“I’M STILL A MAN… YOU THINK I CAN’T DO THIS?” THE WHEELCHAIR-BOUND DUKE WHISPERED TO HIS BRIDE

Chapter 13

They did not sleep that night.

By dawn Lily had told him everything — the filed wheel, the white camellia in her room, the letters taken, Clara Robinson’s whispered conferences on the servants’ stair, the questions Augustus had asked her in the conservatory, and the quiet threat delivered on the dance floor with his hand perfectly proper on her waist.

Charles listened with the terrible stillness of a man receiving information he had suspected for a long time and refused to examine because examining it meant admitting he had been a victim rather than merely unlucky.

“The north wing,” he said when she had finished. “You saw him go in.”

“Ten days ago. He looked up at the window and let me see him do it.”

“Then he wants to be caught doing something.” Charles’s mouth was grim. “Which means it is not where he keeps what matters. It is a distraction.”

“Then what matters?”

He was silent. Then: “The day of the crash, I sent a letter. A telegraph, actually — to the family solicitor, requesting an audit of the trust accounts. I had begun to notice discrepancies.”

Lily’s breath caught. “And the crash happened that night.”

“John took the reins because I had a headache.” Charles closed his eyes. “I have spent eighteen months believing my own carelessness killed my brother. But I sent that telegraph at four o’clock in the afternoon, and the axle failed on a bridge I had crossed a hundred times, and the man who benefits most from my death and my incapacity is a man who was in London when I sent it.”

“You think he had the carriage sabotaged.”

“I think,” Charles said, “that I should very much like to see the axle.”

Captain Clark was summoned before the household woke. He listened to all of it without expression, asked four precise questions, and left within the hour. He returned after dark with two men, a crowbar, and the axle from the wreck — which had been kept, as such things are kept, in a shed on the estate where no one had thought to look at it.

The fracture point had been cut.

Not worn. Not broken by force. Cut — partway through, so that the axle would hold for a mile or two of ordinary road and split the moment the carriage took the bridge at speed.

Charles looked at it for a long time without speaking.

Then he said, very quietly, “My brother died for a piece of paper.”

“And you were meant to die with him,” Lily said. “You did not. So they found another way to remove you. One slow enough to look like fate.”

Clark spoke then, his voice hard. “The physician. Wallace. He has been paid from an account at Hoare’s, under a name that is not his own. My man found the drafts.”

“Whose name?”

Clark met his master’s eyes. “Kensington, your grace. A family account.”