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

Chapter 19

The letter arrived at Ravenmoor House at half past two in the morning, carried by Lord Ambrose Vane’s own solicitor, who had been woken out of his bed and had not been forgiven for it.

Rosalind was still awake.

She was sitting in the library with a rug over her knees and the fire built up high, and she heard the bell, and she heard the door, and she heard the footsteps.

The Duke came in with a folded paper in his hand, and his face was not the face of a man who had read a letter. It was the face of a man who had been standing outside a locked door for two years and had just been handed the key, and could not decide whether to use it.

“Read it with me,” he said.

“Alistair—”

“Read it with me. I will not do this alone.”

So Rosalind stood up, and he unfolded the paper on the library table between them, and they read the last words of Celia, Duchess of Ravenmoor, written by candlelight on the eighth of October two years before.

It was short. It had been written by a woman who had very little time and her wits only partly about her, and the handwriting went from neat to wild across the page.

My dearest,

I am not ill. I want you to know that first, because they will tell you I was ill and I will not be here to say otherwise.

Your brother came to my room tonight. I have locked the door and I will not unlock it. I have taken the laudanum from my cabinet because I would rather choose the manner of it than wait for him to choose for me. Do not be angry with me. I have thought about it very carefully and this is the only door left.

Tell them what he did to me. Tell them I was not mad and I was not sick and I did not die of a fever. I was your wife and I did not want to die, and I am doing it anyway, because he has already taken the only thing I had that he could take, and I will not give him the pleasure of the rest.

I love you. I loved you from the day you came back from the war with your hands shaking and your face so hard, and I have loved you every dull ordinary afternoon since, and I am so sorry.

Burn nothing. Tell everyone. Do not let him have the quiet he paid for.

Your Celia.

Neither of them spoke for a long time.

The Duke of Ravenmoor put both hands flat on the table and stood over the letter, and his shoulders began to shake, silently, without a sound; and Rosalind did not touch him and did not speak, because she had learned in three years the difference between comfort and kindness, and because there is nothing at all that can be said.

After a while she put her hand flat on the table next to his, not touching, just there.

He turned his hand over, and took hers.

They stood like that until the fire burned down.

The magistrate’s examination was held in a private room three days later, and it lasted four hours.

Edgar Marsh, who had spent the intervening days in a cell refusing food, was brought in and asked to account for the night in question. He did not deny it. He wept, and he confessed a second time, and the confession was written down and signed, and Dr. Pell signed his own statement beside it, and Margaret Coyle signed hers.

Seraphina Harrow was examined at length. Whether every part of the old conspiracy could support a criminal charge was uncertain, but sworn statements now named her role in manufacturing the scandal against Rosalind. Word of those statements spread through legal and social circles almost at once. Her father tried to contain the damage; the Duke refused every request to suppress the truth.

Rosalind was not in the hearing room for all four hours. She was called for one.

She stood in front of the magistrate and told him, without ornament, the story of the letter in the false hand, the two servants, the betrothed who had been handed a script. When she finished, the magistrate, who was an old man with a red face and an impatient manner, put down his pen and looked at her over the top of his spectacles.

“Lady Rosalind,” he said. “Three years ago, were you given any opportunity to speak in a court of law?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Because there was no charge,” she said. “Because a woman’s reputation is not a crime, and because everyone who could have spoken for me had been paid not to.”

The magistrate wrote something down, slowly. He did not say what.

But three days later, a paragraph appeared in two of the London papers — the sort of paragraph that costs money and buys nothing but memory — stating that the accusations against Lady Rosalind Vane, three years ago, had been found to be manufactured, and that the persons responsible had been identified, and that the lady’s innocence had been established.

Rosalind read it in bed with her tea, in the gray morning light, and she folded the paper, and she sat, and she cried — quietly, with her hand over her mouth, for three minutes and no longer, because she had promised herself she would not give it more than that.

Then she got up, and she washed her face, and she went downstairs and said to the Duke of Ravenmoor, who was standing in the breakfast room with his own paper in his hands and a strange expression on his face:

“I want to be married on Thursday.”

“You said the end of the month.”

“Thursday,” said Rosalind. “I am finished waiting to be allowed.”