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

Chapter 14

They had eleven days until the trustees met in London to rule on Charles’s competence.

Eleven days to prove that the man who had been quietly dismantling him for eighteen months was the same man who would inherit everything the moment the trustees signed.

“We cannot accuse him without evidence he can discredit,” Charles said. “He will say the account is a family one, that any Kensington might use it. He will say the physician’s testimony on my condition is his own professional judgment. He will say my wife is a stranger who has been here three months and has an interest in my fortune.”

“Then we do not accuse him,” Lily said. “We let him accuse himself.”

It was Adeline who gave them the key, and Adeline who gave it unknowingly.

She came to Thornwick for a fitting — Lily had asked her to stand as witness at the London hearing, a request Adeline accepted with a long, steady look that said she understood exactly what she was being asked to do.

“I will tell you one thing,” Adeline said, as the seamstress knelt at her hem. “When Augustus proposed the trusteeship claim, he did it at a dinner. He said Charles could not sign his own name without shaking. And then he said — and I remember the exact words, because they were so strange — ‘the woman will do the rest.'”

Lily went very still. “The woman?”

“I thought he meant a nurse.” Adeline shook her head. “But there is no nurse. Only a physician.”

“And a lady’s maid,” Lily said.

Clara Robinson was confronted that evening, not with fury but with facts — the intercepted letters, the conferences on the stair, the page torn from the correspondence book. Captain Clark stood at the door. Phoebe stood beside Mabel with her arms folded, looking, for the first time Lily had seen, entirely unlike a girl.

Clara broke in under ten minutes.

She had been paid. She had been told only to watch and report — what the duchess wrote, where she went, what she asked the servants. She had not known about the axle, and when she heard of it she went grey and began to cry.

“I did not know,” she kept saying. “Your grace, I did not know.”

“No,” Lily said. “But you knew enough. And now you will help us prove the rest, or you will explain to a magistrate why a duke’s letters were carried out of this house in your apron.”

Clara told them where Augustus kept his private papers.

Not the north wing. Not Thornwick at all.

A house in Bloomsbury. A rented, quiet, respectable house, under a name that was not Kensington’s.