Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Every bone in Seraphina’s body was screaming that this was a catastrophic idea, but as she crouched in the shadows of the high stone wall, she reminded herself of the alternative.
Going back home to face Lady Byron, looking that woman in the eye, and confessing that she had utterly failed to protect the family... that was worse.
The thought of admitting defeat was a far more terrifying prospect than what she was currently doing.
She was the eldest. She was supposed to be the shield, the one who bore the brunt of their precarious social standing, and yet she had allowed a blackmailer to breach their perimeter and threaten Euphemia’s new life.
Confronting Lady Byron with the reality of her failure made her blood run cold.
So, breaking into a Duke’s townhouse to find definitive proof of extortion was, by comparison, the only rational choice available to her.
Finding the identity of her tormentor hadn’t been simple, but Seraphina had broken the puzzle down.
She had taken the letter to the College of Arms the following morning with the magnifying glass and a copy she had made of the impression by candlelight.
The clerks there kept the master rolls of every registered coat of arms in England, every crest, every coronet, every arrangement of symbols on every shield belonging to every family with a title.
She had gone through them methodically, page by page, until she found it.
The match was exact.
The Duke of Norwyn was her tormentor.
Getting past the threshold of the Norwyn estate had not been easy.
She had spent one morning watching the house from the street, noting everything.
Noble households ran on routine and the Norwyn estate was no different.
By ten o’clock the coal merchant’s men had arrived at the cellar door with enough noise and dust to pull every available pair of eyes in that direction, and the scullery entrance on the east side of the building had been left entirely unattended.
She had dressed plainly. Gray wool, white apron, a basket of linens over her arm.
In her experience the people did not look closely at domestic staff, which was both a social failing and, on this particular morning, extremely useful.
She had walked in through the scullery door, and followed the back corridor deeper into the house.
The study had not been difficult to find. Houses like this were built to a logic. Reception rooms at the front, family rooms in the middle, the duke’s private rooms toward the rear where the noise of the street could not reach them.
She had opened two doors before this one, her heart hammering in her chest with each attempt. The first had revealed a linen-scented stillroom, and the second a small, sunlit morning room, both luckily entirely vacant, allowing her to retreat unnoticed into the hallway.
Then she reached the third threshold. The door was heavier than she expected. It was a door designed for absolute privacy, a barrier meant to safeguard state secrets or personal sins from the prying eyes of the household.
“Yes!” she whispered to herself, walking into what she was certain was the duke’s study. The door shut behind her, and a profound wave of triumphant satisfaction washed over her.
“Brilliant,” she whispered to herself, her eyes darting across the expansive room. “Absolutely brilliant. Seraphina, Beaumont... you have outmaneuvered yourself.”
She hurried toward the desk, her fingers instantly sorting through a neat stack of papers resting beside a blotter.
As she flipped through the pages, her heart gave a violent leap.
They were newspapers. Specifically, the exact issues of the gazette containing her heavily opinionated, highly controversial social commentary columns.
“Got you,” she muttered under her breath, a smile touching her lips as she pulled out one specific cutting.
She carefully turned over the stack. Seraphina didn’t write for the gazette every week.
Her schedule was erratic, appearing twice weekly or sometimes every three weeks depending on how thoroughly a political matter had incensed her.
For a reader to possess a scattered collection of the newspaper was normal, but this stack contained every single edition she had penned over the past year, meticulously sorted and archived.
“It is him,” she whispered, her certainty hardening. “There is no doubt left. I cannot believe a duke as wealthy as this man is capable of something like this. Why?”
She prepared to slip the evidence into her apron, ready to make her escape, when the sound of footsteps echoed from the corridor outside, moving directly toward the study door.
Seraphina’s eyes widened in sheer panic, as she wondered if her lucky streak had finally run out.
Her mind raced through her options. Should she stand in the corner and curtsy? She was dressed like a maid, hence there was every possibility he would treat her as one.
‘No,’ she thought. She was holding stolen newspapers.
Her instinct for self-preservation took over, and she bolted toward the door just as the brass handle began to turn.
Pressing herself flat against the wall directly behind the swinging arc of the door, she held her breath, hoping that the person would walk past her into the room, allowing her to slip beneath their arm and sneak out into the hall unhindered.
The door swung open, shielding her from view for a fraction of a second. A tall figure stepped into the room.
Seraphina made her move, dipping low to slide past his flank toward the open corridor.
But she didn’t make it.
Before she could even clear his shadow, a large hand shot backward with blinding speed. His fingers clamped firmly around her stomach, stopping her dead in her tracks. With a single sweep of his arm, he drove her backward, pinning her firmly against the wall.
Seraphina let out a sharp gasp, her chest heaving against the pressure of his hand on her. Instinctively, she brought her hands up to push against his chest, trying to force some distance between them, but he barely budged.
This, she was fairly certain, was the Duke of Norwyn. William Carlton. The man stood locked in place, his hand still anchored across her abdomen, his dark eyebrows drawn together in a fierce line. He tilted his head, his gaze studying every inch of her face.
Looking up at him up close, Seraphina found herself struck by a jarring thought.
For someone so remarkably handsome, with such a chiseled jaw and piercing green eyes…
for someone who looked like he was sculpted out of a romantic poet’s wildest fantasy, how could he possess such a wicked, sinister soul?
It seemed entirely unfair that nature had masked such malice in elegance, allowing a man so beautiful to do something so monstrously evil to a family he had never even met.
“What do you think you are doing here?” he asked. “In my study?”
Seraphina swallowed hard, trying to force her voice into a docile, subservient tremor. “I... I am merely a new maid, Your Grace. I only came in to dust the sideboard and clean the grate. Forgive me.”
The Duke’s gaze didn’t soften, if anything, amusement flickered in his eyes. He didn’t release his grip.
“A maid?” he repeated flatly. “Let us address the errors in that narrative, shall we? First of all, my housemaids do not wear that particular shade of gray, my housekeeper insists on a much darker charcoal. Second of all, unless I have suddenly begun paying my domestic staff a ridiculous fortune, a maid cannot afford the scent of the expensive Attar of Roses that you are currently wearing.”
Seraphina bit her lip, her heart pounding as he leaned a fraction closer. She had not thought about it that morning while she dressed that putting on the perfume Euphemia had gifted her a month ago would be her undoing.
“Third of all,” he continued. “I am exceedingly good with faces, and I have never once seen yours in this household. You are far too pale, as if you have spent your entire life hiding away in dark rooms, entirely untouched by the sun. You look remarkably fragile to be hauling coal buckets.”
Seraphina’s panic flared into a defensive spark. She glared up at him, lifting her chin despite the hand pinning her to the wall. “I am not fragile.”
His grip tightened just enough to remind her of the physical disparity between them. “I will ask you one more time. Who are you, and how did you get into my study? Who are you working for?”
Seraphina felt the stolen newspaper cuttings crinkling against her bodice. Realizing she had no cards left to play except the truth, she looked him dead in the eye.
“I know what you did,” she said clearly.
The Duke froze then. For a single, fleeting second, the mask on him cracked. Seraphina watched as a flicker of shock and calculation crossed his features. She saw the brief, worried tension tighten around his jaw, and a thrill of triumph cut through her fear.
‘I have caught him,’ she thought fiercely.
“I see,” William said, his voice vibrating right through Seraphina’s ribs. “So you think you have caught me out. You think you can walk into my home and hold this over my head?”
“Of course I do!” Seraphina retorted, her chest rising and falling sharply against his arm.
She refused to let him see how fast her heart was beating.
“You thought you could do it entirely in secret, didn’t you?
You thought I would never trace it back to you, that I would just roll over and let you ruin everything.
But you left a trail, Your Grace. A very specific, very stupid trail. ”
William’s eyes darkened, a sharpness entering his gaze that made Seraphina wonder if she had pushed him too far. He sneered, hiding what looked surprisingly like a flash of panic.
“A stupid trail?” he echoed, his voice dangerously smooth. “What, pray tell, do you intend to do with this information? Publish it? Paste it across the front page of the gazette so the entire Ton can gawk at my private affairs?”