Chapter 19
Dorethea arrived home alone. Megan had decided to stay with her family. Her brother, Harry wanted to spend time with her. Oliver understood her need to be with a family she never thought she’d have but he missed her.
The next morning Oliver was just drafting a note when Harold the butler arrived in his study. “Are you at home for the Duke of Newbury, my lord,” and he presented Oliver with the Duke’s card.
“Of course. Put him in the drawing room and see if the Duke of Saxton is free too.”
Harold led the Duke of Newbury to the drawing room with the precise formality the man’s rank required, and Oliver gave himself a moment in the corridor before he followed.
He used them to think about what he knew of Harry Fairfax, the Duke of Newbury.
Twenty-five. Inherited the dukedom four years ago when his father died, still searching for the sister he had never stopped believing was alive.
Harry had spent his own money on investigators, and he’d gone himself to Wales twice in the last three years on nothing more than a suspicion and a rumor.
He was angry that he’d not followed up on his hunch.
He’d heard about Penharrow’s proclivities.
Oliver knew what it was to spend years wanting to do something about a man and finding your hands empty.
He pushed the door open.
The Duke of Newbury was standing at the window.
He turned as Oliver entered and Oliver had a moment to assess him—tall, fair, Megan’s eyes in a harder face, the jaw set with the particular tension of a man who had spent a bad night at the end of a worse week.
He was not a man in the mood for pleasantries.
“Lord Astor.” He inclined his head. Correct, controlled.
“Your Grace.” Oliver crossed the room and offered his hand, and the Duke took it with a grip that communicated precisely how many feelings he was currently managing. “I’ve sent word to my uncle. He’ll join us directly.”
“Good.” Harry released his hand and turned back briefly to the window before seeming to decide against it and facing the room instead. He was doing the thing men did when they wanted to appear less agitated than they were—standing too still, jaw too tight.
“How is she?” Oliver had to know. It wasn’t a question. It was the thing that had been waiting in his mouth since her brother had arrived.
“I’m sure she’s better than she was having found her family. Better than anyone has a right to expect.” Harry chose his words carefully. “She had a difficult night after—after speaking with mother. Understandably. But this morning she seemed steadier.” He paused. “She is remarkably strong.”
“She’s had to be.”
Something moved through Harry’s expression that he locked down quickly. He was going to be a difficulty, Oliver thought, not because he was unreasonable, but because he was in pain and he had somewhere to aim it, and that was always the more dangerous combination.
The door opened again and the Duke of Saxton came in, unhurried, with the expression of a man who had been briefed sufficiently to know what kind of meeting this was.
He greeted Harry with the precise degree of warmth appropriate between equals who did not know each other well and were potentially about to do business.
“Your Grace.”
“Your Grace.”
Oliver closed the door.
“Sit down,” he said, because someone needed to move this forward, “and tell me what you’re thinking.”
Harry sat. The Duke of Saxton settled into the chair by the fire with the air of a man who intended to listen before he spoke as the more mature tended to do. Oliver remained standing.
“I want to challenge Penharrow,” Harry said. Flat, direct, without preamble. “A duel. I want to kill the bastard.”
The Duke of Saxton’s expression did not change.
Oliver looked at him steadily. “All right. Tell me why.”
“Because a trial means evidence. It means witnesses. It means Megan standing up in some room and having what was done to her—” He stopped.
Started again, his voice carefully level.
“She has been through enough. More than enough. Whatever legal strategy you have been building, whatever Penharrow faces in a court of law, the cost of it will be paid by her. Everything she endured will have to be stated publicly, documented, argued over by men in wigs who have never once—” He broke off.
“A duel ends it cleanly. One morning, two shots, and it is done. No testimony. No court. No newspapers. No one gets to print what happened to her.”
Oliver was quiet for a moment.
He understood the argument perfectly. More than that.
He understood the impulse behind it, because he had felt it himself, the white-hot simplicity of wanting to put a pistol in his hand and stand twenty paces from the Earl of Penharrow and let everything end there.
He had felt it in Wales. He felt it now, with variable intensity, on most mornings when he thought too long about what Megan had survived.
“It’s not a bad argument,” he said.
Harry looked slightly surprised.
“The part about the trial,” Oliver continued.
“The cost to Megan. That is a real concern, and we have been thinking about it. Any criminal proceedings will require her testimony in some form and that is not nothing.” He sat on the arm of the chair opposite, considering.
“But there are problems with your solution.”
“I know there are problems. I’m prepared to manage them.”
“Are you prepared to be charged? A duel with the purpose of killing Penharrow would be viewed as murder. Even the likes of myself and others may not be able to stop that occurring and the only way to avoid a trial would be to tell Megan’s story which sort of defeats the purpose.
” The Duke of Saxton spoke for the first time.
His voice was measured, without judgment.
“Dueling is illegal. Has been for some years. It is prosecuted selectively but it is prosecuted. You are a duke. A new one, with an estate to manage and a mother and a sister who have only just found each other again.” He let that settle.
“If you put a ball in Penharrow’s chest on some field at dawn, there is a reasonable chance you will spend the next two years in court yourself.
And a trial of the Duke of Newbury for the death of the Earl of Penharrow will not be the quiet ending you are envisioning. ”
Harry was silent.
He watched Harry absorb this. The anger was still there, banked low and steady, but the intelligence was working now too. Megan had her brother’s eyes and her brother’s mind, Oliver suspected. Both of them thought quickly when they chose to.
“Then what,” Harry said. “You’re telling me we use the courts and she has to stand up and—”
“I’m telling you there may be another way.” Oliver stood and moved to the mantle. “Not the duel. But not the open trial either. At least not in the form you’re imagining.” He glanced at his uncle. “We have been working on several angles simultaneously.”
The Duke of Saxton picked up the thread with the smooth coordination.
“The Chancery petition Penharrow has filed collapses the moment Lady Megan’s identity is legally established.
We have evidence for that. The birth records, the parish register, the family Bible, witnesses who knew her as an infant, the birthmark recorded in writing before she was taken. We have him trapped in a fraud.”
“But that’s a civil matter,” Harry said.
“Yes. It is also a mechanism.” The Duke’s tone was patient, precise.
“Once the Chancery matter resolves in her favor, Penharrow is not merely defeated. He is exposed as a man who filed false claims in a court of law regarding a woman whose identity he knew perfectly well. That is fraud, at minimum. At maximum, it opens the door to a criminal investigation into everything else.”
“The criminal investigation doesn’t require Megan to testify publicly about every detail of what she endured,” Oliver said.
“There are other witnesses. Servants at the lodge. A housekeeper who saw everything. There is James Hartley’s letter, which documents Penharrow’s crimes in his own words.
I’m certain that if we begin down this path, other men will step forward with their own evidence against the earl.
” He held Harry’s gaze. “We want him ruined as thoroughly and permanently as possible. A duel gives you a dead man and a closed account. This gives you a dead man’s legacy destroyed, his name stripped of every honor, and every person who was ever in his pocket understanding that we will come for them next.
I plan to bring his empire crashing down. ”
The fire cracked. Harry was looking at the window again, his jaw working slightly.
“How long,” he said.
“Months, not years. We move quickly on the Chancery matter. Carmichael is already working.” Oliver paused. “I won’t promise you he’ll hang. I can’t promise you that. But I can promise you that whatever the outcome, it will not require Megan to be torn apart in a public proceeding to get there.”
Harry was quiet for a long moment. Then he exhaled, and some of the rigid tension went out of his shoulders, not all of it, but enough that he looked less like a man about to do something irreversible.
“Fine,” he said. It was not gracious. He didn’t intend it to be gracious. “Fine. Not the duel.”
The Duke of Saxton rose and crossed to the decanter on the sideboard with the air of a man who had just concluded a satisfactory negotiation and intended to mark it appropriately. He poured three glasses without asking and set them on the table.
Oliver sat.
Harry picked up his glass and turned it between his hands without drinking. He was still working through something, and Oliver let him work, because he recognized the expression. It was the expression of a man who had one more question and had been deciding for some time whether to ask it.