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

Chapter 16

“My wife did not die in childbirth.”

The words fell into the silence like stones into a well.

There is a particular quality to a room of four hundred people all deciding, at the same moment, not to breathe. Rosalind had felt it once before, at the last ball, when a footman’s voice had announced a duke. This time it was worse. This time it was her own blood moving.

“There was no child,” the Duke said. “There never was. The physician who signed the certificate was paid for the signature, and he is in my house tonight, and he will repeat every word of this in front of the magistrate tomorrow morning.”

Somewhere near the door, a woman made a sound and put her hand over her mouth.

“My wife was violated in her own bed, in my own house, while I was six weeks away in Cumberland.” He said it with the flat clarity of a man reading a dispatch. His voice did not shake. His hands, hanging at his sides, did not shake. Rosalind, watching him from ten feet away, thought she had never seen such violence held so still. “And afterward, she took her own life. And the man who did it paid a doctor five hundred pounds to write putrid fever on a certificate, and sent away the servant who heard her screaming, and burned the letter she left behind.”

A man near the fireplace said, “Good God.”

“He was in this house. He is in this house now.”

The Duke turned his head.

The whole room turned with him.

Edgar Marsh was standing by the pillar, and the glass had slipped in his hand and spilled wine down his velvet sleeve, and he had not noticed. His face was not gray now. It was white. There was a sheen of sweat along his upper lip that could be seen from across the ballroom.

“Edgar,” the Duke said. “Will you say something?”

For a moment it looked as though Edgar would do the clever thing. It looked as though he would laugh — dismiss it, wave it away, say my brother is unwell, and let the room’s own dislike of a scene perform the rest. Rosalind saw him reach for the laugh. She saw his mouth shape itself around the beginning of it.

Then Margaret Coyle stepped out from behind the Duke.

She was in a plain dark dress with her cap in her hands, and she was shaking from head to foot, and she stood in front of four hundred of the finest people in London and said, in a voice that carried to the last row of chairs:

“I was in the passageway, sir. I heard the mistress scream. I heard your voice through the door. And when you came out and saw me, you gave me thirty pounds and told me to go to Kent and never come back.”

The ballroom came apart.

Not into chaos — into something worse, a kind of low, rising, animal noise, the sound of a crowd deciding all at once what it has been told. The woman in green moved away from Edgar without appearing to move. The young woman he had been charming drew back, and drew back again.

Edgar’s glass fell and broke on the parquet.

“It is a lie,” he said. His voice came out high. “It is a lie, she is a laundress, she was dismissed for theft, my brother has been deranged for two years and this woman—” he swung around, pointing at Rosalind, and made the last mistake of his life. “—this woman has been filling his head with it, everyone knows what she is, everyone knows what she did, she was ruined for a reason, ask anyone—”

“Ask me.”

Rosalind spoke.

It was not loud. It did not need to be. The room was already straining toward the sound of her.

“I was ruined for a reason,” she said. “You are quite right about that. But the reason was not mine.” She took three steps forward, out of the shadow of the pillar, onto the open floor, where four hundred people could see the wine-red silk and the bare throat and the woman standing in it. “The reason was a letter that was written in a false hand, and two servants who were paid to swear they saw what they never saw, and a betrothed who was handed a script and performed it beautifully. The reason was a woman who wanted me gone, and could not say why.”

Behind her, at the edge of the crowd, Seraphina Harrow had gone very still.

“I have been standing in a corner for three years,” Rosalind said, “because all of you let a lie be told about me, and not one of you ever asked me a single question. You did not ask because you did not want to know the answer. It was more comfortable to have a woman to point at.”

Silence.

“I am not asking you for your sympathy,” she said. “I am telling you what I will no longer accept. And I am telling you, Mr. Edgar Marsh, in front of everyone in this room, that I know exactly what you did, and so does your brother, and so do the people who helped you keep the truth buried afterward.”

Edgar Marsh lunged for the door.

He did not make it. Colonel Blackwood had been standing by it for twenty minutes with his arms folded, and he caught the man’s collar without any visible effort, the way one catches a dropped hat.

And then Edgar Marsh began, in front of all of London, to cry.

It came out of him in a rush — not grief, not shame, but the simple collapse of a man who has spent two years holding a lie together with both hands and has just been told he may put it down. He said it all. He said the name of the physician. He said the sum. He said the servant. He said that she had fought him, and that she had asked him why, and that he had not known why — that he had done it because his brother had everything and he had nothing, because he was the second son, because he had wanted, just once, to take something that belonged to the man everyone admired.

He said it to the floor, on his knees, with a footman’s hand on his shoulder and four hundred witnesses watching.

And when it was finished, in that awful, ringing quiet, the eyes of the ballroom began, slowly, to turn away from the man on the floor.

They turned toward the woman in white near the orchestra.