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

Chapter 8

The scream came from the east wing, and by the time it ended the whole house was moving.

Footmen dropped their trays. Kitchen maids abandoned their pots. The butler came up the back stairs two at a time, which in thirty years of service he had never once done. Every door along the corridor opened at once, and every head turned the same way.

Lady Cordelia Vain stood in the doorway of her bedroom with one hand pressed flat against her chest.

Her face was a study in terror — the wide eyes, the parted lips, the little tremble in her chin. She had practiced it, Cora would think later, the way other women practiced the pianoforte.

“My pearls,” Cordelia cried. “My grandmother’s pearls. They’re gone. Someone has stolen them.”

The Dowager Duchess arrived first, then Lady Vain, then the Duke. Lady Vain was nearly fainting and had to be supported by her own maid, and she kept saying those pearls are worth a fortune, they have been in our family for a hundred years, over and over, in a voice pitched to carry.

The Duke stood in the middle of the room and looked around it slowly. The bed. The dressing table. The open jewel case, lid flung back, its velvet cushions empty.

He did not look at his bride. He looked at the door.

“Mrs. Pratt,” he said. “Who has been in this room today?”

Mrs. Pratt came forward with her list, and her hands were trembling so badly that the paper shook. “Only the maids who change the linen, your grace. Molly Green, and—” She stopped.

“Go on.”

“And Cora Bell.”

Everyone went quiet.

Cordelia turned to the Duke with wide, innocent, frightened eyes. “Oh, Edmund,” she said softly. “Surely not that girl. The one who threatened me.”

No one in the room breathed.

Lady Vain lifted her head from her daughter’s shoulder. “Search the servants’ rooms,” she said. “All of them. Now.”

They lined the servants up in the great hall.

Footmen along one wall, maids along the other, kitchen staff by the door, the butler in the corner with his hands folded as if he were attending a funeral. Molly Green was crying silently, tears running down her face and dripping off her chin onto her apron, and she kept saying she didn’t do it, she didn’t do it under her breath, and the maid beside her dug an elbow into her ribs to make her stop.

Cora stood perfectly still.

She had learned, at sixteen, how to stand still. It was the only skill that had ever saved her anything.

Mrs. Pratt went up the attic stairs with a candle. The house waited. Somewhere, in the kitchens, a pot boiled over and hissed onto the coals, and nobody went to see to it.

When Mrs. Pratt came back down, she was carrying Cora’s spare apron — the one that hung on a nail behind the attic door, the one Cora had not worn in a week.

Her face was the color of gray soap.

Slowly, in front of everyone, she reached into the apron pocket and pulled out a long shining string of pearls.

They hung from her fingers, catching the candlelight, turning slowly, and there was no sound in the great hall at all. Not a cough. Not a rustle. Forty people, and not one of them moved.

Every eye in the room turned, one by one, toward Cora Bell.

“I did not take them,” Cora said.

Her voice was steady. Her face had gone very pale, but her voice was steady, and she did not look at the pearls. She looked straight at the Duke.

“Of course you didn’t,” said Cordelia sweetly. “They simply walked up four flights of stairs and climbed into your apron all by themselves.”

Someone laughed — a nervous, startled laugh from the back of the hall. Nobody else did.

“Cora was with me all afternoon,” Molly cried out through her tears. “We changed the linen together. I never saw her touch anything, I swear it, I never left her side for one single—”

“Be quiet, girl,” snapped the Dowager Duchess.

Molly shrank back against the wall as if she had been struck.

“Unless you wish to join her.”

Lady Vain pressed a handkerchief to her eyes. “A thief under the same roof as my daughter,” she said, her voice breaking beautifully. “We might have been murdered in our beds.”

“Send for the constable,” said the Dowager Duchess. “At once.”

Two footmen stepped forward and took Cora by the arms.

She did not struggle. She did not pull away. She only looked across the hall at the Duke — at his stillness, at the flatness of his face — and he looked back at her, and gave her nothing at all.

“Lock her in the old wine cellar for tonight,” the Dowager Duchess ordered. “The constable can take her in the morning.”

As they led her out, Cora passed close to Lady Cordelia Vain.

Cordelia leaned in, just slightly, so that no one else in the world could hear.

“Do you know what they do to thieves, Cora Bell?” she whispered. “They hang them.”