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 5

The summons came the next morning, before Oscar had even broken his fast — a footman at his study door, breathless, informing him that his grandmother required his presence in the blue drawing room at once, and that Lord Rendell himself had arrived unannounced from the north, with his daughter and wife in tow, demanding audience over what he termed, in a voice the footmen had heard clear through two closed doors, “a scurrilous accusation against my family’s honor.”

Oscar arrived to find the blue drawing room arranged like a small battlefield. His grandmother sat enthroned in her usual chair, her spine a rod of ivory silk and iron will. Lord Rendell stood before the cold hearth, a heavy-set man with a florid face and the particular blustering confidence of a man who had never in his life been told no by anyone who mattered.

“Your Grace.” Lord Rendell did not bow so much as incline his head a bare few degrees. “I understand my daughter has been accused, in your own house, of some low scheme against a penniless nobody with a dead soldier for a father. I have come to demand you name your source, so that I may see the slander answered as it deserves.”

“There has been no public accusation, Lord Rendell,” Oscar said, closing the door and crossing to stand beside his grandmother’s chair. “Only a private inquiry, conducted with considerably more discretion than your daughter showed in arranging the offense itself.”

“You dare—”

“I dare a great deal in my own house,” Oscar said, and something in his voice, low and utterly without heat, made the marquess’s bluster falter for the first time since Oscar had entered the room. “I watched the seam torn myself, my lord. I did not need to be told what happened — I saw it with my own eyes, across a crowded ballroom, in full candlelight. What my steward’s inquiry has since uncovered is not an accusation invented from nothing. It is confirmation of what I already knew.”

He watched Cresida’s hands, folded tight in her lap, tighten further still.

“A servant’s word,” Lord Rendell scoffed, “against my daughter’s, in a house where half the staff would say anything for a coin.”

“I have that servant’s account in writing, witnessed. And I have no doubt that under proper questioning — questioning I would very much prefer not to conduct in a public setting, my lord, for your daughter’s sake as much as anyone’s — the account would hold.” Oscar let the words settle a moment. “I did not summon you here, Lord Rendell. You came uninvited, and I would remind you that you did so making demands in my grandmother’s house, before either of us had spoken a word of accusation to you directly. I have no wish to see your daughter publicly disgraced. I have every wish to see that no other young woman under my roof suffers as Miss Beauchamp did, and I will have that assurance from you, one way or another, before these three weeks conclude.”

The room was very quiet. It was Cresida, unexpectedly, who broke the silence.

“It was meant only to be a small unkindness, Your Grace. A torn seam, nothing more. She was to be embarrassed. Made to withdraw of her own accord, rather than be sent home in disgrace by anyone’s hand but her own pride. I did not intend—” She stopped, glancing at her father’s darkening face, and pressed her lips shut.

“You did not intend what, Lady Cresida?” Oscar asked. “To be caught? Or to see quite how far a small unkindness could carry, once set loose among three hundred witnesses?”

She had no answer for that.

“Lord Rendell,” Oscar said, turning back to the marquess, “I have no wish to make an enemy of the north, nor to see your family’s name dragged through scandal sheets over a torn gown, however deliberate. But I will have your word, given here and now, before my grandmother as witness, that no further harm — by hand, by rumor, or by any other means — comes to Miss Beauchamp, or any other candidate, for the remainder of the selection. In exchange, I am content to let the matter rest as a private understanding between our two houses, unspoken beyond this room.”

It was, Oscar knew, a generous offer, and a shrewd one — generous enough to let Lord Rendell retreat with some shred of dignity, shrewd enough to bind him with his own honor to a promise he could not break without publicly admitting his daughter’s guilt.

The marquess understood the bargain for what it was, and after a long, blustering moment, gave a short, hard nod. “You have my word, Your Grace. I trust it will not be needed.”

“As do I,” Oscar said, and did not trust it in the least.

When the door had closed behind the departing Rendells, the Dowager Duchess let out a long breath.

“I have watched you negotiate with generals and bankers, Oscar, and I have never once seen you extract quite so much from a man while appearing to give away so little.” She studied him more closely. “You did that for her. Not for the house. For that girl.”

“I did it because it was right,” Oscar said. “And because it happened also to serve her. I do not see that the two need be separated, Grandmother.”

He found Morwin an hour later in the small library, a trunk half-packed in the corner, a letter half-written abandoned on the writing desk before her. She startled at his entrance, moving quickly to cover the letter with her hand — not quickly enough.

“You are leaving.”

“I had thought to,” she said, not trying to deny it, though color rose high in her cheeks. “It seemed the wiser course, Your Grace. I have caused enough disruption in your house already. I am not a fool. I know precisely how far above my situation this all reaches, and I will not be the cause of a rift between Gcoat and a family whose support you plainly need. I thought it kinder to withdraw quietly, before matters grew worse on my account.”

“And you thought,” Oscar said, crossing the room slowly, “to do this without a word to me.”

“What word would I have offered, Your Grace?” Her voice caught. “That I am grateful for every kindness you have shown me, and that I understand all the same that kindness is not the same thing as a future? I have no fortune, no connections worth the name, nothing to bring to this house but my father’s memory and a torn gown that has already cost you more trouble than I am worth. I would rather leave with what little dignity I have left, than wait to be told at the end of it all that I was never truly considered at all.”

“Who told you,” Oscar said very quietly, “that you were never truly considered?”

She did not answer at once, and something in her silence told him more than words could have.

“No one needed to tell me,” she said at last. “I have only to look about me, Your Grace, at every candidate in this house with a fortune or a title or a family that matters, and ask myself honestly what I could possibly offer that they cannot offer better.”

Oscar closed the last distance between them. He did not touch her — would not, not with propriety, and an unfinished letter still lying witness upon the desk between them — but he stood close enough that she raised her chin to meet his eyes.

“You offer,” he said, low and unhurried, “a courage I have not seen matched by any woman in that ballroom, title or no title. You offer a kindness that costs you nothing to give, and yet is rarer in that glittering crowd than any dowry. You offer a mind that does not flatter me, and a spirit that did not break when three hundred strangers wished it would. I have fought wars, Miss Beauchamp, and buried men I loved, and inherited a title I did not want, and in eleven years I have met perhaps one other person who did not, in some fashion, want something from me the moment they learned my name. You are the second.”

She stared up at him, and he watched the careful composure she had built over years of quiet hardship begin, at last, to crack — not into tears, though her eyes were bright with them, but into something more fragile and more honest.

“You cannot know that yet,” she whispered. “It has been less than a week.”

“I have known men for a year, and understood them less than I understand you after a matter of days,” Oscar said. “I am not asking you to believe in a certainty, Miss Beauchamp. I am asking you not to leave before I have the chance to prove it to you properly.” He glanced at the half-packed trunk. “Unpack your trunk. Stay. Let my grandmother’s three weeks run their course, as they must — I will not shame either of us by breaking her rules before their time. But do not leave this house believing yourself unconsidered. You are, at this moment, the single thing in it I consider most.”

For a long moment she said nothing at all. Then, slowly, she reached out and tore the half-written letter in two, and set the pieces aside upon the desk.

Something in Oscar’s chest loosened, that had been drawn tight since the moment he had seen the trunk.

“Then I will stay,” she said, “and trust you to prove it, Your Grace. Though I warn you — I am not easily convinced of my own worth. You may find it a longer wait than you expect.”

“I have never yet lost a siege I meant to win,” Oscar said.

And for the first time since she had known him, Morwin Beauchamp laughed — a small, startled, entirely unguarded sound that struck him harder than any declaration she might have made.