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

Chapter 27

The Home Secretary lived four streets away.

His butler tried to tell the Duke that his lordship was still asleep, that his lordship was not to be disturbed before nine, that his lordship had given strict instructions.

The Duke walked straight past him and up the stairs.

Ten minutes later, the Home Secretary sat in his nightcap at his desk, with a candle guttering beside him and his spectacles crooked on his nose, while Elias Hobbs — shaking, weeping, holding the edge of the desk with both hands — swore on the Bible to everything he had seen and everything he had done.

A clerk was fetched from the next room and wrote it all down in a fast, scratching hand. When it was finished, Hobbs signed it. His signature was a shaky scrawl.

The Home Secretary read the statement twice.

His face grew darker and darker.

“Lord Vain,” he muttered. “Good heavens. Lord Vain.”

He looked up at the Duke over the rims of his spectacles.

“You understand what this means, Ravenshollow. If this is true — and I have known Hobbs’s face for twelve years, and he is not lying — then a peer of the realm suborned perjury, and an innocent man has spent six years in a penal colony, and is about to be hanged this morning for trying to come home.”

“Yes,” said the Duke.

The Home Secretary took a fresh sheet of paper and wrote quickly, dipping his pen twice, and signed his name at the bottom, and pressed his seal into the hot wax.

“A stay of execution,” he said. “The hanging of Thomas Bell is to be stopped at once, until the Crown can review the case.”

He handed it over.

“Go, Ravenshollow. You will need to ride like the devil.”

The Duke did not take the carriage.

He took his fastest horse from the mews, and he rode through the streets of London as the church bells began to ring for morning service — through Mayfair and down through the Strand, through the fog and the frozen mud, past wagons and milk carts and a flock of sheep being driven to market.

He rode with the paper inside his coat, pressed against his chest, and the cold air tore at his face, and he did not slow down once.

The crowd outside Newgate was enormous.

Hangings always brought crowds. People had come with bread and ale as if it were a holiday. Children sat on their fathers’ shoulders to get a better view. A man was selling hot chestnuts from a brazier at the corner, and the smoke rose straight up into the gray sky.

High above the crowd, on the wooden platform that jutted out from the prison wall, stood Thomas Bell.

His hands were tied behind his back. The rope was already around his neck. He was not crying. He was looking up at the gray sky, and his lips were moving.

He was praying.

The prison clock began to strike eight.

The Duke forced his horse through the crowd, shouting, and people cursed him and scattered and shouted back, and he drove the animal on until it could go no further, and then he threw himself off its back and ran on foot.

One.

Two.

The hangman reached for the lever.

“Stop!” roared the Duke. “In the name of the Crown — stop!”

Three.

He threw himself up the wooden steps, holding the paper high above his head so that everyone could see the red seal.

Four.

The hangman’s hand froze on the lever.

The prison governor snatched the paper out of the Duke’s hand, and read it, and went pale — and then he looked at the Duke, and then at the hangman.

“Take the rope off him,” he said. “Now.”

A great roar went up from the crowd.

Nobody was quite sure what had happened, but they knew they had seen something they would talk about for the rest of their lives.

Thomas Bell swayed on his feet, and the rope came away from his neck, and the Duke caught him before he fell.

“Who are you?” the old man whispered.

“I am the man your daughter pulled out of the fire,” said the Duke. “And I have waited six years to thank her. Where is she?”

Thomas Bell stared at him.

“She told me in a letter,” he said hoarsely. “She said Lord Vain promised to save me. She said she had to go away on a ship — the Endeavour — to Canada.”

At that moment, one of the Duke’s grooms pushed through the crowd, red-faced and out of breath. He had been sent racing to the docks the moment the Duke left the Home Secretary’s house.

“Your grace—”

“Speak.”

“The Endeavour went into the dock lock at dawn. The gates are shut. Nobody can get on or off until the water rises.” The groom swallowed. “She sails out into the river at half past eleven.”

The Duke looked up at the prison clock.

Eight minutes past eight.

He had time. Just enough.

But he did not go to the docks.

“Bring Mr. Bell to my house and send for a doctor,” he told the groom. “Then find Molly Green, and Lady Cordelia’s maid Jenkins, and two officers from Bow Street. Bring them all to St. George’s Church by eleven o’clock.”

“Your grace — the church?”

The Duke’s face was hard.

“If I bring her back into a world that still calls her a thief and a liar,” he said, “I have given her nothing. The whole of London will be inside that church this morning.”

He swung back up onto his horse.

“Let them all hear the truth at once.”