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 6

Lord Rendell’s word, as Oscar had privately suspected it would, proved worth exactly as much as the pride of a man accustomed to being obeyed rather than bound. It held for six days.

It broke on the seventh, at the musical evening the Dowager Duchess had arranged in the great hall, with candles blazing in every sconce and the assembled families of half the kingdom seated in rows.

Morwin was to play last. She had confided to Oscar two mornings before that she owned no instrument of her own, and expected to acquit herself poorly against candidates tutored since the nursery. He had told her, with perfect honesty, that he did not care in the least whether she played well — only that she played, and that he intended to listen.

She was halfway through a simple, unpretentious piece when the disturbance began. A sharp cry from near the punch table. A rising murmur of voices. Oscar turned to see Lady Cresida’s mother on her feet, pointing unmistakably toward the piano forte.

“There,” the marchioness cried, her voice pitched to carry. “Search her reticule. I saw her own maid meddling with it not a quarter hour past, when Miss Beauchamp rose to steady Miss Puitt at the punch table and left her seat unwatched. Search it, Your Grace, and see what dishonesty it hides.”

Morwin’s hands stilled on the keys. The music died into an awful, ringing silence.

Oscar was on his feet before the reticule had been fully opened.

“Stop.”

The single word carried the length of the hall like a struck bell. He crossed the floor a second time, lifted the reticule from the piano bench himself before any other hand could touch it, and opened it before the entire watching room. Inside lay a handkerchief, a small comb, a few coins — and, exactly as the marchioness had promised, a piece of jewelry. A delicate brooch of garnet and gold, which Oscar recognized instantly, having seen it pinned, not two hours before, to the collar of his own grandmother’s second-best gown.

A gasp went through the hall.

“A theft, Your Grace,” the marchioness pressed on, her voice ringing with satisfaction thinly disguised as sorrow. “From the Dowager Duchess herself. I am sorry to be the one to expose it. Truly I am.”

“You could not, in conscience,” Oscar said, turning the brooch over slowly in the candlelight, “resist the opportunity, you mean. Though I confess I am curious how you came to recognize my grandmother’s brooch so readily, at such a distance, in a hall lit only by candles. Unless you had some prior and rather intimate knowledge of both its appearance and its intended location.” He turned to the nearest footman. “Fetch my grandmother’s maid.”

The wait that followed was one of the longest of Oscar’s life. When the maid arrived, breathless, she confirmed that the brooch had indeed been laid out for the Dowager Duchess that evening, and that she herself, not twenty minutes before the musical evening began, had discovered it missing.

“And who,” Oscar asked, “had access to the Dowager Duchess’s dressing room this evening, besides yourself?”

The maid hesitated, glancing nervously toward the marchioness, before Oscar’s steady, unrelenting gaze drew the answer regardless.

“Only myself, Your Grace, and — and Mademoiselle Susette. Who came to borrow a curling iron, not an hour since. As her own had broken. I did not think to question it. She has done so before.”

Susette. Lady Cresida’s own maid — the same Frenchwoman who had, by Nan Foster’s account, arranged the payment for the torn gown not two weeks before.

“Your Grace.” One of the hall footmen stepped forward, hesitant, twisting his gloves in his hands. “I ought to say — I saw Mademoiselle Susette here in the hall, not a quarter hour before the music began. Bent over the piano bench, straightening a cushion no one had asked her to touch. I thought nothing of it at the time.”

Oscar turned slowly to where Lady Cresida sat frozen, her face gone the color of ash, and beside her, the marchioness’s confident expression collapsing at last into something like genuine fear.

“It appears,” Oscar said, into a silence so absolute the whole hall seemed to be holding its breath, “that a brooch, stolen from my grandmother’s dressing room by a maid in your own household’s employment, my lady, has somehow found its way into another woman’s reticule — on the very evening that same maid was seen borrowing implements from that dressing room under a false pretext. I confess I find the innocent explanation for that sequence of events considerably harder to imagine than the guilty one.”

“Your Grace—” the marchioness began.

“I gave your husband my word, a week ago, that I would let a matter rest quietly if his family’s word held true,” Oscar said, and his voice had gone very cold now, the voice that had once made grown soldiers go still. “That word has not held. I will tell you this plainly, before every family gathered here tonight, so there can be no further mistake. Miss Beauchamp has been twice targeted under my roof by cruelty dressed up as accident or scandal. There will not be a third time. Anyone who attempts it, whatever their name, whatever their father’s rank, will answer to me directly.”

He crossed to the piano forte and offered Morwin his hand — not to lead her from the room in shame this time, but simply to help her rise. She took it, her fingers trembling faintly against his.

“I believe,” he said, gently, to the hall at large, “that Miss Beauchamp’s performance was interrupted before its conclusion. I would very much like to hear the rest of it, if she is willing.”

Morwin returned to the piano forte, drew a slow breath, and began again from where the music had broken off. Oscar thought he had never in his life heard anything played with such quiet, defiant grace.

Lady Cresida and her mother did not stay for the remainder of the evening.

Later, when the hall had emptied, the Dowager Duchess found him in the corridor, her shawl close, an expression he had rarely seen her wear — something almost like fear.

“You made a very public enemy tonight, Oscar. Rendell will not forgive being humiliated before half the kingdom’s peerage, whatever his daughter’s guilt.”

“Then he will have to make his peace with it,” Oscar said, “as I’ve made mine with the cost of protecting the one thing these weeks have proven worth protecting.”

His grandmother studied him a long moment, then reached up and laid one thin, ring-laden hand against his cheek — a gesture he could not remember her offering him since he was a boy.

“The final selection ball,” she said quietly, “will be held in nine days’ time. I had thought to give the three weeks their full course, as tradition demands. But I find I have seen enough, Oscar. I do not believe either you, or that remarkable young woman, can bear a great deal more of this cruelty before it does lasting harm to you both. Nine days. Be certain, by then, of what you mean to do. And be prepared, when you do it, for every enemy you have made tonight to make one final attempt to stop you.”

“I have never yet failed to be ready,” Oscar said, “for a battle I intend to win.”

Of the nine days that followed, Oscar would remember one morning above all the others. He had risen early to find the garden empty — Morwin had gone, her maid informed him, to visit her aunt’s cottage at the edge of the village, some two miles distant. Oscar found himself, before he had quite decided to do so, calling for his horse.

The cottage, when he found it, was smaller than he had expected — whitewashed, thatched, a neat kitchen garden already turned for planting. It was, Oscar understood at once, the whole of the world Morwin Beauchamp had known since her father’s death. Modest. Orderly. Kept with evident care despite evident want.

She was in the garden when he arrived, kneeling in the cold earth, and looked up at the sound of his horse with an expression of such open, startled delight that Oscar felt the whole ride’s uncertainty dissolve entirely.

“Your Grace.” She rose, brushing the earth from her hands. “I did not think to see you here. This is hardly a fitting call for a duke.”

“I find,” Oscar said, dismounting, “that I have grown considerably less interested of late in what is fitting, and considerably more interested in where you are.”

Inside, a small front room, sparse but scrupulously clean, held a shelf of books — poetry, history, a well-thumbed treatise on husbandry — and, set apart in a place of evident honor, a small wooden box carved with a pattern of oak leaves.

“My father’s letters,” Morwin said quietly, coming to stand beside him. “From his years at war. I have read them so many times I could recite them in my sleep.”

She drew one bundle out, untied the ribbon, and read aloud a passage her father had written from a muddy encampment years before — not of the horrors of the campaign, but of wildflowers found growing along a riverbank, pressed and sent home, because he had not wanted his daughter’s memory of him built only from a soldier’s grim duties.

Oscar listened and found, to his own considerable surprise, that his throat had gone tight.

“He would have liked you,” Morwin said softly, refolding the letter. “He always said the measure of a man was not his title or his fortune, but whether he troubled himself to notice a wildflower on the worst day of a war.”

“I notice you,” Oscar said simply, “which I have come to believe is the only thing in this world I have ever truly needed to learn to see clearly.”

It was Mrs. Fenwick, Morwin’s aunt, who spoke to him plainly while Morwin went to fetch water for the kettle.

“I do not know what your intentions are, Your Grace, and I will not presume to ask outright. But I have watched that girl endure more unkindness in these few weeks than most young women see in a lifetime, and bear it with more grace than I had any right to expect. I will only say this. She has never once asked for pity, and will not thank you for offering it now, however grand the gesture. But if what I have seen pass between you these past weeks is what I believe it to be — then I will tell you plainly, Your Grace, that you could search the whole of the kingdom and never find a truer or braver heart than the one beating in that girl. And any man fortunate enough to win it had better understand precisely what he has been given.”

“I understand it, Mrs. Fenwick,” Oscar said. “Better, I think, than I have understood anything else in the whole of my life.”

He rode back to Gcoat Hall that afternoon in thoughtful silence, understanding at last that the truest measure of a house was not the height of its ceilings, but the warmth kept alive within its walls — and that he wanted, more than he had wanted almost anything in eleven long years, to fill Gcoat at last with that same warmth.

That evening, his grandmother told him something he had not known. Three nights after the ball, she had summoned Morwin privately, and asked her outright whether she believed she had any true chance of winning his regard, or whether she meant only to persist out of pride.

“She told me,” the Dowager Duchess said, “that she had no notion whether she had any chance at all, and that she did not intend to persist out of pride. She told me she meant to stay only because you had shown her, in a single evening, more genuine regard than she had received from any person of consequence in the whole of her life — and that she owed it to her father’s memory, and to her own, not to run from that regard out of fear, before she had at least given it the chance to prove itself true or false.”

The nine days passed in stolen mornings in the garden, in small kindnesses observed and returned, in the slow, careful building of trust between two people who had each, in their own separate fashions, learned young that trust was a dangerous thing to offer too freely — and who found, at last, someone worth the risk of offering it fully.