THE DUKE CHOSE THE PLAIN GIRL AT A MAYFAIR AUCTION — THEN THE VEIL CAME OFF
Chapter 25
A waltz in three-quarter time is a very simple thing. There is nothing to it but turning, and trusting the man who turns you, and not thinking about the floor.
They moved together beneath the same chandeliers that had once illuminated her humiliation.
His hand rested firmly at her back — not possessive, anchoring, the way a man holds a thing he intends to keep hold of in a storm. Her gold silk caught every candle. Her mother’s gown, from a trunk that had been shut for twenty-two years, worn at last by a woman who was not inconvenient.
“You are watching them,” Sebastian murmured.
“I am counting them,” said Evelyn. “Two hundred and eleven in this room who said something about me in October. I remember all of them. I have a list.”
“Of course you do.”
“Do you regret it?” she asked quietly. “Any of it. The auction. The thousand pounds. Choosing the ugly duckling.”
His eyes warmed in a way she had rarely seen, and would see a thousand times more before the end.
“I never chose the ugly duckling,” he said. His thumb pressed very gently at her waist. “I chose the only woman in the room worth seeing. Everyone else was furniture. You were the only person in England who was actually there.”
Applause began somewhere near the doors — not the polite scatter that greets a dance, but the other thing, the rising, unforced, unplanned sound of a room deciding to be on somebody’s side. It went around the ballroom in a wave. Lady Agatha Vane, standing by the fire with her stick, was beating it on the floor in a slow rhythm, and one by one the people around her began to beat the floor with their canes and their heels, and Selby House made a sound it had never made in eighty years.
Evelyn did not look at the crowd.
She looked at him — at the man who had entered a room full of cruelty and silenced it with three words — and for the first time in twenty-three years she felt not overlooked, and not mistaken, and not second.
The Duke of Halstead had bought a plain woman in a veil for a thousand pounds.
What he had actually done was see her.
The hearing took place at eleven o’clock the following morning, in Lincoln’s Inn, before the Vice-Chancellor, and it lasted nineteen minutes.
Dr. Croft, aged thirty-one, third son of Lord Croft, took the stand at eleven and by twenty past, under cross-examination by Mr. Finch, had conceded that he had signed the certificate without having examined Lady Emmeline Ashby on more than one occasion, that he had been paid by a solicitor acting for Mr. Aldous Kerr, and that he had never in his career seen the lodge behind the wall at Marlbrook House, which he had described in a sworn affidavit as “a commodious residence with garden.”
The Vice-Chancellor dismissed the petition at half past eleven, with costs.
By the end of January, Lord Merton had resigned his seat and his commissions and gone abroad. Aldous Kerr was tried at the Spring Assizes and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation, and the newspapers printed the whole of Dr. Penn’s list of forty-one women, with the names and the dates and the fees, and the public read it in their breakfast rooms for a fortnight.
Dr. Elias Penn gave evidence for the Crown, was convicted of conspiracy, and was fined three thousand pounds and struck off the register; he went to a small house at Exmouth, where he lived, by the account of the man who kept the chandler’s shop opposite, another eleven years, and spoke to no one.
Marlbrook House was closed in April under a writ of the Court, and its fourteen remaining patients — thirteen women and one man, an elderly gentleman who had been lodged there since 1819 by a nephew who wanted his house — were removed by Mr. Finch’s clerks and placed, at the Duke of Halstead’s expense, in houses that were actually houses, with doors that opened, in villages where a woman could walk to a church.
Mrs. Grice came to Devonshire as housekeeper of the west wing at Halstead Park and brought Hannah Pell with her, and Hannah Pell, who had walked fifteen miles with a letter in her shoe, was made keeper of the estate post, with instructions to open nothing, register everything, and never again to permit a letter to be lost between a village and a house.
And on a wet morning in the middle of March, Sebastian Vane stood in the churchyard at Halstead with a mason and a chisel, and had the inscription removed from his mother’s marble slab.
Of a decline — that was what it said. It had said it for twenty-two years.
“Put the truth,” he told the mason.
The mason, who was an old man and not a fool, looked at the Duke and said, “Then you must tell me what the truth is, my lord, because I cannot cut a thing I do not know.”
Sebastian was silent for a while.
“Cut,” he said at last: MARGUERITE, DUCHESS OF HALSTEAD. BORN 1796. TAKEN FROM HER SON IN 1825. SHE WAS NOT ILL.
The mason cut it. It is there today.
Lady Emmeline Ashby took eleven months to sleep through a night. She would not sit in a room with a closed door in it until the following autumn. She wrote, in the end, four hundred and sixty pages of an account of her fifteen years and lodged it, through Mr. Finch, with the Commission and with two Members of Parliament, and the whole of it entered the public record, and a copy of it is in the British Museum today.
She kept the tin jug with the three sprigs of dried lavender.
And the Halstead diamonds went to Amsterdam in May, and the two properties in Norfolk went in June, and the eighth Duke’s portion of the estate — everything that could be traced to the fraud of 1828 — was surrendered to the Court. The recovered assets were distributed among hundreds of ordinary subscribers: clerks, widows, half-pay officers, and even a schoolmaster in Ipswich, all of whom had bought the paper in good faith and lost money when the scheme collapsed.
Halstead Park kept its land and lost its money, and the Duke of Halstead, who had been the richest man in the West Country, spent the following decade being considerably less so, and discovered, to his own annoyance, that he did not mind at all.