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

Chapter 17

He went to the study, and opened the whole of the London correspondence, and did not come out for twenty minutes.

When Marianne came in, she found him standing over two documents, coat already on.

“What is it?”

He held up a letter from the Prescott family solicitor.

“The firm that purchased her father’s debt is controlled through a Prescott holding company. It is three removes deep — a creditor, a firm, a holding company, a family — but the shelf marks give it away.” He set the letter down. “Vivienne, perhaps. Her father, perhaps. Perhaps both.”

Marianne put her hand on the back of a chair. “Why would they go to such lengths? A forged note is a crime.”

“Because he does not need to win.” Edmund reached for his gloves. “He only needs it to be painful enough that I cannot touch it. A duke may marry a poor woman. He cannot marry a woman whose father is publicly accused of debt — not in the middle of a settlement that will be gossiped about in every drawing room in three counties. Prescott understood exactly what he was buying. He was not buying three hundred pounds. He was buying the appearance of an awkward business, and he bought it for the price of a clerk’s afternoon.”

“Then she was right,” Marianne said slowly. “She was right not to tell you.”

“She was wrong about everything that mattered.” He said it without heat, which made it worse. “Where has she gone?”

“She didn’t say.”

Edmund stood in the middle of his own study with his gloves in his hand and no direction to ride in.

“Her aunt,” he said finally. “There is an aunt. She has mentioned her once — at Marlbrook, past Chidden. There is a cottage.” He turned toward the door. “Have the phaeton brought round.”

“Alexander.”

He stopped.

“You have not told me what you intend to do about the settlement.”

“I rejected it,” he said. “Yesterday. Before I knew any of this.”

Marianne stared at him. “Before you knew.”

“Yes.”

“Then how will you save the tenant land? The northern mortgage falls due in March. You have told me so yourself, twice, in writing.”

Edmund pulled on his gloves.

“By selling the London house. Part of the racing stable. Three investments my trustees consider sacred.” The corner of his mouth moved, without humor. “Rigby will require smelling salts.”

“You will be considerably poorer.”

“I will be considerably poorer.”

Marianne sat down, which she had not intended to do.

“Alexander.”

He was already at the door.

“Someone,” he said, “believed that I could be forced to choose between my duty and that woman. They designed the whole apparatus for it: the debt, the scandal, the timing, my own trustees standing behind their chairs asking me to be sensible.” He looked back at her. “They were wrong about the choice. Not about the apparatus. They built it very well.”

He was halfway down the corridor when Marianne called after him.

“Alexander. Where did she go?”

He stopped at the head of the stairs, and stood there a moment with his hand on the rail, and answered without turning around.

“She did not tell me. That is the whole answer, and it is my own fault.”

Two miles away, the road turned south, and forty miles beyond that, the light was coming up over the Waterbrook hills — and at the gate of a small stone cottage, a hired carriage stopped, and Rosalind Ellery stepped down onto the gravel with her trunk and her writing case, and looked up at the house where she had spent every unhappy summer of her girlhood, and found that there was already a carriage standing in the drive.

It was polished to a mirror shine. Its horses were still harnessed, cropping at the grass verge. And on the door panel, in gold leaf, was a crest she had never seen in her life until eleven days ago at Marchwood House, when its owner had saved the Duke of Harnwood the seat beside her.

The Prescott crest.

Rosalind stood motionless in the road with the morning sun in her eyes, and the driver behind her cleared his throat and asked whether she wished him to take the trunk down, and she did not answer him, because the door of the polished carriage was opening.