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

Chapter 30

The story was in every newspaper in England by the next morning.

The Duke who stopped a hanging. The bride who never saved anyone. The maid with the burned hand. People read it aloud in coffee houses and kitchens and village inns. Ladies read it in their drawing rooms and gasped. Footmen read it in the servants’ halls and cheered. For weeks, nobody in London talked about anything else.

Lord Alaric Vain was tried before the House of Lords in the spring.

He stood in the great hall in his finest coat with his gold rings on his fingers, and he told them it was all a lie — a servant’s lie, a drunken valet and a hysterical maid and a madman in love.

But then Elias Hobbs stood up and told his story again, in a clear voice, without weeping this time, and Jenkins told hers, and Molly Green told hers, and the old magistrate — who had once been Lord Vain’s hunting friend and who was now very frightened for his own neck — admitted that he had never checked whether Thomas Bell had even employed a stable boy.

He had not. He had taken Lord Vain’s word, because Lord Vain’s word had always been enough.

Lord Vain was found guilty of lying under oath, of conspiring against an innocent man, and of attempting to have that man hanged.

He was not hanged himself. Lords very rarely were. But the court ordered him to pay damages to Thomas Bell for six stolen years, and the sum was so enormous that Lord Vain had to sell his house on Grosvenor Square, and his horses, and his paintings, and finally the gold rings off his own fingers.

The debt he had held for six years over the little cottage where Cora’s mother lived was handed over to the court by order. The Duke asked for it to be brought to him.

And one evening, in front of Cora and her father, in the firelit drawing room of Ravenshollow Hall, he held the paper over a candle and watched it burn to ashes.

“There,” he said. “Nobody will ever hold anything over this family again.”

Lord Vain left England that summer on a cheap ship to the Continent.

He went alone. His wife would not go with him; she had gone to her sister’s house in Bath and had the doors barred. The last anyone heard of him, he was living in two small rooms in a town nobody had heard of, telling anyone who would listen that he had once been a great man.

Nobody believed him.

For Lady Cordelia, it was different.

Nobody put her in prison. Nobody sent her away. They simply stopped seeing her — and in London, that was worse.

The invitations stopped first. No more balls, no more dinners, no more afternoon calls from ladies who had once fought for a seat beside her. When she walked into a shop on Bond Street, the other customers suddenly remembered they had somewhere else to be. When she spoke, people looked through her.

She went to one ball in April, uninvited, wearing a gown of pale blue silk.

She walked into the ballroom with her chin held high and her diamonds on, and the music did not stop, and nobody made a scene, and nobody said a word.

But one by one, every person in that room turned their back.

Cordelia Vain stood in the middle of the dance floor completely alone, while the orchestra played a waltz for everyone but her.

She left before the second dance.

By the end of the month, she and her mother had moved to a small, cold house in the north of England, where the wind blew all year round and nobody came to visit. Every morning, Cordelia read the London newspapers. She told herself she did not care what they said.

But she always read them.