No Family, No Friends, No Mercy: The Paralyzed Duke Waited for a Bride Who Never Cried Off

Chapter 18

The petition was filed on the fourteenth of June, and the news broke in London on the sixteenth, and by the twentieth the whole city was talking about nothing else.

It came out in pieces, the way these things do: first a paragraph in a morning paper about an inquiry into certain loans and a consortium, and then a second paragraph naming a firm, and then a third naming a name, and then, on the twenty-second, a report that the affairs of Lord Philip Draycott had been placed in the hands of the Court of Chancery on petition of the Home Office, on grounds of fraud and the use of forged instruments.

The creditors came out of the walls. Men who had been too frightened to speak for ten years, men who had signed away estates, men whose sons had been turned out of Oxford and whose wives had been cut dead — one after another they appeared, and laid their papers before the commissioners, and told their stories in dry, level, respectable voices, and each story was the same story.

The commission sat for eleven weeks.

Adrian Ellsworth was called to give evidence three times: once about his father’s estate and the forged signature, once about the promissory notes, and once about a horse.

He came to that last examination in a wheeled chair, because he was still mostly in the chair then, and he sat in the witness box with his hands folded and answered questions in a flat, unhurried voice for two hours. He was asked whether he was mad. He said that he was not. He was asked whether he had come to that conclusion from a physician. He said that he had, and named Dr. Murray, and produced the letters, tied with tape in a bundle — the four letters from Hollis to Draycott, of which the third said, in plain English, I cannot in conscience certify that His Grace’s mind is affected.

The room went very quiet when that was read out.

Mr. Frederick Hollis was called afterwards, and gave evidence for a day and a half, and wept twice on the stand, and was ruined entirely — professionally, financially, and socially — and at the end of it named four other men who had been paid for similar services.

Lord Philip Draycott did not give evidence. His counsel advised him not to, which was the last piece of good advice he was to receive.

On the ninth of October, the commission found: that the consortium had been a fiction; that the papers conveyed by it had been forged; that thirty-one separate estates had been obtained by fraud; and that the principal author of the scheme had been, in every case, Lord Philip Draycott.

No gaol. Revelstoke had been right about that; the man’s friends were too numerous and the law too slow and the proof, on some of the older counts, too thin.

It did not matter.

What happened instead was this: his assets were frozen, his partnerships suspended, his name printed in the newspapers for eleven weeks in a row in the same paragraph as the word forgery. His clubs did not precisely expel him; he simply ceased to be seen at them. His invitations stopped. His tenants stopped touching their hats. Two of his three remaining friends wrote letters of the most formal possible withdrawal, and the third wrote nothing at all and simply never called again.

He was, at forty-one, exactly what Adrian had promised he would be. Unremarkable.

And then, in November, one worse thing happened to him, and it was not of Adrian’s making.

The Chancery commission, having authority to examine all his affairs, examined the matter of the horse — the bay gelding bought in Melton, the groom who had been called away to a mother who did not exist, the boy who had carried the message and could never be found. They found the dealer. The dealer found a bill of sale. And the bill of sale had, on the reverse, in a hand everybody now knew very well, a note: Stirrup leather to be cut through at the third hole. Do not send the animal to the stables at Ravenwood until the day.

It was not enough for a criminal prosecution for attempted murder. The law was not built for it. But it was enough to be read aloud in a public room, twice, by a commissioner, to a room containing eleven other gentlemen and a shorthand writer; and by December the whole of London knew that Lord Philip Draycott had cut the stirrup leather of his best friend’s horse, and had then gone to the funeral of that friend’s father and held his arm at the graveside.

He left London in February and went abroad. He was never seen in England again. There is a report — unverifiable, and repeated in more than one club — that he died at Florence in the winter of eighteen twenty-six, alone, having spent four years trying to buy his way back into rooms that no longer had a door for him.

Adrian Ellsworth read that report in a newspaper nine years later, at breakfast, in the conservatory at Ravenwood, with sunshine coming through clean glass, and said nothing about it, and passed the paper to his wife.