Every Woman Avoided the Chair Beside the Feared Duke — Until the Quiet Spinster Sat Down

Chapter 12

Inside the envelope was a single sheet, folded once, and a smaller square of paper pinned to it with a bent pin.

The small square was a promissory note. It bore the name of her late father in ink that had browned with eleven years, and a figure, and a date, and a signature that was — she held it to the candle and made herself look at it honestly — very nearly her father’s.

The figure was larger than anything the Ellerys had possessed at any point in their history.

One hundred and forty pounds, with interest accumulating at seven percent since the date of execution, which meant that the true claim was now more than twice that, and that everything left of the Ellery property — the two tenant fields her father had kept back for her, the cottage where her Aunt Verity lived, the small sum in the funds that had been intended to be hers at thirty — would not cover it.

Beneath the note, on the folded sheet, someone had written a single sentence in neat, careful, disguised handwriting.

“A woman carrying such obligations should think carefully before encouraging the attention of a duke.”

Rosalind read it twice. Her hands went cold from the wrists inward, as though she had been out in the rain for hours.

Then she looked at the date on the note.

She looked at it for a long time.

Her father had settled his final accounts in the autumn of the year before he died. She remembered it — remembered him coming home from the solicitor’s office in the village with the satisfied look of a man who had paid his last creditor, remembered him saying, over a supper of bread and cold mutton, that there was nothing owed in this house to anybody and nothing owed by this name.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, and the good thing to be said about him was precisely this: he had been a man who disliked debt with an almost religious intensity, because he had watched his own father lose everything to it.

The date on the note was two years after he died.

Two years.

She sat on the edge of the bed with the candle burning down and turned the paper in her fingers, and the conclusion arrived the way an old pain arrives — slowly, from far off, and with total certainty.

Someone had gone looking through her father’s history for a weapon.

Not a real one. A plausible one: a note in the correct hand, on paper of the correct age, with a figure large enough to be ruinous and dates arranged so that a creditor’s solicitor could present it as genuine and a country widow’s family could not afford to prove otherwise. Whoever had built this had spent real money and real time on it. They had found her father’s signature on something — a bond, a lease, a letter — and traced it, and set a pen to it with patience.

Her father’s name, dragged out of its grave and dressed in a lie, for the sole purpose of frightening her.

Before encouraging the attention of a duke.

Somebody had chosen that sentence. Somebody had sat at a table and decided which words would frighten her most, and had written encouraging rather than accepting, because encouraging implied she had already done something improper. And attention, because attention was the only thing the world believed a woman like Rosalind Ellery could ever hope to be given.

And whoever had written it knew exactly what had begun to happen between them.

Not suspected. Knew. Because they had used the word duke, and they had not said the Duke of Harnwood, and they had not needed to. Everyone in that house had been speculating for days. But a person who sends a letter like this to a penniless woman does not do it because of what a drawing room is whispering. They do it because they have watched something grow, from close enough to see the exact moment it became dangerous.

Rosalind thought about the drawing room on the first night — Crane’s cataloguing gaze from across the room, before anything had happened at all.

She thought about Crane on the landing, saying forty-three households in the tone of a man who already held the information by the throat.

She thought about Vivienne Prescott at breakfast, saying he becomes intensely interested and then quite suddenly isn’t, and hated how much the memory still stung, and set the sting aside, because the sting was what they wanted.

Then she thought about the letter’s real purpose, and her cold hands went colder still.

Her father’s name was on this paper. If it was declared valid, he died a debtor, and everyone in three counties would know it. If it was declared invalid, she would have to prove that a dead man’s signature had been forged, in open court, in public, with her name printed in the newspapers next to the word fraud — and to do that she would have to spend money she did not have, and time she could not recover, on a fight whose only certain outcome was scandal.

Either way, the letter won.

Unless she disappeared before it was played.

Rosalind knelt, and opened her writing desk, and put the promissory note and the folded sheet inside it, and locked it, and set the key on the ring with her others.

Then she sat in the dark and did not sleep, and listened to the house breathe, and understood for the first time what it meant to be hunted.