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

Chapter 16

The house in Bloomsbury had a respectable green door and a brass knocker, and Captain Clark’s men had been watching it for four days.

On the fifth, Augustus arrived at nine in the morning and did not come out.

Lily went in at half past ten with a magistrate’s warrant — obtained through Richard Randolph’s offices and Adeline’s testimony — and Captain Clark at her shoulder and two constables behind them.

They found Augustus in the upstairs study, burning papers in a grate. The room smelled of scorched ink.

He looked up, and for half a second his face was not charming at all.

“Duchess,” he said. “How enterprising.”

“Stop.” Lily crossed the room and pulled the remaining papers from the grate with her gloved hands, stamping out a corner that had caught. “Every one of those is evidence now, my lord. You have just spent an hour destroying nothing and proving everything.”

They found the drafts to Dr. Wallace. They found a ledger of payments to a man in Sheffield who had supplied carriage axles. They found letters in Augustus’s own hand discussing “the inevitable conclusion of the trusteeship question” with a solicitor who was not Richard Randolph — letters written months before the crash.

And they found, in a strongbox beneath the floorboard, a single page of heavy paper, watermarked and dated: the audit request Charles had telegraphed the afternoon he was nearly killed. It had been copied, not sent. The clerk at the telegraph office had been paid to divert it.

Charles came up the stairs slowly, on his own legs, with a constable’s arm at his elbow and Mabel’s hand firm beneath his other arm. He crossed the room in eleven steps and stood in front of his cousin.

Eleven steps. Lily counted every one.

“Well,” Charles said. “Here I am, Augustus. Not shaking. Not dying. Standing in your study. Shall I sign my name for you?”

Augustus said nothing at all.