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

Chapter 23

Cora stared at him.

“The fourteenth,” she repeated.

“The fourteenth of January.”

Every newspaper in London had printed that date for months. Every shop window in Mayfair had it written on a card. Every servant in every great house in England knew it, the way they knew the price of bread.

Because on the fourteenth of January, at eleven o’clock in the morning, in St. George’s Church on Hanover Square, the Duke of Ravenshollow would marry Lady Cordelia Vain.

And at eight o’clock that same morning, Cora Bell’s father would hang.

“The same day,” Cora whispered.

The vicar did not answer. He did not need to.

She sat down slowly on the edge of the cot where her father had slept the night before. The blanket was still crumpled. The pillow still held the dent of his head.

“Mrs. Dobbs will bring you supper,” said the vicar. “You must eat, my dear. You must sleep.”

“I can’t.”

“I know.” He put his hat back on. “I will go to the prison in the morning. I will be with him. You have my word.”

After he had gone, Cora sat in the dark for a long time with her hands in her lap — the burned hand and the whole one.

Somewhere across the city, in a house in Mayfair, Lady Cordelia Vain was sitting in front of a mirror while her maid brushed her hair a hundred strokes, and the wedding dress hung in the next room like a white ghost, and the whole house smelled of hothouse roses.

Somewhere else, in a cheap lodging house by the river, a man in a black coat was taking off his boots and counting out the coins Lord Vain had paid him, and thinking about nothing at all.

And in the vestry of St. Mary’s, Cora Bell made a decision.

She stood up, folded the blanket, put on her shawl, and went out into the night.

For three days, she did not eat.

She sat outside the gates of Newgate Prison from morning until night, on a stone step across the road, in the cold, hoping for a glimpse of her father. The guards would not let her in — no visitors, not for a condemned man, not for anyone. She saw the cart go in with the bread. She saw the turnkeys come and go. She saw the black flag hanging limp above the wall and knew it was only waiting.

Once, she gave the last of the Duke’s coins to a turnkey, and he carried a message inside for her, and came back and told her that the prisoner had wept and said tell her not to come.

That was all.

The Duke did not come.

Every morning she told herself he would. Every morning she looked for his horse at the end of the street, for his tall figure, for the carriage with the crest on the door. Every evening she walked back to St. Mary’s alone.

He never came.

What she did not know — what she could not know — was that the Duke had spent those three days locked in the study of his townhouse in Mayfair with a bottle of brandy he did not drink and a drawer he did not open.

He had the confession. It had been given to his mother the same night Lord Vain came to the house, and his mother had given it to him, and he had read it, and he had believed it.

Because it was in her handwriting. Because it was signed Cora Bell. Because it said, in neat clerk’s script, that she had entered his house under a false name, stolen Lady Cordelia’s pearls, and invented a wicked lie about saving him from the fire, out of revenge for her father’s conviction — and that every word she had said was false, and she begged their forgiveness.

He had read it twice. He had sat down slowly on the edge of his bed, and stared at the signature, and his mother had said, Her own hand. Her own name. She lied to you from the very first day.

And he had believed it, because a man who has been made a fool of once will believe almost anything to stop being made a fool of twice.

He locked the confession in the drawer of his writing desk and did not take it out again.