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

Chapter 24

On the fourth evening, a black carriage was waiting outside St. Mary’s.

Cora saw it from the far end of the street. She stopped walking, and stood still, and the fog moved around her.

The window came down.

Lord Alaric Vain leaned out, wrapped in a thick fur coat, his breath steaming, his rings glinting on the hand that rested on the frame.

“Get in, Miss Bell,” he said pleasantly. “It’s cold, and you and I have business to discuss.”

“I have nothing to say to you,” said Cora.

Lord Vain smiled.

“Not even to save your father’s life?”

Cora stood very still in the street.

The fog rolled between them. Somewhere behind her, a church bell struck the hour.

Then she walked to the carriage, and climbed in.

Inside it was warm and dark and smelled of leather and cigars and expensive wool. Lord Vain settled back against the cushions and looked at her for a long moment — the way a man looks at a horse he is thinking of buying.

“You’re a clever girl,” he said. “Cleverer than your father. So I will speak plainly, and we will not waste each other’s time.”

He held up one finger.

“Your father hangs on the fourteenth. Nobody can stop it. Not the Duke, not the vicar, not the King himself — unless I ask them to.”

Cora’s nails dug into her palms.

“You,” she said. “You have friends.”

“I have a great many friends, Miss Bell.” He turned his hand over, admiring his rings. “The magistrate who signed that order dines at my table twice a year. One word from me, and your father’s sentence goes back to transportation. He sails to the colonies and lives out his days in the sunshine. He does not hang.”

He looked at her.

“What do you want in return?”

Lord Vain reached inside his coat and took out a folded paper.

He opened it on his knee — four pages of close, neat clerk’s handwriting — and held out a pen.

“Your signature. That’s all.”

Cora took the paper with trembling hands and read it by the light of the carriage lamp.

It said that she, Cora Bell, had entered the house of the Duke of Ravenshollow under false pretenses. That she had stolen Lady Cordelia Vain’s pearls. That she had invented a wicked lie about saving the Duke from a fire, in order to take revenge upon the Vain family for her father’s just conviction. That every word she had spoken was false, and that she begged their forgiveness, and that she would leave England and never return.

It was four pages of lies, written down in beautiful handwriting, with a space at the bottom for her name.

“Sign it,” said Lord Vain, “and you will be on a ship called the Endeavour, bound for Canada, on the morning tide of the fourteenth. I have paid for your passage. Your father will live, and you will have saved him — which is more than any of you Bells have ever managed before.”

“And if I don’t sign?”

Lord Vain shrugged, and the fur moved on his shoulders.

“Then at eight o’clock on the fourteenth, you may stand in the crowd outside Newgate and watch him drop.”

Cora closed her eyes.

She thought of the Duke’s face in the street. That one second of doubt. She thought of her father in the cart, saying don’t cry for me, my girl. She thought of her mother, in a cold cottage a hundred miles north, waiting for a husband she believed she would never see again — and sewing by the window, every afternoon, in case he came home.

What was one piece of paper against a man’s life?

She opened her eyes.

“Give me the pen.”

Lord Vain smiled and handed it to her.

Cora leaned over the paper and signed her name at the bottom, slowly and carefully. Cora Bell.

Then, below her name — where people always wrote the date — she wrote a date. In small, neat letters.

The fourteenth of January, 1811.

Lord Vain barely glanced at it. He was looking for the signature, only the signature. He blew on the ink, folded the four pages, and put them back inside his coat.

“A wise choice,” he said. “Be at the West India Dock at seven o’clock on the morning of the fourteenth. If you are not on that ship when it sails, the deal is off.”

He opened the carriage door.

Cora climbed down into the cold street. The fog took her immediately, and the carriage rolled away, and behind its dark windows Lord Alaric Vain leaned back against the cushions and laughed quietly to himself.

He had not the slightest intention of speaking to any magistrate.

On the morning of the fourteenth, Thomas Bell would hang, and his daughter would be on a ship halfway down the Thames believing she had saved him — and by the time she learned the truth, she would be on the other side of an ocean, and nobody in England would ever hear the name Cora Bell again.

It was, he thought, the neatest piece of work he had done in years.