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

Chapter 6

On the third night after the ball, Isabelle dreamed of her father.

It was not the dream that came to her every night — the one where she is twelve years old, hair loose and ink-stained, sitting at the oak table while her father’s voice walks her through a column of numbers like a guide through dark country. In that dream, he is alive. In that dream, the world is whole.

This dream was different.

This dream was the night the investigators came.

She was twenty. The house was the same house — the narrow Bloomsbury townhouse that smelled of bread and tea and paper, where the books had long since begun outnumbering the furniture. And her father stood behind his desk, calm as a man meeting the rain, while the men from the East India Company stood across from him in their black coats and their patient, courteous faces.

“Thomas Fairmont,” the tallest of them had said, unrolling a document, “you are accused of the systematic falsification of Company accounts. Of diverting funds earmarked for the Crown. Of —”

“Show me the evidence,” her father had said. Not angrily. Curiously. As if he were being presented with a puzzle.

They had shown him. Dozens of records, each one bearing his signature. His name, in fine black ink, attached to withdrawals he had never made, to ledgers he had never seen, to money that had never touched his hands.

Isabelle had watched him read them. She remembered the way the candlelight had moved across his face as he traced the signatures with one careful finger.

“These aren’t mine,” he said politely.

“They bear your hand, sir.”

“Then someone has a better hand than mine.” He looked up. “Every one of these is identical.”

“Identical to your signature, yes.”

“No. Identical to each other.” He had turned the documents toward them, the way he turned sheets of equations toward her when he taught. “No man signs his own name identically dozens of times. It cannot be done — the muscles will not permit it. Look at the pen pressure. Look at the angle of the H. These were traced from a single original, then overwritten to age the ink.”

The men from the Company had looked at each other.

And the next week, everything her father owned was sold, and the week after that, the invitations stopped coming, and the month after that —

The dream shifted. She was older. Twenty. The room was smaller. The walls were bare where the books had been sold. Her father lay in the narrow bed, his hands folded over the counterpane, and they were thinner than she had ever seen them — the hands that had taught her to hold a pen, to find rhythm in numbers, to read a battlefield in a list of shipping times.

“Promise me, Isabelle.” His voice was a thread of smoke. “Promise me you will not let them silence you.”

“I promise, Papa.”

“The truth is not lost. It is only hidden.” His eyes found hers, and there was something in them that was not fear — something that looked almost like peace. “Read the patterns. The patterns will tell you.”

“The patterns will tell me what?”

“Everything.”

A knock on the door shattered the dream like glass.

Isabelle sat up in the dark, gasping. The room — her attic room at Harrington House, narrow and white and as bare as a nun’s cell — steadied around her. A cedar chest. A water pitcher. A single hairbrush. And beneath the floorboard, where she had hidden them the day she arrived, the copies.

She did not need light to find them. She had carried them across four households, two counties, and five years. She pulled up the floorboard, lifted out the folded papers, and held them to the cold moonlight.

The signatures of Henry Karstair. The Duke’s own father.

Identical. Every line, every angle, every flourish. Identical the way copies are identical. Identical the way a pattern is identical, when someone has used the same template, the same pressure, the same weighted hand.

The same hand that had condemned Thomas Fairmont.

Her father’s ghost seemed to stand at her shoulder as she traced the capital H with her fingertip.

The patterns will tell you everything.

Tomorrow night, she would walk into the Duke’s library again. She would sit at his desk, beside his fire, and she would decipher his cyphers and call him your grace and pretend she did not notice the way he looked at her, or the way her own pulse answered.

And with every stroke of the pen, she would be hunting the man who had killed her father.

Even if that man’s name was carved in gold above her head.