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

Part 4

The trial of Lord Alaric Vain before the House of Lords was reported in the newspapers as a great and solemn affair, and in truth it was neither.

It was, first and foremost, a performance. Lords do not like to convict lords, and everyone in that hall knew it. Half of the peers on the benches had at some point in their lives done something that would have hanged a poor man, and every one of them had been protected by a name, a purse, a friend, or a magistrate who dined at their table. They were not judging Lord Vain. They were judging whether men like them could ever be made to answer for anything.

It is a hard thing to make a bench of men confront the fact that they are, all of them, standing on the same ladder that holds up the man in the dock.

The Commons’ managers presented the case. They began, as any honest prosecution must, with the stable.

They brought a boy of fourteen who had worked in the yard at the Crown and Anchor as a pot-boy — not a stable boy, he said, and never been one, and there had never been a stable boy, and the horses had been looked after by Mr. Bell himself, mornings and evenings, rain or shine, for eighteen years.

They brought the parish clerk who had copied the trial record in 1811, who had to admit, under examination, that the phrase the stable boy, sworn appeared nowhere in the actual scribbled notes taken by the magistrate, and that he — the clerk — had written stable boy because he assumed that was what had been meant.

They brought the old magistrate.

He was seventy-eight, and his hands shook, and he had spent the previous month sleeping badly. He admitted, in a voice like a man reading his own indictment, that he had known Lord Vain for thirty years, that he had dined with him the week before the fire, that he had heard the case in a single morning, and that he had not once considered whether the young woman’s account of the fire — which differed from Lord Vain’s in every particular — might be the true one.

“Why not?” the manager asked.

“Because she was an innkeeper’s daughter,” said the magistrate, “and he was a lord.”

There was a long silence.

Then they brought Hobbs.

He had been told by the Duke to answer nothing but the truth, and he did exactly that, in the flat, careful voice of a man who has rehearsed something for six years and no longer needs to rehearse it. He described the ale house. He described the stable loft. He described waking to the smell of smoke and finding himself on the wrong side of a burning house. He described the purse in Lord Vain’s hand the next morning, and the words Lord Vain had used, which were who will believe you, and you will be finished in this country, and say what I tell you and you will never see me again.

And then he described what he had done. Not the lie — that was already established. He described rolling over in the hay and going back to sleep. He described the moment, four hours later, when his master’s body had been carried past him on a plank into a stranger’s house, and he had stood there with his hands hanging at his sides and said nothing at all.

“I have carried that with me every hour of every day since,” he said. “I told your lordships the truth last spring because a girl asked me to sit down and told me I was worth something, and I believed her, and I still do not know if I deserved it.”

Cordelia Vain did not testify.

She was not required to, and the managers did not call her, because the solicitors on both sides agreed between themselves that a broken engagement and a ruined reputation were already a sufficient punishment for a woman, and because a peer’s daughter reading her own correspondence aloud in the House of Lords would have embarrassed too many families whose names belonged on the guest lists of half the benches. Her maid Jenkins testified in her place, and did it badly and honestly, weeping, contradicting herself twice, and finally saying the only thing she had said at the church, which was: my lady told me to do it and I did it, and I have not slept since, and I am glad it is over.

Lord Vain conducted his own defense.

He was, by every account, magnificent for the first hour. He was charming, and funny, and wounded, and he spoke about his daughter’s honor and about the vanity of servants and about the danger of a great house being ruled by a whim. He made three of the lords laugh. He very nearly got away with it.

Then the Duke of Ravenshollow stood up and asked a single question.

“If my lord Vain was in the carriage the whole night,” he said, “would he be so good as to tell the House how he came to have soot on the cuffs of his coat when he was found in the stable the next morning?”

Lord Vain did not answer.

He began to speak, and stopped, and looked around the hall at the faces of the men he had dined with for thirty years, and saw nothing there that he could use. He sat down, and did not rise again.

The verdict was guilty on all counts. The sentence was not death; the House would not hang one of its own, and no one had truly expected it to. It was, instead, the thing that lords fear more than rope: the total and public dismantling of a fortune, and the erasure of a name.

They fined him eighty thousand pounds — a sum so vast that it stripped him of everything. They ordered compensation to Thomas Bell for six years of stolen liberty, assessed at three hundred pounds a year and every year of his life to come. They ordered the restitution of the cottage debt, which had been held over Cora’s mother for six years, and they voided every lien and claim that the Vain family held anywhere in England.

And then they did the thing that finished him: they struck his name from the list of those entitled to sit in that hall. He was no longer Lord Vain in any sense the law recognized. He was Alaric Vain, a private gentleman with a ruined name and a mountain of debt, and there was not a magistrate in the country who would take his word over a farmhand’s.

He left England in June on a ship bound for Ostend, in a cabin he could not afford, alone.

Nobody came to see him off.