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

Chapter 23

The Dowager Countess of Selby’s Michaelmas auction had, in the ordinary way of things, been held in October.

This year it had been postponed twice — once for the mourning of a royal cousin and once, quietly, because the Duke of Halstead had written to Lady Selby and asked her to move it, and Lady Selby, who was seventy-four and had never in her life been able to resist a scene with the right people in it, had agreed at once and asked no questions.

So it was on the twentieth of December, in snow, that the carriages began to come up to Selby House.

Evelyn stood in the long mirror of the guest chamber at eleven o’clock that morning and let the maid finish the last eleven buttons.

The gown was gold silk, cut from a length that Sebastian had produced from a trunk in the west corridor — a trunk that had been in the locked room, beneath the window, unopened for twenty-two years — and which had been bought in Paris in eighteen twenty-four by Lady Marguerite Vane, who had never once had the occasion to wear it.

“I found it in the bottom of the trunk,” he had said, three days earlier, when he brought it to her. “My mother’s. It was made for a woman who was told she was inconvenient, and never worn, and I would rather it was worn by a woman who is not.”

The silk caught every candle in the room.

At her throat, borrowed for the night from Lady Agatha Vane, the Halstead diamonds burned with the cold, blue-white fire that the family had owned for two hundred years, and which would, by the end of the following spring, be sold to a banker in Amsterdam along with much of the family’s movable wealth, and which neither Evelyn nor Sebastian ever afterwards regretted for one hour.

In her hands, folded over her arm, she carried a length of heavy black Brussels lace.

They arrived at half past ten.

The ballroom at Selby House was exactly as she had left it: the same chandeliers, the same three cracks in the plaster above the doorway, the same smell of roses and beeswax. Nine hundred people. Every candle lit.

Evelyn Ashby, who had stood in that room in October behind a veil while a hundred people said poor creature loudly enough to be heard, walked in on her husband’s arm in gold silk, with her face uncovered.

The whispering began at the doors and ran outward, room by room, like a fire in a field.

She is here.

She is veiled no longer.

Look at her.

My dear, look at her — she is not plain at all.

Where is Ashby?

Where is her father?

Sir Percival Ashby was standing by the fireplace in the second room with a glass in his hand, and Evelyn watched her father see her, and watched his face do something she had never seen it do in twenty-three years: it went afraid.

At the far end, near the card room door, a small neat man in a black coat and a leather case was standing with a heavy, red-faced man of sixty in a peer’s star.

Dr. Elias Penn, and Aldous Kerr, and Lord Merton.

Sebastian stopped at the centre of the ballroom floor.

He did not raise his voice. He had told her, once, that he had spent fourteen years making his name into a weapon precisely so that when he spent it, no one could stop him.

“Two months ago,” he said, “this room laughed at my wife.”

Nine hundred people stopped talking at once.

“Some of you called her plain. Some of you bid two pounds and thought it a joke. I bought her for a thousand, and you went home and told the story over supper, and every one of you got it wrong.” He let his gaze move slowly from the doors to the fireplaces to the card room, and where it went, heads went down. “You were not laughing at a plain woman. You were laughing at the woman who corrected the Portuguese envoy at Lady Mottram’s supper and then pretended to cough so he could keep his face. You were laughing at the woman who gave her supper to a scullery child and told the housekeeper she had eaten early. You were laughing at the woman who has spent the last two months doing something no one in this room has done in twenty years, which is to refuse to be lied to.”

He took one step forward.

“And some of you in this room,” he said, “have helped sustain lies like this for years, and you know exactly what I am talking about, and one of you is standing beside the card room door.”

The whole ballroom turned to look.

Aldous Kerr, red-faced and steady, did not move.

“Your Grace is overwrought,” he said pleasantly, loudly enough to carry. “Your Grace’s mother-in-law is a confirmed lunatic of fifteen years, and your Grace has married into a family with a melancholy in it, and any physician will tell you that grief of this kind—”

“Dr. Penn,” said Sebastian. “Would you care to speak?”

The small man in the black coat stepped forward into the middle of the floor, and took out of the leather case a bundle of papers tied with tape, and laid them on the nearest card table, and untied them, and let them fan across the baize in front of nine hundred of the most curious people in England.

“Forty-one certificates,” said Dr. Elias Penn, in the clear, mild voice of a country physician explaining a regimen. “Mine, all of them, signed between eighteen twenty-four and eighteen forty-three. Copy and counter-copy, and against each one, the fee I was paid, the name of the man who paid it, and the name of the house to which the woman was sent.”

The ballroom made a sound like the sea.

Lord Merton started toward the door.

“Stay where you are, my lord,” said Sebastian. “The constables are in the hall, and the newspapers are in the gallery, and there are four gentlemen of the Morning Chronicle in the second row of chairs, and they have been taking notes since eleven o’clock.”

Aldous Kerr said, quite clearly, “This is a monstrous—”

And then, from the doorway, a woman’s voice — quiet, dry, steady, the voice of a person who had spent fifteen years rehearsing a sentence and had finally been given a room to say it in — interrupted him.

“Mr. Kerr.”

Everyone turned.

Lady Emmeline Ashby stood in the doorway of the ballroom in a grey gown, on the arm of a matron in black, with her white-threaded hair pinned up and her daughter’s eyes in her face.

“I,” she said, “am the lunatic of fifteen years. I have come to be looked at.”