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

Chapter 22

“Edmund,” said the Dowager Duchess. “Come away now. You are making a spectacle of our family in front of the whole of London.”

“Mother—”

“Now.”

The constables were pushing Thomas Bell toward a cart. He stumbled, and one of them caught him by the elbow and hauled him upright, and the old man’s head came up, and he looked back over his shoulder at his daughter.

“Don’t cry, Cora,” he called weakly. “Don’t cry for me, my girl. I saw your face again. That’s enough.”

The cart rattled away down the cobbled street toward Newgate.

Cora ran after it.

She ran until her legs gave out beneath her, and then she fell to her knees on the wet stones, and nobody in that street helped her up. The dock workers looked at their boots. The fishwives turned away. Mrs. Dobbs came hurrying, but the crowd swallowed her.

When Cora finally lifted her head, the Duke’s carriage was already gone.

Lord Vain’s carriage was still there.

It stood at the corner with the horses stamping, and the window was down, and Alaric Vain was leaning out with one elbow on the frame, watching her with the calm, patient interest of a man studying a horse he might buy.

He did not speak.

He only smiled, slowly, and then he tapped the roof of the carriage with his cane, and the coachman drove on.

Cora Bell knelt on the cobblestones in the cold with her father’s cart disappearing into the gray mouth of the city, and for the first time since she was sixteen years old, she did not know what to do next.

She had spent six years being careful. Six years keeping her mouth shut, keeping her head down, keeping the glove on, sending three shillings a month home to a sick woman in a cold cottage. Six years of being invisible.

And it had bought her nothing.

The Duke did not go home.

He spent the whole day going from one office to another — the magistrates’ court, the prison, the house of a judge he had known at Cambridge — and everywhere he went, the answer was the same.

The law was clear. A man who came home from transportation before his time was up would hang. It was not a matter for argument; it was a matter for the calendar. There was nothing anyone could do. Nothing, that is, except a royal pardon from the Crown — and no one was going to pardon a convicted arsonist without new evidence.

Real evidence. A witness. A document. Not a song. Not a scar. Not the word of a housemaid.

And by evening, the Duke had learned something else.

Lord Vain had been there before him at every office. At every door. Lord Vain had friends everywhere, and Lord Vain had asked, very politely, very reasonably, for the matter to be dealt with quickly — for the sake of the family, you understand, and the upcoming wedding, and the reputation of a great house.

The Duke rode home through the dark with his hands frozen on the reins.

He had failed.

He had stood in a snowy street and asked a girl if she had lied to him, and while he was asking, her father had been dragged past her in chains — and he had done nothing, because his mother had said come away now, and because for one shameful second he had believed the doubt in his own chest more than he had believed the truth in her eyes.

That night, Cora sat alone in the vestry of St. Mary’s.

Mrs. Dobbs had wrapped her in a blanket and made her tea, and the tea had gone cold, and she had not touched it.

The Duke had not come back.

She told herself she did not care. She told herself she had known all along how this would end — a maid and a duke, a convict’s daughter and a man who would marry a lady in two weeks, and what else could it ever have been?

But it hurt more than her hand had ever hurt. More than the fire. More than the chains around her father’s wrists.

Just before midnight, there was a knock at the door.

Cora leapt up, her heart in her throat.

It was not the Duke.

It was the vicar, Mr. Dobbs. His face was gray.

“What is it?” Cora said. “Tell me. Please.”

The vicar took off his hat and held it in both hands.

“The magistrate has signed the order,” he said gently. “Your father will hang at Newgate at eight o’clock in the morning.”

He paused.

“On the fourteenth.”