They Mocked Her Brilliant Mind Until a Ruined Duke Chose Her in the Middle of Scandal
Chapter 14
Mr. Merritt’s chambers in Chancery Lane were exactly as Margaret had expected: dark, high-ceilinged, lined with law reports in leather binding, smelling of dust and old paper. The solicitor himself was a thin, gray man with the defeated posture of someone who has been holding a door for years against a wind he knows will eventually win.
But it was not the room, or the man, that stopped Margaret in the doorway.
It was the portrait above the mantel.
A young woman — perhaps twenty-five — with dark hair and a face so like William’s that the resemblance was an answer to a question Margaret had never thought to ask. It was a different William from the one she knew: younger, laughing, his hand resting on the shoulder of a tall man in a militia uniform. The photograph was mounted in a heavy silver frame, and beside it, propped at an angle, was a second frame, smaller and less grand: a young woman in a bride’s veil, holding a bouquet against a painted studio backdrop.
“Your brother,” Margaret said, addressing the portrait without turning. “And your wife.”
William had come in behind her, and the silence that answered her was the heaviest silence she had ever heard him make. When he spoke, his voice was not steady. It was small, and old, and full of rooms she had never been allowed to enter.
“His name was Edward. He was six years older than me.” A pause. “He died at Waterloo. Nineteen years old. He was a cornet in the cavalry, and he died in a field hospital two days after the battle, because there were not enough surgeons, and the wound was a simple wound that any man with clean hands could have stitched.”
Margaret turned slowly. William was not looking at the portrait. He was looking at the smaller frame — at the bride.
“Clara,” he said. “My wife. I married her a year later, because my father arranged it, and because I was too young and too obedient to understand that grief is not a foundation for a marriage.” His voice went lower. “She died giving birth to our daughter, who did not survive her by a single day. That was six years ago. I have not been inside the chapel at Silvermont since.”
Margaret crossed the room and took his hand. The words that had lived in her chest for three years — you do not know what it is to carry a death — died on her tongue, because she did know now, had known from the moment she had first seen the photograph in his rooms, from the moment she had watched him recognize her brother’s name in the muddy yard. They had been carrying the same weight. That was the thing nobody had ever told her about grief: it made you fluent in other people’s silences.
“That is why you recognized it,” she said softly. “The world sometimes forgets to move on.”
William closed his eyes. “I came to London, Margaret, looking for a marriage of convenience because I had spent six years proving to myself that I could not love again without losing it all. I chose a wife the way a drowning man chooses a plank — by arithmetic.” He looked at her. “And then I met you, and I discovered that the arithmetic was a lie, and that the plank was a person, and that I had walked into the greatest risk of my life with my eyes open and my heart closed.” He held her gaze. “You asked me, at the sidings, if I was certain you were worth the danger. I am more certain every hour. But you should know the whole of what you are choosing, Margaret. You are choosing a man who has been widowed, who lost a brother, who failed a family, and who has spent the last three years of his life learning to carry the debts of his own pride.”
Margaret stood on her toes and kissed him, gently, on the mouth. “Well,” she said, “I have spent the last three years carrying a secret that might have put a duke in prison. We are more evenly matched than you think.”
Behind them, Mr. Merritt cleared his throat for the third time. He was standing in the doorway of his inner office with a folio in his arms and an expression on his face that Margaret recognized at once — the look of a man taking out a lease on his own courage.
“Miss Prescott,” he said quietly. “You asked my clerk for the Corvus accounts. I have prepared them.” He set the folio on the table. “But before you open it, I must ask you to understand what you are holding. The Corvus Trust has existed for eleven years. In that time it has underwritten the collapse of three estates, the ruin of two partnerships, and one death that was staged to look like an accident.” He looked at her directly. “I have kept the whole of its accounts, Miss Prescott. The whole of them. Including the page that names the man who signed the order that killed your brother.”
The room went very still. Margaret’s hand closed on the folio.
“His name,” she said, “is Jonathan Pierce.”
Mr. Merritt shook his head slowly. “Miss Prescott, the trust’s founder — the man who formed it, who writes its orders, who signs its receipts — is not Jonathan Pierce.” He opened the folio, and turned to the page — the last page, the page with the single name, in the neat, educated hand Margaret had last seen on the back of a receipt.
The name on the page was William Hawthorne, Duke of Silvermont.
Margaret felt the floor fall away beneath her. She heard, distantly, herself say: “No.” She looked at William, saw the confusion and then the horror rising in his face, saw him step forward, saw his hand reach for the page —
— and the door of the chambers slammed open, and a voice Margaret knew better than she knew her own heart said, from the doorway, with the smile of a man who has just watched the last stone of the arch drop into place:
“Miss Prescott. I told you I would be present at the funeral. I am merely early for the wedding.”
Jonathan Pierce stepped into the room, and behind him, in the corridor, stood the tall figure from the sidings, waiting patiently in the dark.