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

Chapter 11

The following morning dawned gray and restless over London.

Isabelle had barely slept. Every hour of the night had been filled with the same thoughts: forged signatures, Sir Edmund Graves, and Dominic’s quiet promise — I trust you. No one had said those words to her in years. Trust had been a luxury she had lost the day her father’s name was destroyed, the day she had learned what the world did to the families of the accused.

And yet now everything depended on it.

She rose before the light, dressed, and sat down at the window with her father’s old ledger — the one he had kept in the last year of his life, filled not with money but with patterns. Compositions of ink. Angles of handwriting. A whole study of the mechanics of forgery, compiled by a dying man who wanted his daughter to finish what he could not.

Pages and pages, in his careful hand:

The hand that signs a name a hundred times will leave its own signature in the pressure of the stroke. Look for the fracture. Look for the metal. Look for the man.

Aunt Margaret found her there at noon, still reading, still tracing the pages with her fingertip.

“My dear,” she said gently. “You will wear your eyes out before the truth does.”

“The truth has not once been in a hurry to find me, Aunt. I have decided to be the one who hurries it.”

Her aunt regarded her for a long moment — the same look she had given her eleven years ago, in the wreckage of the Bloomsbury house, when everything else had been sold and only the two of them had remained.

“Your father would be proud of you.” She said it the way other women said goodnight — quiet, certain, final.

Isabelle’s eyes stung. “I know, Aunt.”

“Good.” Margaret nodded crisply, and turned back to the kitchen. “Now put on your good gown. The gentleman from yesterday is back, and he has brought a carriage and a very large, very disapproving-looking man in black with him.”

The Duke of Harrington’s carriage arrived outside the townhouse at half past noon.

The arrival alone caused half the street to peer through their curtains. Dukes did not visit Bloomsbury cottages. Four footmen, two coachmen, and a closed carriage with the Harrington crest painted on the door — it was not a visit. It was an event.

Isabelle stepped outside to meet them, and the carriage door opened.

Dominic stood beside it. The Duke remained seated within, expression composed, unreadable, a man carved from the same cold marble as his library.

“Miss Fairmont,” the Duke said coolly, as she approached.

“Your grace.” She inclined her head. “Shall we?”

She entered the carriage without another word, settled onto the velvet seat, and waited.

The ride to Harrington House passed in an intense, humming silence. Dominic watched her — she could feel his gaze like warmth on her skin — but said nothing. The Duke stared out the window at the passing streets, his long fingers resting on the head of his cane.

Finally, Dominic spoke.

“You look exhausted.”

“I was working on the signatures.”

“And?”

Isabelle’s gaze lifted from her lap. “They are definitely forged.”

The Duke turned from the window. “Explain.”

Isabelle reached into her satchel and removed several sheets of paper — her own careful copies, made at odd hours by candlelight. “I copied the original signatures attributed to Henry Karstair. Then I placed them beside the newer ministry documents — the ones signed in his final year as an active minister.”

She laid them out on her lap.

“The angle of the capital H is identical in every instance.”

Dominic frowned. “That proves imitation.”

“No.” Her voice sharpened. “It proves mechanical tracing. A forger who imitates by eye will vary — the angle drifts, the pressure changes, the rhythm of the pen stumbles. These do not. I measured them, Dominic. To a hundredth of an inch, every line is identical.”

The Duke leaned forward, interested. “Continue.”

“Real signatures always vary slightly,” Isabelle said. “From moment to moment. From pen to pen. From morning to evening. No two genuine signatures of any living man have ever been found perfectly identical. These are.”

She unfolded a second set of papers.

“And the ink is different. I tested a scraping from the forgery against old Company records of the period — the composition is different. The forged signatures were written later and aged artificially — heat and moisture, the classic method — to look old.”

The Duke nodded slowly. “Then the signatures were rewritten.”

“Yes. After the originals were removed.” She looked at them both, and let the next words fall carefully. “Which means Henry Karstair’s name was inserted into the record after the investigation was underway.”

Dominic exhaled slowly. “Which means my father’s name was used as —”

“A scapegoat,” the Duke finished quietly. “Yes.”

Silence filled the carriage.

“Sir Edmund Graves,” Isabelle said. “He had access to the originals. He handled the audit personally. And he had — motive, of a kind.” She turned to Dominic. “The complaint you found. The clerk’s memorandum. What did it say, exactly?”

Dominic reached into his coat and produced the yellowed paper. “A clerk’s formal complaint that an under-secretary of the audit was ‘unusually interested in the handwriting of the convicted parties’ and had retained documents ‘for extended periods beyond the authorized window.’ Initialed E.G. — Sir Edmund Graves.”

The Duke’s gaze darkened. “Then we have motive and opportunity. We still lack direct proof.”

“That is why I brought you here,” the Duke said.

An hour later, they stood inside the Harrington study.

Tall windows filled the room with pale daylight. Documents covered the desk — stacks of them, aged paper and fresh, all bearing the flourishes of officialdom. The Duke moved to a drawer, unlocked it, and withdrew a single leather folder.

“Sir Edmund Graves’s own papers,” he said. “Ministry correspondence from his personal files. Authentic signatures, dozens of them, spanning fifteen years.”

Isabelle’s pulse quickened. “This is exactly what we needed.”

Dominic watched her closely. “Can you confirm it?”

“Yes.”

She sat down at the desk, and the world fell away.

The magnifying lens. The careful comparison. The grain of the paper, the composition of the ink, the rhythm of the strokes — she worked the way her father had taught her, slowly, methodically, letting the pattern rise to meet her. And there it was.

The same fracture.

Small, but unmistakable — a break in the ink of the descending stroke of the G, where a worn nib had split, depositing a thin double line. She had seen that same fracture twice before. In Henry Karstair’s forged signatures. And in the forged signatures of Thomas Fairmont.

“Look at this,” she said quietly.

Both men leaned over her shoulders. She pointed with the tip of the magnifying glass.

“The stroke pressure here. A small fracture in the ink — the signature was written with a metal pen whose nib has split. The same instrument appears in the forged documents. The same pen, Dominic. The same pen wrote all three sets of signatures — the ones that condemned my father and the ones that condemned yours.”

Dominic’s jaw tightened. “A double-pointed metal pen.”

“Yes. An instrument that leaves a mark no human hand varies — because the hand is only tracing. The pen does the remembering.”

The Duke folded his arms. “So Graves copied your father’s signature, used Karstair’s name as a cover, and let both men — one dead, one dying — carry the blame.”

“For years,” Dominic said, and his voice was dark as a winter sea. “For years, my family has believed my father guilty. Your family has burned with shame. And the man who did it has been sitting in the Ministry the whole time. Eating dinner with us. Calling on my mother. Attending my father’s funeral — I remember him at the funeral, Dominic… William. Standing in the back of the church, hat in hand, looking grieved.”

Isabelle reached out — instinctively — and touched his arm. “Then we will end it.”

“How?” Isabelle asked.

The Duke’s answer came quietly, and there was something almost gentle in his voice.

“With a trap.”