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

Chapter 19

Years later, the story was still told in the drawing rooms of London, though it had begun, by then, to garland itself with time like a rose bush with ivy.

The details changed, as they always do. In the retellings, Isabelle had slapped the Duke with her other hand, or over a diamond necklace, or because he had insulted her father’s grave; in the most romantic version, she had been weeping, and the Duke had caught the slap in his palm like a gentleman catching a falling star. Aunt Margaret, when consulted, declined to correct any version, on the grounds that “all of them flatter my niece, which is the purpose of stories.”

But the truth, as it happened, was preserved — in the library of Harrington House, in a ledger of pressed flowers and yellowed newspapers, under glass, for the children to read.

And there were children. Two of them, in the end: a daughter, Margaret, called Maggie — dark-haired, green-eyed, born with her mother’s frown and her father’s grin — and a son, Thomas, called Tom, who at the age of four discovered the definition of treason and demanded, at breakfast, to know all about the gentleman who had forged his grandfather’s name.

The story was told at every breakfast for a month. It was told at bedtime. It was told to the cats.

“And what did you do, Mama?” Maggie would ask, at the end of each telling, though she knew the answer perfectly. “When the wicked man said your papa was a liar?”

“I slapped a duke,” Isabelle would say, solemnly. “And it was the finest moment of my life, save one.”

“Which is the finest, Mama?”

“This,” Isabelle would say, and pull both children into her lap. “Every time.”

The spring of the fifth year of their marriage, they went back to Highgate.

The daffodils were out along the lane. The lych-gate had been newly whitewashed. And in the churchyard, beneath a yew that had stood for two hundred years, there was a stone that had not been there the last time: a modest headstone of Bath stone, carved with two names.

Thomas Fairmont, Mathematician — Restored in Full And Henry Karstair, His Friend in Truth.

“It took four years of petitioning,” Dominic said, “and one extremely threatening letter from William. The Church was delighted, in the end. A grave shared by the two most-wronged men in England — they could not get the Bishop out to bless it fast enough.”

Isabelle knelt in the cold grass before the stone, and her children knelt with her, and if she cried, the daffodils kept her secret.

“Papa,” she said, very quietly, when her throat would let her. “I read the pattern. I did not let them silence me. And I found you a friend for the journey.” She touched the stone. “Everything else is yours.”

Maggie presented a chrysanthemum to the grave, laid with the gravity of an ambassador, and Tom pronounced the whole ceremony a very good one, Mama, though the grass was wet, and Aunt Margaret — eighty, unbowed, magnificent in a violet cloak — observed that the morning was a fine one for flowers, which are the only language heaven understands.

On the way home, they stopped at the old townhouse in Bloomsbury.

It had been bought — by whom, no one ever quite admitted — and turned into a school. A small one. A good one. A brass plate beside the door read Fairmont House: A School for Pattern and Truth, and on the front step, in the May sunshine, twelve girls sat with their slates, while a young woman in a plain gown — one of the first pupils, now the first mistress — walked them through their first substitution cipher.

Isabelle watched from the lane, with the children holding her hands.

“Mama,” Tom said, “may I go to your school? Even though I am a boy?”

“You may go when you are seven, and you may be the only boy, and you may be proud of it. That is how your grandfather would have wanted it. He never met a boundary he believed in.”

That evening, at Harrington House, the spring dusk came down soft and gold over the gardens. The cherry trees had finished blooming; the roses had begun. From the open windows of the library drifted the sound of a pianoforte, played badly, with great enthusiasm, by Maggie, with Charlotte — home for the season, a young woman now, with her mother’s sharpness and her governess’s heart — correcting her gently from the window seat.

Inside, by the stopped clock, Dominic sat with his wife’s feet in his lap and a pile of letters on the table beside him: the new season’s invitations; a note from William about a strip of coastline in the Americas he was considering for the Company; and — at the bottom, wrapped in a ribbon — a letter from Sir Edmund Graves, forwarded from New South Wales, where he had been transported for life.

Isabelle reached for it, read it once, and passed it to Dominic without a word.

Madam —

I have no claim on your mercy, and I ask for none. I write only to say that I have read, in the colony’s newspaper, of your school, and of your father’s restored works, and of the two names upon the stone at Highgate.

When I forged those documents, I believed I would be remembered as a great man. I am thirty-four years old, and I am remembered only as the man who killed two better men, and even now — even corrected, even punished, even wrung out of every pretense — I cannot find it in me to resent you for it. That is the only honest sentence I have ever written.

You were right, Miss Fairmont. Men like me are dangerous. But you were more right when you said that patterns never lie.

I am learning to read patterns now. It is the only reading they allow us here. I think, sometimes, that it is your father’s ghost teaching me.

Dominic set the letter down. “What will you do with it?”

“Nothing,” Isabelle said, after a moment. “There are some men whose damage you must simply — let go of. Like a pattern you have proved.” She folded the letter back into its ribbon. “I proved it. The proof is a school and a grave and a family. He can keep the letter. I would rather keep my children.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. Through the open window, London went on conducting its endless, glittering, tireless gossip — the way it had the night she slapped a duke, the night she had deciphered a war, the night she had stood on a terrace and refused to be frightened.

And inside the library, where the clock was stopped at the hour it had all begun, two stubborn hearts had chosen each other.

And chosen again.

And again.

The End.