Chapter Twenty-Five
“Last night was not what any of you believe it to be.”
Lady Honoria’s voice shook so badly on the first words that Clara thought she would not get through a second sentence.
But she steadied herself with both hands flat upon the table, and drew a breath, and went on, and with every word the shaking gave way a little more to something harder and clearer underneath.
“It was not an accident, and it was not a moment’s foolishness, and the Duke of Farenwoode did nothing, nothing, for which he owes me or anyone an offer of marriage. It was arranged. From the beginning to the end of it, it was arranged, by my father, and I was the instrument he used to do it.”
“Honoria.” The Earl’s voice came low and dangerous. “You are overwrought. You did not sleep. Sit down, before you say a thing you cannot unsay.”
She did not sit down.
“I followed the Duke onto that terrace because my father instructed me to. Before the ball had even begun, he told me that if His Grace withdrew from the room, as he so often does when the company grows too much for him, I was to go after him. He told me to take hold of his arm and to speak loudly, so that I should be heard. And he arranged…” Her eyes went to the Dowager for the first time, and something like grief crossed her face.
“He arranged for the witnesses. He asked Her Grace, when he saw the Duke leave the ballroom, to gather the principal guests near the terrace doors. He said he wished to make a happy announcement, and she, suspecting nothing, did as he asked. She did not know what she was being used for. None of you did. That was rather the point.”
Clara, at the foot of the table, saw the colour drain from the Dowager’s face as the meaning of it reached her, saw the dawning, sickening understanding of a woman who had just learned that her own hand had been upon the knife.
And beneath her own held breath, unbidden and unwelcome and impossible to push down, Clara felt the first frightening stir of a thought she did not dare let herself complete: if the whole obligation had been manufactured, if there had been no accident, no innocent mistake, no true compromising of honour, then perhaps the chain around him was not iron after all.
She shut the thought away at once, hard, because to hope now and be wrong would be more than she could bear a second time.
“Be silent.” William Hartwick was no longer smiling. “You do not know what you are throwing away. You will be silent this instant, or—”
“Or what, Papa?” And now the shaking had nearly gone out of her, and what was left was steady, and terrible, and free. “Or you will destroy Captain Weston? You have already promised me that a dozen times over. I find I am no longer able to hear it.”
A stir went round the table. Clara saw the Duke go very still.
“There is a man,” Honoria said, and at his name her voice changed altogether, softened and steadied at once, as though it were the only true thing she had said in months.
“Captain James Weston. I have loved him the better part of a year, and he loves me, and we had an understanding between us that harmed no living soul.
And my father found my letters. He read them, every one, without my knowledge.
“He came to me and told me that unless I did exactly as I was bid, unless I played the perfect, willing, blushing prospective Duchess of Farenwoode to the very last figure of the dance, he would see to it that James was broken. Cashiered. Ruined with fabricated charges that a man of my father’s influence can always find someone to swear to. ”
Her voice cracked once, and held.
“So I smiled. And I curtsied. And I let myself be walked out onto a terrace to trap a decent man into a marriage that would have made two more people as wretched as I have been. And I cannot do it. I have reached the end of what I am able to do. I will not buy James’s safety with the Duke’s whole life, and my own, and…
” her glance flicked, just once, to the foot of the table, to Clara, and away again “… and other people’s besides.
Whatever it costs me. Being free of you, Papa, is worth any price there is. ”
The silence after she finished was absolute.
The Earl rose from his chair. The genial mask was gone now; what stood in its place was something white and savage, and it frightened Clara more than all his smiling had.
“You stupid, sentimental girl,” he said softly.
“You have just destroyed yourself for a junior officer with three hundred a year. Very well. You have made your choice, and you will live by it. And as for Weston: I shall have him broken inside the month, and you may carry the knowledge of it with you wherever you go.”
“You will do no such thing.” The Duke stood.
He did it without haste, unfolding from his chair at the head of the table, and he was not loud, and he did not need to be, for the whole room turned to him at once.
Clara had seen him cold before. She had never seen him like this: every ounce of the careful, weary reserve burned clean away and something formidable standing in its place, the full weight of what he was at last brought to bear.
“Lord Hartwick. You will listen to me very carefully, because I shall say it only the once.”
His voice was quiet and without mercy.
“You will not lay one finger upon Captain Weston’s career. If a single charge is ever brought against that man, from any quarter, however well disguised, I will know its author. And I will spend whatever it costs, and I can spend a very great deal, to see it disproved and its source laid bare.”
He took a breath, then went on.
“More than that, I will see your daughter independently provided for, so that she need never again depend upon your goodwill for bread, and may marry her captain whenever she pleases. And if you should be tempted, out of spite, to spread one whisper against this house, or against her, or against Miss Ellsworth, or against anyone else under my protection, then understand this: the servants standing against these walls have heard every word your daughter has spoken. The truth will be in every kitchen in the county by nightfall and every drawing room in London by Friday, exactly as fast as your lie would have travelled. What they will all know is that the Earl of Hartwick attempted to trap the Duke of Farenwoode into marriage by manufacturing a scandal and coercing his own child. You may consider, my lord, which of us that ruins.”
It was, Clara thought, watching the Earl’s face, like watching a building come down: the slow, dreadful instant in which a man who had always won understood all at once that he had lost. The pale eyes went round the table: to his daughter, who did not flinch; to the Duke, who did not move; to the silent ranks of servants against the wall, who had indeed heard everything.
He found no opening anywhere, no purchase, nothing left to seize.
“You are no daughter of mine,” he said to Honoria at last, and his voice was venom. “From this hour. I shall not acknowledge you again as long as I live.”
Honoria met his gaze without a tremor, the tears running freely down her face and her voice perfectly steady.
“I know, Papa,” she said. “I have known it since I decided to speak. I find I can live with it a great deal more easily than I could live with the other thing.”
And the Earl of Hartwick turned, and walked the length of the room, and went out, and slammed the door behind him so hard that the cups jumped in their saucers. His footsteps went away down the corridor and did not come back.
Into the enormous silence he left behind him, for a long moment, not one person in the room moved at all.
Clara sat with her hands knotted white in her lap and her pulse beating thick in her throat, and tried to make herself believe what her own ears had given her.
It was undone.
The thing that had seemed, an hour since, as fixed and final as the turning of the earth—the wedding, the years of watching, the slow grey shrinking of everything she had let herself want for the space of a single night—was simply gone.
Swept clean off the table in the space of five terrible minutes by a frightened girl who had found, at the very last, the courage to refuse.
She scarcely dared breathe, as though the smallest movement might wake her from it.
At the far side of the table, Lady Honoria had sunk back into her chair, spent, her face wet and her shoulders shaking; but there was something loosed in her now that Clara had not once seen in all the days of her visit, the look of a person who had at last set down a burden too heavy to have been carried another step.
And the Dowager Duchess sat rigid and ashen at her son’s left hand, staring at nothing, her ringed fingers pressed hard against her lips, undone by the discovery of what her own wanting had so nearly done.
The Duke had not moved. He stood yet at the head of his table where he had risen to bring down William Hartwick, and Clara saw the terrible stillness slowly leave him now that there was no enemy left to spend it upon.
She saw what remained: a man who, in the sudden ringing quiet, did not appear to know where to look or what to do, with his stricken mother close upon one hand and, the whole length of the room away from him, the woman he had promised at dawn that he would not give up.
He had not yet looked at her.
Clara kept very still, and waited.