had once understood, on the eve of battle, precisely which ground he meant to hold, and at what cost.

The first was that Lady Cresida Ashworth had made a very grave mistake in choosing Morwin Beauchamp for her cruelty.

The second was that he — Duke Oscar of Gcoat, feared by half the kingdom, moved by almost nothing in eleven long years — had no intention whatsoever of letting these three weeks of trials decide what his heart had already begun, quietly and irrevocably, to settle for itself.

Pell brought his findings three days later, in the quiet hour before the household gathered for the morning’s archery trial — one of the small tests the Dowager Duchess had devised to observe the candidates at their ease, or, as Oscar privately suspected, to observe which of them handled failure and success with equal grace.

“The maid was called Nan Foster, Your Grace,” Pell said, standing very straight before the desk in Oscar’s study, a slim ledger of notes in his hand. “Hired for the three weeks from the village, to assist below stairs with the candidates’ dressing, as several of the young ladies came without their own maids or shared them between two households. She dressed Miss Beauchamp on the night of the ball, along with two others. And she was paid, Your Grace, the sum of four guineas, two days before the ball, by a woman answering the description of Lady Cresida’s own maid — a Frenchwoman called Susette, who has been in the Ashworth household above six years, and is known to be devoted to her mistress beyond the ordinary run of service.”

“I could not persuade Nan Foster to say outright what the money was for. She is frightened, Your Grace, and not without reason — she is a village girl with a widowed mother to support, and Lady Cresida’s family has considerable influence in that parish. But she would say this much. When I assured her no harm would come to her for speaking honestly, she said she was told only to loosen the left shoulder seam of Miss Beauchamp’s gown before she was dressed, using no more than a few threads’ worth of unpicking — so that it should hold through the fitting and the first hour of the evening, and give way only under a firm hand, later.”

Oscar sat very still, one finger tapping once against the desk — the only outward sign of the cold satisfaction settling into him. Not triumph, precisely, but the particular grim clarity of a man who has finally been handed the shape of a thing he already knew to be true.

“Four guineas,” he said, “to ruin a woman’s one good gown, and her dignity with it, in front of half the kingdom.”

“There is more, Your Grace.” Pell’s voice dropped, careful. “Nan Foster says she was told further that, should anyone ask, she was to say the seam had simply been old and poorly made — cheap work, unworthy of a lady of quality. She believed, when she agreed to it, that it was no more than a small unkindness — the sort of petty rivalry common enough among young ladies vying for the same match. She did not know, or so she swears, that it would be timed and staged as it was in the ballroom itself. That, she says, was arranged separately. She was not present for it, and cannot speak to how it was managed, save that Susette told her the timing would be seen to.”

“Susette,” Oscar said slowly, “who serves no one but Lady Cresida Ashworth, and would not act without her mistress’s knowledge and instruction.”

“So it would appear, Your Grace.”

Oscar rose from the desk and crossed to the window, looking out over the lawns, where the servants were already setting up the archery butts for the morning’s trial — bright targets against the green, entirely oblivious to the quiet reckoning taking shape in the room above them. He thought of Cresida Ashworth’s satisfied face in the candlelight, the fan pressed to her lips, the performance of horror that had not once reached her eyes.

“Will the girl testify to it, if called upon?”

“She is afraid, Your Grace, as I said. But I believe, with assurance of your protection, and perhaps some small consideration for her mother’s circumstances, she might be persuaded.”

“See that she is protected regardless of what she chooses to say,” Oscar said. “I will not have a frightened village girl made to pay twice for another woman’s cruelty. Increase her mother’s pension from the parish fund, if it will ease her mind, and tell her plainly that nothing she says to me will ever reach Lady Cresida’s ears without her own consent.” He paused, still looking out at the bright targets on the lawn. “But I want it in writing, Pell. In her own hand, or witnessed by yours. Before these three weeks are out, my grandmother will not act on my word alone against a marquess’s daughter. And she is right not to. I mean to give her more than my word.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” Pell hesitated, then added, with the particular delicacy of a servant who has served a family long enough to feel entitled to a small liberty. “May I say, Your Grace — the household has noticed you walk in the gardens most mornings now. And rarely alone.”

Oscar did not turn from the window, but something in the set of his shoulders eased very slightly.

“You may say what you observe, Pell. I have never asked you to be blind.”

“Then I will only say,” the steward ventured, “that in eleven years I have not seen you rise before dawn for any reason but grief or duty. It does my old heart good, Your Grace, to think there might now be a third reason.”

Oscar said nothing to that, but he did not deny it either.

The archery trial that morning proved, as his grandmother’s trials so often did, to reveal a good deal more than the placement of an arrow. Lady Cresida shot well — clearly coached for the occasion, her form elegant, her aim respectable — and accepted the scattered applause with the easy grace of a woman accustomed to admiration. A shy girl called Miss Puitt missed the target entirely on her first attempt and dissolved into tears at the ripple of amusement that followed, and Oscar noted, with some private satisfaction, that it was Morwin Beauchamp who left her own place in line to murmur something quiet and steadying to the weeping girl, and to stand beside her, unasked, through her second attempt.

It was not skill Oscar found himself watching so closely across the lawn. It was the quiet kindness she showed a stranger with nothing to gain by it, in a house full of women calculating every gesture for its effect upon his notice.

Lady Cresida noticed him watching. He saw it in the sudden brightness of her smile turned toward him — and he saw, too, the flicker of calculation that crossed her face when her gaze slid from him to Morwin and back again. Whatever restraint he had shown, it had not been restraint enough to escape her notice.

She found occasion to approach him that afternoon, on the terrace, under a striped awning.

“Your Grace,” Cresida said, settling beside him with a rustle of blue silk. “I do hope Miss Beauchamp has recovered from her unfortunate accident. Such a shame, for a girl in her situation, to be so ill-equipped for an occasion of this consequence.”

“I understood the gown to have been perfectly sound,” Oscar said, watching her over the rim of his cup, “until the seam was deliberately loosened, and then seized at precisely the moment most calculated to cause her the greatest possible humiliation.”

Cresida’s smile did not falter, but something behind her eyes went very still. “Deliberately, Your Grace? Surely you cannot mean to suggest—”

“I mean to suggest nothing at present, Lady Cresida,” Oscar said, setting down his cup with a small, deliberate click of china against saucer. “I find suggestion a poor substitute for certainty, and I am, by nature and by training, a very patient man when it comes to establishing certainty.” He held her gaze a moment longer than propriety strictly required. “You would do well to remember that, I think, before these three weeks are out.”

He rose, bowed with perfect correctness, and left her sitting alone under the striped awning, her tea going cold in her hand.