SHE PRETENDED TO BE A “BOY” FOR 7 MONTHS TO AVOID AN ARRANGED MARRIAGE—UNTIL THE DUKE FOUND OUT…

Chapter 18

April came and went, and nothing happened, and the nothing was worse than anything.

Josephine waited for the scandal to break. She waited for the carriage to come from London, for the letter to surface, for the county to turn its eyes toward Hawthorne Estate and start whispering. Every time the post arrived she watched Francis’s face; every time a rider came up the drive she felt her stomach drop.

Nothing.

Evangeline Cross had gone quiet.

“It means she’s saving it,” Dennis said, when Josephine finally told him what she had feared most. “A letter like that, you don’t spend it on a small thing. You hold it until the moment it’s worth the most.”

“How long can she hold it?”

“A year. Five years. Forever.” Dennis shrugged. “That’s the problem with that kind of weapon. It doesn’t go off when you want it to. It goes off when she wants it to. All you can do is live your life and be ready.”

The Duke stopped riding past the stable yard.

That was the first thing Josephine noticed, and it hurt worse than she had expected. He still rode every morning — she heard Arabus’s hooves on the cobbles before dawn, as regular as a bell — but his route had changed. He went out through the west gate now, away from the stables, away from her.

He had not spoken to her in two weeks.

Then, on a grey morning in the second week of April, he sent for her.

Francis came down to the stables himself, which he now did so often it had stopped being remarkable. “His Grace wants you in the study at eleven.”

Josephine’s hands went cold on the pitchfork.

“About what?”

“He did not say.” Francis paused. “He has been in the study since dawn. He asked for pen and paper and then sent the ink back and asked for a different ink.” He looked at her with a flicker of something like sympathy. “Whatever it is, it is not a small thing.”

She knocked at eleven exactly.

“Enter.”

Raymond was at his desk. He looked like a man who had not slept. There were letters spread across the desk in front of him, and a folded page on the corner — and Josephine recognized the fold, the cream paper, the handwriting.

Her heart stopped.

He had written to Evangeline.

“You may sit,” he said.

She sat.

“Lady Evangeline Cross has been in correspondence with your uncle,” Raymond said.

The floor moved under her.

“What?”

“I intercepted three letters. Two went to Arthur Foster, care of his solicitor in the county town. One came back.” He tapped the page on the corner of the desk. “In it, she proposes an arrangement. She will provide your uncle with a copy of a document — a confession, written in your own hand — which she believes is worth a considerable sum to a man who wishes to recover a runaway ward.”

Josephine could not breathe.

“She means to sell it to him.”

“She meant to.” Raymond looked up. “When she wrote that letter, she did not know that I had opened the others.”

“You opened her letters.”

“I opened her letters,” he said, without apology. “And in the last one she received from Arthur Foster, he offered her four hundred pounds for the document, plus a further three hundred if she would consent to witness its authenticity in person before a county magistrate.”

Josephine put a hand over her mouth.

“Your Grace—”

“I have had my man of law draw up a document,” Raymond said. “It is not complicated. It sets out the facts: that you are the lawful daughter of Edmund Foster; that you fled your uncle’s house to avoid an unlawful contract; that your uncle sold you without consent and thereby committed a fraud upon your person; and that Lady Evangeline Cross has since attempted to profit from your uncle’s fraud by trafficking in a document prepared under duress.”

He picked up another page.

“Copies have been sent to Mr. Collingwood of Harrowfield, to the county magistrate, and to Lady Evangeline’s father.”

Josephine stared at him.

“Her father.”

“Lord Ashworth Cross has one great fear, and it is scandal attached to his name.” Raymond’s voice was flat. “He has a daughter of marriageable age, four hundred tenants, and ambitions in the House. He will receive a letter containing hard evidence that his daughter has been attempting to extort money from a young woman who was herself the victim of illegal dealing — via the post, over her own signature.”

He set the page down.

“He will put a stop to it,” Raymond said. “He will do it today.”

Josephine sat in the chair and could not speak.

“You knew,” she said at last. “You knew about the letter. And you knew about my uncle. And you did not ask me a single question.”

“I did not need to ask.” Raymond looked at her, and for the first time in two weeks his face was not cold. It was tired, and patient, and something else she could not name. “You told me you could not accept my gift because I did not know who you were. And you were right. I did not know the whole of it.” He paused. “I do now.”

“How?”

“I read her letters. I read your uncle’s. I read a copy of the document Lady Evangeline sent to him for his inspection — which, I may say, is a very poorly worded document, and would not have survived five minutes before a magistrate.” A faint, dry note entered his voice. “You did not write it well.”

“I wrote it to buy time.”

“I know.” He set down his pen. “I wrote to your uncle last night. On my own account. I told him that any attempt to use that document in this county will be met with a public accounting of the money he took for his brother’s daughter, and the contract he signed, and the night she had to cut off her own hair to escape him.”

Josephine’s eyes stung.

“Your uncle will not speak of it again,” Raymond said. “Neither will Lady Evangeline. Neither will Mr. Collingwood. The matter is closed.”

Silence.

Then Raymond opened the drawer and set the velvet box on the desk again, and pushed it toward her, and this time he pushed it all the way to her side of the desk.

“Now,” he said, “we may begin again.”

And Josephine Foster sat in the Duke of Hawthorne’s study with the morning light on the carpet and the whole of her ruined life laid out and made clean, and did not trust herself to say anything at all.