THE DUKE CHOSE THE PLAIN GIRL AT A MAYFAIR AUCTION — THEN THE VEIL CAME OFF

Chapter 21

Juliana Ashby arrived at Halstead Park on the second of December, at eight in the evening, in a hired post-chaise with one trunk, and she was five months gone with child, and she had been crying for a week.

Evelyn met her in the hall.

She had been preparing for this meeting for four months. She had prepared a speech, several speeches — the cold one, the kind one, the one with arithmetic in it — and she had rehearsed them all on the roads of Devon and Norfolk, and when her sister came up the steps with her face grey and her beautiful, famous, orchid-gold hair unwashed and pinned anyhow, Evelyn said none of them.

What she said was: “Have you eaten?”

Juliana burst into tears.

She wept for half an hour in the little parlour with her head on Evelyn’s shoulder and her hands clenched in Evelyn’s sleeve, and what emerged from it, in fragments, was this: Owen Ferris was a lieutenant with six hundred a year and a long queue of debts ahead of him; his regiment had been ordered to Ireland in the spring; they had lodgings in Plymouth in two rooms over a chandler’s, and he was not cruel, not exactly, but he was weak, and weakness under pressure is not the same as kindness, and she had discovered in four months that society does not visit a girl who ran away, and that a wife without a fortune is a servant, and that she was going to have a baby in a town where she knew nobody at all.

“Papa would not answer,” she kept saying. “Papa would not answer any of my letters. I wrote eleven times.”

“I know.”

“I wrote to him. I wrote to Papa asking for the money for the post-chaise back to Ashby Grange, and he did not—”

“I know.” Evelyn stroked her sister’s hair, which was the oldest habit she had. “Juliana. Look at me.”

Juliana looked at her. She had the face that five London seasons had been built around, and it was swollen and sallow and it was, for the first time in twenty years, actually her sister.

“Papa burned your letters,” said Evelyn. “He burned mine too. That is what he does. And I am not going to tell you that what you did in October was right, because you ran out of a house in the middle of the night and left a note that was three lines long and you did not say goodbye to me, and I have been very angry with you for a long time and I am entitled to be.”

Juliana’s mouth trembled. “I know.”

“But I am not going to be angry with you in this house, because you are my sister, and because you are going to have a child, and because of all the things our father took from us in the last twenty years, the one I refuse to let him take is the two of us.” Evelyn took her by both shoulders. “You will stay. You will have the baby here, with a proper doctor. Owen is welcome at Christmas and he will be treated decently if he behaves decently. And after that, if you want him, you may go to Ireland with him, and if you do not, you will not, and we will find something else for you to do with your life, because there is always something else.”

Juliana stared at her.

“You have become,” she said slowly, “very frightening.”

“Yes,” said Evelyn. “It has been a busy autumn.”

And then, because the sister she had grown up adoring and resenting in equal measure was sitting in front of her with a cup of tea and the beginnings of a person in her belly, Evelyn said: “I need you to tell me something. In September, before you left — did you see anything in Papa’s study?”

Juliana looked surprised.

“His study? I was never allowed in his study.”

“Neither was I. That is why I am asking.”

Juliana thought about it. She had a way of thinking about things that was not like Evelyn’s at all — slow, wandering, associative — and it had made her seem stupid for most of her life and had never once made her wrong.

“There was a man,” she said. “In August. I remember because I was in the garden and I saw him come out through the study window into the shrubbery rather than the front door, which I thought was strange, and then he came round the side and the footman let him in at the front and pretended he had just arrived, which was stranger still.”

“What did he look like?”

“Small. Neat. Grey about the temples.” Juliana wrinkled her nose. “He had a leather case and he smelled of camphor and tobacco, and Papa called him Elias, and when I asked Papa who he was, he said, nobody, and you did not see him.”

“August,” said Evelyn quietly. “This August.”

“Yes.”

“Four months ago.” She stood up. “Juliana. Where in the study did he come from?”

“From the desk. There is a window behind it, in the corner, that opens into the shrubbery, and it does not lock properly.” Juliana shrugged. “Papa has never fixed it. He says there is no money.”

“Did you ever go in afterward? Out of curiosity?”

Juliana’s eyes went sideways, in the way of a younger sister who had been caught in every room she had ever entered.

“Once,” she said. “In September. After Papa went to London. I wanted to see whether he kept a strongbox, because I wanted to know whether there was any money at all, because I was already planning—” She stopped.

“You were already planning to run.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

Juliana set down her teacup.

“There was a strongbox,” she said. “And there was a letter on the desk addressed to me in Papa’s hand that he had never sent, and I read it, and it was about how he would not send money and I was no longer his daughter.”

Evelyn’s heart had begun to beat hard and slow.

“And there was one other thing,” said Juliana. “On the desk. Under the letter. It was a page torn out of a book, with a line drawn under four names, and Papa had written in the margin, in pencil, in his own hand—” she frowned, remembering — “he had written if this ever surfaces, we are all in the mud together.”

“Was there a fifth name? Set apart?”

Juliana looked at her, startled.

“How did you know?”

“Because that is how a man keeps a leash,” said Evelyn. “Juliana, I need you to write all of this down tonight, in your own words, and sign it, and date it, and give it to Mr. Finch tomorrow morning.” She was already moving toward the door. “Because in eighteen days my husband and I are going to stand in Lady Selby’s ballroom, in front of nine hundred of the most talkative people in England, and I intend to end this — all of it — in a single night.”