She Was Forced to Wear Black and Sit in Silence… Until the Feared Duke of War Chose Her

Chapter 10

Colonel Blackwood arrived at Ravenmoor House at dawn the next day, having ridden through the night, and he did not look pleased about it.

He was a compact, weathered man of about fifty with a crooked nose and the flat, unhurried manner of someone who had spent twenty years being shot at and had developed opinions about it. He looked at Rosalind for a full three seconds when he came into the library — assessing, unembarrassed — and then gave her a short nod that felt more like a verdict than a greeting.

“I had wondered,” he said to the Duke. “You never said anything.”

“There was nothing to say.”

“There was two years of nothing to say.” Blackwood pulled off his gloves and sat down without being asked. “Tell me about Brighton.”

The physician’s name was Dr. Pell. He had attended the Duchess in her last illness. He had signed the certificate. And eleven months after the funeral he had sold his practice, packed his house, and moved to Brighton, where he had bought a small terrace house a hundred yards from the sea and, by all accounts, did not practice medicine at all any longer.

“A doctor who stops being a doctor at forty-eight,” Blackwood said. “That is not a retirement. That is a man who cannot stand the sight of his own hands.”

“Can he be found?”

“He can be found. Whether he will speak is another question.” Blackwood looked at the Duke. “And there is a second matter. You asked me to look into the household.”

“Yes.”

“The maid who was sent away — the one who was in the corridor that night. Her name was Coyle. Margaret Coyle. She was paid thirty pounds and given a character reference and a ticket to her sister’s in Kent. She came back to London last spring.”

“She is here?”

“She works at a lodging house near the docks, doing laundry.” Blackwood paused. “And she has been trying to get a letter to this house for two months. The butler has been burning them.”

The Duke’s face did not change, but Rosalind, watching him, saw his hand close around the edge of the library table.

“Why did he burn them?” Rosalind asked.

“Because someone told him to.” Blackwood looked at her with a flicker of interest. “You’re the intended, then.”

“I am.”

“Good. You’re asking the right questions.” He turned back to the Duke. “Bring her in. Tonight. Before anyone knows she’s been found.”

Rosalind spent the afternoon in the Duchess’s garden.

It was a small walled thing behind the house, gone over to dead roses and dead leaves, with a stone bench and a little fountain that no longer ran. It had been hers — Celia’s — and no one had touched it in two years, and the neglect was its own kind of grief.

She sat on the cold bench with her hands in her lap and thought about the two women in this house.

One of them had married into it and been buried out of it, and nobody had ever asked her a single true question about how she died.

The other was about to walk into it through the front door, in front of four hundred witnesses.

You are not frightened, she told herself. You are alert. There is a difference, and you must learn it before you need it.

Nell came out at dusk with a shawl and said, “There is a woman in the kitchen, my lady.”

Margaret Coyle was perhaps forty, thin to the point of sharpness, with hands red from hot water and eyes that had not slept properly in years. She stood in the middle of the servants’ hall with her cap in her hands and refused to sit down.

“I want to say it to the Duke,” she said. “Not to a lawyer, not to a paper. To him.”

“He is here,” Rosalind said gently. “But he will hear it in front of me as well. Is that acceptable?”

The woman looked at her for a long moment.

“They said you were ruined,” she said. “They said it in this house. I heard them laughing about it in the kitchen, two years ago, saying as how at least one woman in London had it worse than the mistress.” She twisted her cap. “You don’t look ruined. You look like you’re still standing.”

“I am.”

“Then I’ll say it in front of you.”

She came into the library and looked at the Duke, and her mouth worked for a moment, and then she spoke.

“They sent me away,” she said. “That night. Mr. Edgar, he came down to the kitchen and told me to pack, and gave me money, and said I should go to my sister and never come back to London. And I went, because I was frightened. But I have not slept, sir. Two years, and I have not slept.”

“Why were you frightened?”

Margaret Coyle began to cry, without any sound at all, tears running down her face as though they had been waiting a long time for permission.

“Because I was out in the passageway that night,” she said. “I heard her — the mistress — and she was screaming. And there was a man’s voice, and I would know it anywhere. I have heard it at dinner every Sunday for four years.”

The room was very quiet.

“Whose voice?” the Duke asked.

“Mr. Edgar’s, sir,” she said. “And when I tried the door, it was locked from the inside. A little later, he unlocked it and came out.”