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

Chapter 14

For the next week, London did not know what to gossip about.

The scandal of the forgery had not yet faded; the revelations of the Times were still being read aloud in every club and drawing room. And yet society had already found a new delicious story, one with even better optics: the Duke of Harrington, the most eligible man in England, walking in Hyde Park with a governess on his arm.

Not any governess, of course. The governess. The brilliant, scandalous, wronged daughter of a wronged man — the woman who had slapped a duke and unmasked a forger, and who was now, according to eyewitnesses, laughing at something he said, in public, where anyone could see, while her aunt walked ten steps behind them with the expression of a general inspecting a treaty.

Aunt Margaret considered it her duty, it seemed, to chaperone the courtship with visible vigilance. She sat between them at every tea. She timed their walks — “Fifteen minutes, my dear. Any longer and the neighbors will begin measuring for wedding cake.” She interrogated Dominic about his intentions, his finances, his family, and, in one memorable moment, his opinion of her chrysanthemums.

The chrysanthemums — now the only subject of a standing joke between them — appeared everywhere. A bunch of them in the park, wrapped in paper. Another in the parlor, arriving by footman while aunt and niece were still at breakfast. A third, the smallest, tucked into the letter that arrived on Thursday:

My dear Miss Fairmont —

The house is unreasonably quiet. The library is intolerable. I have decided that the only cure is to hear you say something accurate about me in person. I shall call tomorrow at three, with chrysanthemums in apology for this entire absurd courtship, which I have discovered I have no desire to shorten.

Yours, D. Karstair

P.S. — I have taken the liberty of informing the Times that your ring is “a family heirloom.” The editor did not believe me. I did not expect him to.

Isabelle read the letter three times, then pressed it to her chest, then hid it in her father’s journal, between the pages on the composition of ink.

The week was golden. Every day, something small and wonderful: a walk, a tea, a note, a chrysanthemum. Every day, the world of London watched and whispered and — slowly, deliciously — began to approve.

Because the story was good. The story was perfect. The brilliant wronged governess and the grieving duke — a love story to heal a scandal. The same drawing rooms that had called her a fortune-hunter now called her a romantic heroine. The same ladies who had pitied her now envied her.

One evening, the Duke of Harrington — William Karstair, Dominic’s elder brother — received them for dinner at Harrington House.

It was the first time Isabelle had entered the great house since leaving it. She wore her best gown — the blue one, mended twice — and held Dominic’s arm, and she did not feel like a governess anymore.

Lady Harrington had been — predictably — absent. A note had arrived, formal as a treaty, expressing her sincere regret that “an engagement elsewhere prevented the pleasure of Miss Fairmont’s company.”

“She is hiding,” Dominic said, low, as they mounted the steps. “Give her time. She has been wrong about you for four years, and Charlotte has been right about you since the day you arrived. She will come around.”

“Does she know what I think of her?”

“She knows.” Dominic’s mouth curved. “I told her. ‘Miss Fairmont,’ I said, ‘believes you are a magnificent instrument of social destruction, and I share her view.'”

“Dominic!”

“She thanked me for the compliment.” He grinned. “We are family now, in ways neither of us entirely chose.”

William, the Duke, was a different creature at his own table. Relaxed. Almost warm. He poured Isabelle wine and asked her carefully detailed questions about her father’s theorem on sequence approximation — a paper her father had written three years before his death, dismissed by the Royal Society, and now being reread by certain members who had heard the name Thomas Fairmont spoken with respect again.

“When the fuss dies down,” the Duke said, “I should like the Royal Society to reprint it. With a preface. Your father’s work deserves—” He searched for the word. “—a second hearing.”

Isabelle’s eyes stung. “He would have liked that. He always said mathematics was the only honest language.”

“He was right.” The Duke lifted his glass. “To honest languages.”

They drank to it. The candles burned. The world, for one golden evening, arranged itself around the table in the right shape.

The invitation arrived by hand the following Tuesday, with the Harrington crest and a blade of cold courtesy in every letter:

Dear Miss Fairmont —

I am informed that you are to dine at my brother’s table on Friday next. I am also informed that you have made my daughter Charlotte laugh every day this past year, and that you are the only person who has ever succeeded in teaching her to sit still long enough to know a verb from a noun.

I cannot pretend that I was right about you, or that I am graceful in admitting it. I am told I am not, at my age, going to improve.

I extend my apologies, which I do not extend often. You may do with them what you like. Charlotte asks me to write that she misses you terribly, and that her uncle has told her the chrysanthemums are “a family joke,” and she wishes to be informed of the joke at the earliest opportunity.

Yours, etc., Charlotte, Lady Harrington

Isabelle read the letter twice. Then a third time. Then she carried it to Aunt Margaret, who read it once, folded it carefully, and said, “Well. The tide has turned.”

“Is that a mercy, Aunt? Or just the tide?”

Her aunt looked at her — long and warm. “It is both, my dear. The tide always is. The question is whether you choose to swim with it, or stand on the shore and be the weather.”

Isabelle laughed, and wrote back to Lady Harrington in the mildest, warmest terms she possessed, accepting the apology and promising Charlotte her first lesson in substitution ciphers at the earliest opportunity — “with her mother’s permission, which I shall not presume upon twice in one month.”

The reply came by return messenger: “She shall have it. You may presume once more.”

Isabelle cried a little, reading that. But they were good tears. The kind her father would have called proof of life.