She Slapped England’s Most Feared Duke… Then He Refused to Let Her Go

Chapter 18

The guests departed by midnight, but the house did not fall quiet.

Charlotte had been permitted — under protest — to stay awake for the exodus, and inaugurated her new title of Special Adviser to the Viscountess by standing at the great door and bidding each departing guest farewell with a curtsy of varying degrees of dignity, all supervised by a smiling Lady Harrington. When the last carriage rolled away, she delivered her verdict to her mother:

“I have decided,” Charlotte announced, “that I like marriage. But I like the cake more.”

“The cake is finished, my love.”

“Then I shall marry someone who owns a bakery, and I shall have one every day.”

Lady Harrington, who had had a day of sustained emotion and very little wine, laughed until she cried — actually cried, right there in the front hall, with her daughter’s hand in hers and tears running down the careful architecture of her face. It was, everyone privately agreed, the finest thing that happened all night. The Viscountess herself obtained a witness; she required no other proof that a house could change.

Isabelle found Dominic on the terrace at last, in the same silver moonlight as the ball when everything had begun — the balustrade, the ivy, the jasmine gone quiet in the cold — and she came to stand beside him, close, so that their shoulders touched.

“This is where I first followed you,” she said.

“This is where I first knew I was lost.” He turned to her, and his face in the moonlight was young and open and entirely hers. “I have been thinking, wife. About the first thing you ever said to me that I believed.”

“Everything I said to you, you believed. That is why you kept me.”

“No.” He shook his head slowly. “The first thing. The night you slapped me. You said you insulted my father — and I thought, this woman will burn her life down for a dead man’s honor.” His voice went quiet. “And I knew, in that moment, that I had never met anyone like you. And that whoever finally deserved you would have to be willing to burn his own life down too.”

She was silent. The moon moved. The night smelled of wet earth and the last of the cherry blossom.

“Dominic?”

“Yes.”

“I am glad you burned yours.”

“Where else would I go?” he said, and kissed her.

It was not the chaste kiss of the church. It was not the formal kiss of the top table. It was the kiss of two people who had chosen each other in the dark, who had deciphered each other’s silences, who had stood on opposite sides of a forged signature and crossed the distance anyway. It was warm, and certain, and entirely theirs, and the ivy rustled, and the moon held its place, and London, ten miles away, went on gossiping about the governess and the duke and did not know the half of it.

Later — much later — Dominic led her into his library.

She had not been in that room since the night of the trap. It smelled the same — wax, paper, wood smoke — and it looked the same, the shelves of mahogany, the maps, the tall windows where the rain had streaked silver. But the clock on the mantel had been stopped at the hour they had first met. And on the desk, where the codes had lain, there was a single folded letter and a small velvet box.

“The letter is from my father,” Dominic said, “written the week before he died. He asked me to give it to the woman I would marry.”

Isabelle opened it with hands that trembled.

Dear son —

If you are reading this, you found her. I spent forty years among politicians, and I can tell you with certainty: the only test of a woman is not her beauty, nor her blood, nor her fortune, but whether she makes you want to be honest. If she does, keep her. If she does not, let her go, and live honestly alone, which is better than dishonorably together.

I never signed those documents, William. I want you to know that. It was the only thing of mine I left you, and I am glad it was true.

Your loving father, Henry

Isabelle reread it twice, folded it carefully, and pressed it to her chest.

“He knew,” she whispered. “He knew he was innocent, and he wrote it down for you.”

“He did.” Dominic’s voice was rough. “And I did not believe him. I was ashamed of him for years — the way the world was ashamed — and I never once asked him what he knew.” He swallowed. “The great sin of my life is not that my father’s name was forged, Isabelle. It is that I let the world forge my memory of him and called it duty.”

She set the letter down and took his face in both hands.

“Then let us forge our memory of him anew,” she said. “Together. With ink and truth, the only honest way. And when we have children, we will tell them the story correctly — how their grandfather was betrayed, and how the woman he taught patterns to came and set the record straight.”

Dominic laughed through something very close to a sob. “Children.”

“Yes.” She smiled, fierce and bright through her own tears. “I have decided I should like several small readers of patterns. Charlotte has agreed to assist with their education. You are to be chief financier of their chrysanthemums.”

“My God,” Dominic said. “I am dying.”

“Do not die. I have plans for you.”

And in the stopped-clock silence of the library where it had all begun, Isabelle opened the velvet box — the ring inside matching his, thin gold, one clear stone — and held out her hand.

“Put it on, husband. I am officially re-proposing. The first one was interrupted by a teacup.”

Dominic Karstair, who had faced down ministries and forgers and half the peerage, laughed aloud, took her hand, and slid the ring onto her finger — first, and only, and forever.