She was cruelly given to a drunken Duke to pay her family’s debts—none foresaw what would follow

Chapter 16

Chancery accepted the petition within the week, and for seven days the offices of the court ground through the Corvus accounts like a mill through grain — while London’s newspapers, fed by a source that signed nothing, began to fill with a different kind of story.

The source was, of course, Pierce. But his stories were not aimed at Margaret, not yet. They were aimed at the shareholders.

Duke’s Debts Threaten Railway Holdings, ran the first headline. Silvermont Scandal Reaches Prescott Boardroom, said the second. The third was a masterpiece of implication: Prescott Heiress Refuses Board Advice, Commits Company Credit to Ruined Aristocrat.

Margaret read all of them in her study, side by side, and did not flinch. She had expected the paper war. What she had not expected was for the war to arrive at her own front door.

It came in the form of a tray of visiting cards, left by the butler at noon: three financiers, two chairman of rival lines, and — most astonishing of all — the Earl of Marchmont, a white-bearded grandee who had not spoken to her in a decade, sent word that he wished to “see her judgment at close quarters.”

Margaret received them all in the same hour, one after another, and heard the same story in four different accents: Pierce was spreading a rumor that she had diverted company funds to repay William’s debts — that her judgment had been compromised by a fortune hunter who had charmed her away from her duties at the very moment the northern expansion needed a steady hand.

“I have diverted nothing,” Margaret told the fourth of them, a banker named Aldridge with a face like a ledger. “His grace’s debts are his own, and the company’s books are open to any auditor you care to name. Ask me for the numbers.”

Aldridge looked at her for a long moment. Then he said, quietly: “Miss Prescott, I have been in banking for forty years. I know a rumor tarted up to look like a fact when I hear one. But so does every man in this city, and the rumor still does its work.” He set down his cup. “If I were you, I would not be receiving callers. I would be finding the man who broke your brother’s trust and letting the world see him bleed.”

Margaret felt the floor of the room tilt, very slightly, beneath her.

“Which brother?” she asked, carefully.

Aldridge smiled — the first warm expression she had seen on his face. “Miss Prescott, I knew your brother George. He went through my offices asking about patents half a year before he died, and I put him onto a solicitor who knew the value of what he was building.” He stood. “I also knew, the morning I read about the accident, that the man who signed the inquiry’s report had signed three others before it, all of them accidents, all of them convenient.” He touched his hat. “The world moves slowly, but it moves. Keep your enemies close and your accounts closer. And when the time comes for paper to speak, Miss Prescott, you will find some of London’s financial men are not as deaf as they pretend.”

He left. Margaret stood alone in her study, and the pause in her chest was not fear. It was the sound of a door opening on a corridor she had always known existed but never dared walk down.

That night, she summoned the last of the pieces.

The man called Armitage had once been a baronet. He had once been a partner in the ironworks that supplied the lines. And he had once been, according to the account of the duel that circulated in every club in London, the man who accused William Hawthorne of ruining him — and the man with whom William had crossed swords at dawn, in Hyde Park, over an accusation that Pierce had planted in the public prints days before.

William told Margaret the whole of it in the carriage on the way to Whitecross Street, where Armitage now sat in debtors’ custody, ruined by the very campaign that had funded him.

“He repeated the accusation in a letter to the Chronicle,” William said, “the week my father’s estate was being valued for creditors. I challenged him. I did not know then that the letter was written for him — that Pierce’s clerk had drafted it, and Armitage had only lent his name for the money.” A pause. “The duel was a farce. He was no swordsman. I disarmed him in half a minute and walked away. And the whole time, Pierce was laughing — because in London, a duel is the one story that never dies, and he had handed it to me on a silver plate, signed by my own hand.”

“He used you,” Margaret said.

“He used my honor against me. It is the weapon I have never learned to parry.” He looked at her, and there was no shame in his face, only the exhaustion of a man who has told the truth to its end. “Armitage wrote to me, a year ago, from the prison. He said he had something the devil wanted to keep buried. I never answered. I thought I had left that part of my life in the mud of the dueling ground.” He reached across the carriage and took her hand. “I think perhaps I was afraid to find out that he was as much a victim as I was. It is easier to hate a villain than to forgive a fellow prisoner.”

The carriage stopped. The gates of Whitecross Street rose before them — a gray, soot-stained keep with bars on every window, holding the men London had decided to forget.

“Then let us go in,” Margaret said, “and hear what the prisoner has to tell us.”