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

Chapter 17

The Chancery hearing was held in a long room with a high, cold window and a portrait of a dead judge.

The four trustees sat at a long table. Mr. Justice Hale presided, retired and grey and famously unmoved. Aldous Reed had his report in front of him, and his report, Lily noted, was six pages long, and he had been writing it since the assembly.

Dr. Wallace testified first. He spoke with confidence and professional gravity about the Duke’s injuries, the necessity of complete rest, the inevitable degeneration of his condition, and the danger of any activity beyond what his chair permitted.

Then Elias Sterling testified.

He had examined the Duke three times, and he had examined Dr. Wallace’s prescriptions, and he had a copy of the dispensary’s records. He explained, in the flat, patient voice of a man who had no interest in drama, that the sedative administered at Thornwick Hall had been dosed at roughly three times the accepted maximum, sustained over eighteen months, and consistent with deliberate systemic weakening.

Mr. Justice Hale asked one question. “Doctor. In your professional opinion, is there any medical reason this man cannot walk?”

“No, my lord. There is a medical reason he has been unable to. It is a chemical one, and it was administered by his physician.”

Then Adeline was called, and testified to Augustus’s words at dinner: the woman will do the rest.

Then Clara Robinson, tearful and steady, testified that she had been paid to report on the duchess’s correspondence.

Then a clerk from the telegraph office in Sheffield, who had been found in three weeks and had been paid, once, four hundred pounds, to lose a message.

And then Captain Clark laid the axle on the table.

It was a great, ugly, iron thing, wrapped in sacking, and when it was unwrapped the whole room leaned forward. Clark put his hand on the cut and traced its edge, and explained, in a soldier’s plain words, what a cut axle does on a bridge.

Mr. Justice Hale looked at the axle for a long moment. Then he looked at Lord Augustus Kensington, who had chosen, at the last possible hour, to attend.

“Lord Augustus,” he said. “Do you wish to address the bench?”

Augustus stood. He was very pale, and his charm had left him entirely, and what remained underneath it was small and ordinary and frightened.

“I would like to remind the bench,” he said, “that my cousin purchased a wife to provide himself with evidence of competence. That is not the same thing as competence.”

“On the contrary,” Mr. Justice Hale said. “It is precisely the same thing.”

He turned to Charles.

“Your grace. Would you stand?”

Charles rose.

He stood in the cold light of the high window, both hands on the table’s edge, shaking, white to the lips — and he held. He held while the room counted, and he held while Lily counted from her seat and got to nine, and then Aldous Reed quietly said, “That will do, your grace,” because he was an old man, and kind.

Charles sat down. Then he looked across the room at his cousin, and said one sentence.

“Eighteen months ago, you murdered my brother in a carriage that was meant for me.” His voice did not rise at all. “You have had a great deal of my family’s money since. I would like it back.”