She Called the Cold Duke “An Insufferable Bore” — What Happened Next Stunned London

Chapter 10

The Blue came out of the safe on the Thursday.

Nora saw it because she was polishing the library that morning, and Iris came in with the key and did it herself — the one task in the house that was never delegated, and she did it with the ceremony of a woman lighting a candle in a church.

The Ashford Blue was a pendant, cut marquise in 1911 from a stone Adrian’s great-grandfather had bought in Amsterdam, and it was the exact, unearthly color of deep water seen from above. Forty-two carats of it sat in a platinum nest and hung on a chain fine as a thread of rain. Iris lifted it out of the box on a cloth, and in the winter light the whole library turned blue.

“I’ve held this three times in twenty-two years,” Iris said. “Once for the old lady’s funeral, once when Mr. Ashford married, and once now.” She set it into the smaller velvet case that would be carried to the gala. “The tradition — you’ll hear it from everyone this week, so hear it from me first. The Blue is worn by the mother of the Ashford heir at the wedding of the heir. It’s been that way since the twenties. It means: the child in your arms is the future, and you are the door.”

Nora went up to the nursery that afternoon with a tray, still feeling the blue behind her eyes.

Lily was on the floor with her paper, at work.

“I made you a present,” she said, without preamble. “Come here. You have to sit on the floor, it’s a floor present.”

Nora sat on the floor.

The map was of the manor, drawn better than the first one — the corridors smoother, the tree in the garden bigger, the labels steadier. But this one was different: there were small figures where rooms used to be. Iris in the kitchen. Mrs. Poole with a spoon. Father in the study with a chair and a window and a lamp that was drawn with a lot of yellow. And in the blue room at the top of the stairs, a woman with dark hair.

“You have to draw your own face,” Lily said, “I didn’t know how.”

Nora did not look up for a moment, because her eyes had gone hot.

“What is this room?” she asked, pointing, very lightly, at a room standing empty at the edge of the drawing, outside the manor’s walls, with nothing in it at all.

Lily turned the paper around to look, and then back, and then she said, in her matter-of-fact, doctor-of-divinity voice:

“That’s where I used to put her. But she isn’t in there anymore.”

“Where is she?”

The child looked up at Nora with a stillness that was, in a six-year-old, more frightening than any tantrum.

“You know, you’re not very good at pretending,” Lily said. “That’s why I like you.”

Downstairs, at that same hour, Helena Ashford was in the east sitting room with Ellery Croft.

Ellery was fifty and grey and had been the family’s fixer since before Adrian had a driver’s license — the man who arranged the auction, the auction’s lawyers, the boat, the silence. He sat with his hat on his knee and a notebook he did not write in.

“The results are due Monday,” Helena said. “The gala is Saturday. I want the girl in custody before either.”

“On the theft.”

“On the theft. The necklace goes into her coat at the end of the evening and comes out of it in front of the whole county.” Helena turned her teacup a quarter turn with two fingers. “Fifty guests, a photographer from the Herald, three trustees, my granddaughter in bed upstairs with her birthday on Sunday, and the police taking the maid out of the front hall in handcuffs. Do you know what a story like that becomes by Tuesday, Ellery? It becomes the reason she is not the mother. It becomes a woman with a grudge and a rap sheet and a taste for diamonds. It becomes the last conversation on earth that a judge in this state will ever listen to.”

“And if the lab disagrees.”

“Then the lab will be testing the wrong vial,” Helena said, “because a maid under arrest for theft does not have custody of her own blood sample, and because the county will hold her until Monday evening, and because Monday evening is thirty hours too late. I have not spent six years on this to lose it to a judge’s calendar.”

Ellery wrote nothing down. “And the child’s father?”

Helena set the cup down.

“My son,” she said, “will do what Ashfords have always done when the world turns difficult. He will decide that the family is more important than the fact. He was raised for it. I raised him for it.”

The trap was set the following evening, between the florists and the electricians, while the whole house slept its way toward Saturday.

Corinne Vale came down the west corridor at one in the morning in a silk dressing gown with the velvet case in her hand and her heart going like a birdcage — because the case was not in the safe, the way it had been for a week, but in the little silver room off the hall where the coats for the evening were being hung, and because her aunt had told her exactly what to do, and because her debts were a number she could no longer say out loud.

The coat was there, on the second hook, and it was the color of wet stone, and it had a repair at the left cuff, and it was the only coat on that rail that did not belong to a guest.

Corinne slid the pendant into the left pocket, all the way down, so that it lay at the seam where no hand goes by accident. Then she smoothed the pocket flat, and stepped back, and turned around.

In the doorway, in the dark, Helena Ashford was watching her.

“Smile, Corinne,” she said. “It’s almost over.”

And upstairs, in the blue room at the top of the stairs, Nora Reyes slept the deep sleep of a woman who had finally, after six years, put flowers on the right grave.