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

Chapter 12

The county lockup in March was cold in a way that no house on that coast could imitate: a cold with no weather in it, no sea, no smell. They put her in a cell by herself — the kind the deputies used for the quiet ones — and she sat on the bench with her back against the wall and her hands in her lap and did the only thing her body knew how to do, which was to stay awake.

At two in the morning, a man came to the glass.

Tomas Rennick was fifty-eight and looked like a lawyer the way a heron looks like a bird: long, gray, patient, entirely about one thing. He had a briefcase and an umbrella that had already failed and a face that Nora had seen exactly twice in her life, both times from the end of a corridor while the family talked about money.

“Miss Reyes. I’m the family’s counsel, which is a grotesque coincidence this evening, so let me put this plainly.” He sat down on the visitor’s stool. “Your arraignment is at ten Monday morning. The charge will be grand larceny of an item valued at two point one million dollars. With the wire transfer in your name and the hairbrush incident last week, the district attorney will ask for remand. I am going to make sure he does not get it — not because I believe you, but because I do not believe the timeline.”

“Why not?”

“Because the safe log in that library records every opening, and it says the safe was opened twice on Friday morning: once by Mrs. Ashford, and once at 11:40 p.m. on Friday night by somebody who did not enter a code and did not file an entry.” He opened the briefcase. “The videos in the west corridor from one in the morning until three are — I will describe it exactly as my investigator did — present but garbled, which in a house with a camera system and a security office is what we in the trade call an interesting fact.”

Nora looked at him.

“You’re here at two in the morning,” she said. “Why?”

“Because at eleven o’clock tonight my client told me, in the doorway of his own house, in front of his mother and the sheriff of this county, that he does not care what happens to the necklace.” Tomas snapped the briefcase shut. “He cares what happens to the child. And he instructed me to be here before morning, which is something no member of that family has ever asked me to do.” He stood. “Hold on, Miss Reyes. Hold on until Monday. Someone is going to hand you the key to this, and I would like to be in the room when they do.”

She was released at nine on Sunday morning on a bond posted in the name of A. Ashford, which meant that eighty people went to bed on Saturday night having seen a maid taken out in handcuffs, and breakfast on Sunday was in a house where the word bond was not mentioned at the table.

Nora did not go back to Blackthorn. Tomas drove her to a motel on the coast road with a diner attached — “until Monday, and then we will see” — and she sat on the end of a bed with the blinds closed and her hands shaking for the first time in fourteen hours.

Her phone had eleven messages from a number she did not know.

She did not listen to them. She put the phone face down on the nightstand and slept for two hours and woke, at noon, with her heart going like a birdcage — because it was Lily’s birthday, and the child was seven years old in a house full of flowers and no one had told her where Nora had gone.

At Blackthorn Manor, that same afternoon, three things happened.

The first: Corinne Vale was called into the library by Tomas Rennick for what he described as “a preliminary conversation about the coat rail,” and came out of it gray in the face, went to her room, packed two suitcases, and was stopped at the gate by a deputy who had been told to watch for her. Her hands were taken, and so were her suitcases; and in the pocket of the emerald silk she had worn the night before, folded small, was the brass key to the ornamental case — which was not the safe’s key, and did not need to be, because Corinne Vale had spent the last three days telling an unrecorded version of the story to anyone who would listen.

The second: the security office went through the west corridor footage frame by frame, as Tomas had asked, and found the four minutes that had been overwritten were sandwiched between two frames showing a woman in a dressing gown, at 1:07 a.m., at the door of the silver room. Nobody in the house had to be told whose dressing gown it was.

The third: at 4:50 on Sunday afternoon, a courier in a plain white van came up the hill from Boston, and signed a pad at the staff door, and left in Iris’s hands a sealed laboratory envelope from Hale and Wexler Genetics of Boylston Street, addressed to Mr. Adrian Ashford — express, signature required, results enclosed.

Iris took it to Adrian’s study, and did not open it, and did not deliver it to the east wing, and did not mention it to anyone, which was, in that house, an act of war.

Adrian Ashford sat in his father’s leather chair with the envelope on the desk in front of him and did not move for a long time.

Rain was coming off the sea again. In the corridor there was the sound of a birthday party being had by one small girl, being had stubbornly and without joy, because a child who has been told that her birthday party is later, when all this is over knows exactly what has happened to her world.

He picked up the envelope.

He turned it over once in his hands — the way he had once, six years earlier, turned over a folded note with four creases in it, standing in the same room, in the same rain, believing he knew exactly what kind of person people were.

Then he opened it.