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

Chapter 15

The engagement was announced at the end of September.

It was not the announcement the gossips had predicted — no grand ball, no public spectacle, no thousand guests. Instead, the Times carried a quiet paragraph in the society page: “The Duke of Harrington is pleased to announce the betrothal of his brother, Viscount Karstair, to Miss Isabelle Fairmont, daughter of the late Thomas Fairmont.”

And London, having changed its mind so many times that season that it was dizzy from the motion, decided to approve. Enthusiastically.

The invitations began arriving the same week. Dinners. Balls. Receptions. Everyone wanted the love story at their table — the scandal had faded, but the romance was even better for drawing rooms: a governess, a duke, a dead mathematician, and a tray of forged signatures. It was, as one hostess put it ecstatically, “the season’s only genuinely interesting story, and it sits at my table!”

Isabelle endured it with the patience she had learned in five years of being invisible. She smiled. She curtsied. She answered the same questions with the same gracious candor — yes, I did study the signatures; no, I did not always believe justice would come; yes, the day my father’s name was restored was the happiest of my life; no, I cannot tell you everything about the Crown’s cyphers, and I am sorry, but I have been sworn to secrecy, and I am rather proud of it.

The last answer raised her stock higher than any gown could have. London loved a secret, and a woman who had kept one — a woman who had deciphered messages for the Crown, they whispered, though no one knew quite which messages, and everyone embellished them — was suddenly the most fascinating woman in the room.

But the most wonderful thing was not the invitations.

It was Charlotte.

Lady Harrington had allowed the renewed acquaintance — cautiously, then warmly, then with evident pleasure. The first cipher lesson had taken place in the Harrington nursery, with Charlotte in a state of rapturous concentration, her small tongue between her teeth, her pen scratching away at the page as Isabelle walked her through her first substitution.

“The key rotates every three characters, my lady. Watch.”

Charlotte had looked up, suddenly serious. “Mama said you were a liar once. When you first came here, she said you were a liar and a climber and you would hurt Uncle William.”

“Did she?”

“Yes.” Charlotte had considered this. “But I watched you read my books to me, and you never skipped the boring parts. Liars skip the boring parts.”

Isabelle had laughed — loud, surprised, delighted — and Lady Harrington, standing in the doorway with a teacup in her hand, had looked at her daughter and then at her governess, and something in her face had quietly forgiven itself.

That was the autumn. That was the season.

And on the first clear day of October, in the same park where Dominic had walked with her a hundred times, beneath the same climbing roses of Bloomsbury, Isabelle Fairmont stood beside the man she loved, wearing a gown of pale gold and a ring that had belonged to his grandmother, and she thought: I have won.

Not the case. Not the scandal. Not the restoration of the name — although those had been wins, and real ones, and she would take them forever.

What she had won was this: a Sunday in late light, with a man who had found her in the dark and chosen her, deliberately, in the light.

That was the autumn. That was the season.

There were small wonders buried in those weeks, the kind that needle themselves into memory like threads of gold. Dominic discovering, to his endless delight, that Isabelle could beat him at chess in eleven moves and refused to explain how. Isabelle discovering that the Duke of Harrington — the fearsome William, master of cyphers and cabinets — was terrified of his own cook, and that his cook was terrified of Aunt Margaret, who had once, in a flour-dusted moment of solidarity, taught her the trick to rising dough.

“The world is a web of terrors,” Isabella told Dominic one evening, seriously. “I find it comforting.”

“That is the most governess-like thing you have ever said to me.”

“You proposed to a governess, Viscount.”

“A fact,” he said, kissing her hand, “for which I thank God daily.”

Charlotte descended upon the courtship like a small, delighted storm. She wrote letters — weekly, unstoppable, illustrated with drawings of chrysanthemums and crowned with lopsided hearts. She had taken to calling the engagement “the vexation,” in honor of the original one, and her mother had allowed it, which Lady Harrington’s friends took as proof that the end of the world had finally arrived.

But the real proof came at Christmas.

The Harrington house, for the first time in years, was lit with laughter. Isabelle arrived for the holiday with Aunt Margaret, and found that her old attic room — the narrow white cell — had been repapered and aired, given a fire and a window seat, and a single chrysanthemum in a vase on the sill. No note. The gardener denied everything. Lady Harrington said nothing at all, and kept saying nothing, and the chrysanthemum kept blooming, and that was the whole arithmetic of it.

Christmas Eve, they played charades. William cheated. Charlotte shrieked. Aunt Margaret, in a velvet cap, uttered a single devastating hint and retired to the applause of ages. And Dominic — Dominic found Isabelle alone in the corridor, by the portrait of his father, and took her hand in the dark.

“I wrote to you that first week, you know,” he said quietly. “Before the terrace. Before the trap. I sat in this house for two nights with a letter that said I trusted you — and I could not send it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I did not trust myself to be saved.”

Isabelle looked at the painted face of Henry Karstair — the worn, kind eyes of a man who had died under a weight that was not his, whose name the world had finally cleaned.

“You were saved, Dominic. And so was I.” She squeezed his hand. “Out of the same lie. Out of the same darkness. That is not luck, I think. That is pattern.”

He laughed — soft, surprised. “You and your patterns.”

“They never lie.”

“No.” He turned to her, and the candlelight found the water in his eyes, and he said, “They brought me you.”