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 7

The final selection ball was, by long tradition, the grandest occasion Gcoat Hall staged in a generation. Every chandelier ablaze, the great hall banked with hothouse flowers, musicians brought from the capital, every family of consequence in three counties assembled once more to witness the Duke of Gcoat name his bride.

Oscar dressed that evening with a steadiness he did not entirely feel, his mind turning again and again to the small velvet box he had carried in his coat pocket for three days — his mother’s ring, kept safe in the family vault since her death, reset that week at his private instruction.

Morwin came down to the ballroom in a gown of deep blue silk, plain in its lines but exquisite in its simplicity, a gown his grandmother had quietly commissioned and gifted her over Morwin’s fierce and embarrassed protests. She looked, Oscar thought, watching her descend the great staircase on her aunt’s arm, entirely unlike the frightened young woman in the torn gray gown of three weeks before, and yet entirely, unmistakably herself.

“You look,” he said, low, for her ears alone, “like a woman about to make three hundred people deeply regret every unkind word they have ever spoken of you.”

“I look,” Morwin said, with the faint, wry smile he had come to treasure, “like a woman who has borrowed courage from a duke who insists, quite unreasonably, that she has always possessed it herself.”

It was near midnight, after two hours of dancing, when the trouble came — not from Lady Cresida herself, who sat pale and subdued at the edge of the hall, but from her mother, who had clearly decided that if her daughter’s suit was already lost, she would not surrender the field without one final, desperate blow.

She rose during the pause between sets, in full view of the assembled hall, and addressed herself to the room at large.

“I wonder,” she said, her voice pitched to carry, sweet and venomous as poisoned honey, “whether His Grace has troubled himself to inform the company of precisely whom he intends to honor tonight. A young woman who arrived at this house three weeks ago in a gown so poorly made it could not survive a single evening’s wear. Whose father left her nothing but debts, and a name no one here had troubled to remember. And whose own conduct since has occasioned more scandal, more disruption, and more disgrace to this house than any candidate in the history of the Gcoat selection. I say this not from malice, Your Grace, but from genuine concern for the dignity of your title. Surely a Duke of Gcoat’s line deserves better than a penniless nobody who has spent these three weeks scheming her way into your notice by whatever means presented themselves.”

A ripple of shocked murmuring swept the hall. Near the back, Oscar caught the flash of Morwin’s face going white, her hands closing tight in the deep blue silk of her skirts.

He did not hesitate.

“Since the marchioness has been so kind as to invite my accounting of the evening’s honor,” Oscar said, his voice carrying with the same effortless force that had silenced the hall nine days before, “allow me to correct the record. In full. Before this company.”

He crossed the floor a third time — this time not stopping at Morwin’s side, but continuing to the center of the great hall, where every eye could find him without difficulty.

“Three weeks ago, in this very hall, I watched a woman’s gown torn from her shoulder by a hand disguised as steadying her — a deliberate act, arranged for payment, timed to the precise moment of greatest humiliation, so that three hundred guests might laugh at a soldier’s daughter for daring to appear among her betters in an honestly mended gown. I know this not by rumor, my lady, but because I witnessed it myself, and because my own inquiry has since confirmed, in writing and under witness, precisely whose hand and whose coin arranged it.”

His gaze moved deliberately to where Lady Cresida sat frozen.

“Not two weeks later, a piece of my own grandmother’s jewelry was stolen from her dressing room and planted in that same woman’s reticule, in an attempt to see her disgraced and dismissed as a thief before this entire company. That scheme, too, unraveled — not by chance, but by the plain, provable fact that only one household’s maid had both the opportunity to take the brooch and, as three of my own footmen have since attested, was seen at that very bench not a quarter hour before the theft was discovered, straightening a cushion no one had asked her to touch.”

The marchioness’s face had gone the color of ash. Lord Rendell, near the punch table, looked, for the first time since Oscar had known him, entirely at a loss for bluster.

“I have said little of this publicly until tonight, out of consideration for houses I did not wish to make enemies of, and out of respect for a young woman who asked me more than once to show mercy even to those who had shown her none. But I will not stand in my own hall and hear that same young woman called a schemer and a disgrace, when every scrap of scheming and disgrace these three weeks have produced has come, without exception, from quarters far better dressed and far more richly titled than she has ever claimed to be.”

He turned from the stunned marchioness and crossed the last distance of the hall to where Morwin stood, her eyes bright with tears she was fighting with every ounce of her will not to let fall.

He reached into his coat pocket and drew out the small velvet box he had carried close against his heart for three long days.

“Miss Beauchamp,” he said, and his voice, though it still carried to every corner of the hall, had gentled into something no one present had ever heard from the Duke of Gcoat — something unguarded, entirely undefended. “I have fought wars, and buried friends, and inherited a title I did not want. And in eleven years I believed myself a man who had lost the capacity to want anything for himself alone, apart from duty. I was wrong.”

The hall had gone utterly, breathlessly silent.

“I have watched you endure cruelty these three weeks with more grace than I have seen from generals under fire. I have watched you offer kindness, unasked, to every frightened soul this house has produced — including some who did not deserve it half so much as you gave it. Your father saved my life once, long before either of us knew what that debt would come to mean, and I find now that I do not wish merely to repay it. I wish to spend the whole of my life beside the daughter he raised. If she will have me.”

He opened the box. Inside lay his mother’s ring, reset in warm gold, a single deep-set garnet catching the candlelight like a small, steady flame.

“Morwin Beauchamp,” he said. “Will you do me the honor of becoming my wife?”