The Duke’s Fiancée Threw Water at the Maid — She Wiped It Off and Said, “You Will Remember This Day”

Chapter 21

The carriage ride across London took forty minutes, and not one word was spoken inside it.

The Duke sat facing backward, watching the city slide past the window — the frost on the rooftops, the smoke rising straight up in the still air, the clerks hurrying to their offices with their collars up. Lady Cordelia sat beside him with her hands folded, and across from them sat Lord Vain and the Dowager Duchess, who looked out at the passing streets with the expression of a woman being taken somewhere she had not agreed to go.

When the carriage turned down toward the river, the streets narrowed and the smell changed — tar and fish and wet rope and coal — and the Duke’s jaw tightened.

There was already a crowd outside St. Mary’s.

Dock workers. Fishwives. Beggars. Children perched on bollards. A knot of men in leather aprons who had clearly left their work to see whatever there was to see. And in the middle of them, two constables in blue coats and a thin man in a black coat with a paper in his hand.

The church’s side door had been forced open. The wood was split around the lock.

The Duke was out of the carriage before the wheels had stopped.

“What is the meaning of this?”

Then he saw them.

The constables were dragging Thomas Bell out through the side door, one on each arm, and the old man’s feet were barely touching the ground. He was coughing — a raw, wrenching cough that bent him nearly double — and his gray head hung forward, and the rags of his coat had come open to show the bones of his shoulders.

And behind him, fighting to reach him, held back by Mrs. Dobbs with both arms around her waist, was Cora Bell.

“Let him go!” she was crying. “He’s sick — please, he can’t walk, please, he’s sick—”

“Thomas Bell,” said the thin man with the paper, in a loud flat voice that carried across the whole street. “Convicted six years ago of arson and damage to property. Sentenced to seven years’ transportation. Found at large in England before the end of his sentence.”

He looked up from the paper.

“You know the penalty for that, old man.”

The crowd murmured. Everyone knew. Half of them had come down here knowing, and the other half had worked it out on the way.

The Duke pushed through them.

“Stop this at once,” he said. “I am the Duke of Ravenshollow. This man is ill. He cannot stand. I will take responsibility for—”

“You will take responsibility,” said a clear voice behind him, “for the man who nearly burned you alive.”

He turned.

Cordelia had stepped down from the carriage.

She walked slowly into the middle of the crowd with her mother’s fur around her shoulders, and every eye in the street turned to watch her — the beautiful lady in the brown wool, with her pale hair catching the winter light and her chin held high.

“Did she tell you who he is, Edmund?” Cordelia said.

She stopped beside the thin man and looked at the Duke with wide, sorrowful eyes.

“Did she tell you who she is?”

She pointed at Cora.

“That old man is Thomas Bell, the drunken innkeeper of the Crown and Anchor. The man who knocked over the lamp that night and set the whole place on fire while you lay sleeping upstairs.”

Her voice rose so that the whole street could hear.

“And this girl is his daughter.”

A gasp went through the crowd like wind through a wheat field.

“She came into your house under a false name,” Cordelia went on. “She came to take revenge on the family that sent her father to prison. She stole my pearls. And when she was caught, she made up some fairy tale to turn you against me — didn’t she? She told you it was she who saved you.”

The Duke said nothing.

His eyes were on Cora. On her white face, on the tears drying on her cheeks, on her hands clenched in the folds of her skirt.

Cordelia came closer, and lowered her voice, as if she were pitying him.

“And that burn on her hand. Oh, Edmund. Of course she has a burn. She was there that night, running from the fire her own father started. Anyone could have a burn.”

The Dowager Duchess had come to stand beside Cordelia now. Her face was like carved stone.

“Is it true?” she asked her son coldly. “Is this girl the daughter of that man?”

The Duke turned to Cora.

She was standing between the two constables, and her hair had come loose from its pins, and her glove was torn at the seam, and she was looking at him.

For a moment he only looked back at her.

“Is it true?” he asked quietly. “Is he your father?”

“Yes,” said Cora.

“You never told me.”

“No.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and she saw the question move behind his eyes like a shadow on water.

Why didn’t you tell me?

What else haven’t you told me?

It lasted only a second. A heartbeat. A flicker of doubt, like a candle guttering in a draft.

But Cora saw it.

And in that one second, something inside her broke.