The Duchess War

by Courtney Milan

  Chapter Twenty-four

  When he finally returned to his home, he was sure Minnie would see what he intended to do. She’d seen everything else about him so easily. But she was waiting for him with tea and a late supper, and whatever she saw in his expression, she must have attributed to unhappiness over his brother’s situation.

  “I don’t think a conviction will stick,” Robert told her over a warm cup.

  “That sounds like good news.”

  He held his hand out, let it wobble from side to side. “It’s not the worst news. There’s not enough evidence to convict him, but there…there may not be enough to vindicate him, either. Not unless I explain my involvement.”

  “And will you do it?”

  He paused and looked her in the eyes. “This no longer just involves me.”

  She looked up at him. When had she begun to trust him? Why had he let her?

  “Who else does it involve?” she asked.

  “My mother, for one.” He shut his eyes, not able to look at her as he told the first lie. “If I explain everything, I must publicly disclose my relation to Oliver. The truth would embarrass my mother—he was conceived scarcely a few months after her marriage—and it would humiliate Oliver’s parents. Oliver himself…well, it wouldn’t hurt him to be known as a duke’s son.”

  “I see,” she said slowly.

  “It’s worse than you think. You see, it’s no longer about the trial itself, but the public account of it. If I just asserted that he was my brother, some people would always believe that I said it just to save him from the conviction for the sake of friendship. He’d not be exonerated. But…imagine that, for the sake of verisimilitude, I was to announce the truth of his parentage with my mother in the room. How do you suppose she might react?”

  “I… Well. The duchess—dowager duchess, I mean—she’s strong as flint. But just as brittle.”

  “She would probably turn white. She might stand up and leave. And that reaction, more than anything, would give the assertion the stamp of veracity. I could drive her into reacting.” He looked over at her. “It would humiliate her, but it might save my brother.”

  “Perhaps, if she knows it’s coming—”

  “When she knows what is coming, she can steel herself not to react. If she knew it was coming, likely she wouldn’t even attend.” He looked at her. “I am sure that I can convincingly make the case for Oliver’s innocence. But to do it, I might have to sacrifice—forever—any peace I might make with my mother. Tell me, Minnie. Is it worth it?”

  She was silent for a long time, looking in his eyes. He buried the truth deep, deep, so that she would not hear what he had not said.

  “And you’d do that?” she finally asked. “Lose all hope of your mother, for your brother’s sake?”

  “My father—” The words came out hoarsely. He shut his eyes. It was his only chance to explain it to her, even if she did not yet know what she was hearing.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t have to answer. On the scale of things, we are weighing your mother’s humiliation against your brother’s future. Your brother must come first.”

  She put her arms around him. Her touch burned. He didn’t deserve it. He didn’t deserve her. He shrugged her off, stood, and went to stand a few paces away.

  “It’s more than that,” he said softly. “It isn’t just the fact that my father forced himself on his mother. It isn’t that he tried to have her sent off, that he refused to acknowledge the child, that he failed to provide anything except the barest modicum of support. It isn’t just that my actions put him in a stinking cell tonight.” He clenched his fists. “I’ve tried to choose everything my father was not. And so I can’t. I can’t leave my brother alone in this. I can’t risk his conviction, and I won’t stand by while I have breath to save him.”

  “No, Robert,” she said. “Of course you won’t.” She ran her hand along his cheek. “You have too much to do to waste your energy on regrets now. Do what you must.”

  There was no way to escape his regrets, looking down at her. It didn’t make it any better, that he’d received her tacit approval. In some ways, it made that knotting in his gut feel worse.

  She smiled up at him. “Now, what can I do to help?”

  His heart almost broke as he looked down at her.

  “You can make sure my mother is in the courtroom on the day of the trial,” he said slowly. “Sit with her, and make sure she is there when I speak.”

  Because if Minnie brought the duchess…she would be there herself.

  No time for regrets now.

  Still, he felt them piercing his skin like silent splinters as she smiled at him. “You can trust me,” she promised.

  And he’d done it. He’d fooled his wife.

  Robert returned to his brother’s cell at ten the next morning. The money that he’d handed the gaoler the night before had already made a difference. The top half of the cell door had been opened, showing heavy iron bars behind. The cell itself had been scrubbed out, and Oliver had been given water to wash with.

  There was still an unmistakable stench to the holding room, but at least now it was only toe-curling and not enough to actually trigger gagging.

  “I had a good talk with the lawyers this morning,” Oliver said cheerfully. “My parents are out having breakfast, but they’ll be back soon.”

  “Then I won’t take long,” Robert said.

  A hint of confusion flashed over his brother’s face, but Robert bulled ahead and told him what he’d learned on the previous night—about the substance of Lord Green’s testimony, about the quote from a volume of chess strategy.

  Oliver leaned back against the cell wall. “Come to think of it,” he said, “that is a good point. I didn’t recognize the quote. Where did you ever hear the term discovered attack? You never played chess.”

  Robert drew a deep breath. “Do you know who Minerva Lane is? Or Maximilian Lane, I suppose.”

  Oliver gave a surprised little huff and leaned forward. “Maximilian Lane? Of course I know who he—who she is. She’s famous in the annals of chess. Or infamous, I suppose. I’ve studied her games, you know. They were recorded during…” He broke off and looked Robert in the eye. “You’re joking,” he said. “Never tell me that your Minnie is Minerva Lane.”

  “Uh.” Robert shrugged. “As it happens…yes.”

  “That’s how you knew.”

  Another nod. “Stevens knows her real name, but he hasn’t uncovered her past.”

  “I see.” Oliver took two paces to the edge of his cell and turned around. “Of course she’s hiding who she is. She’d be ruined if everyone knew.” He didn’t say anything—didn’t ask whether Robert would expose his wife’s past. He didn’t beg him to do it. Oliver would never ask for such a thing. But he took hold of the bars of his cell and squeezed until his knuckles turned white. “What a mess.”

  “Not a mess.” Robert stepped closer. “Between you and me, I got everything—the title, the fortune. I’ve made up the difference as best I can. The least I can do is make sure you have a little freedom.”

  Oliver cocked his head and looked at him. His nose wrinkled again, this time in confusion. “That’s what you think? You think that between the two of us, you got the better deal, that I was left with nothing?”

  It wasn’t an opinion. It was a fact. He’d given his brother as much as the other man would take, but Oliver was still fighting to secure his position in society.

  “Never mind,” Robert said.

  “No, I won’t brush it off with a never mind. You really think that you were born with more than I was?”

  “I know I was.”

  Oliver turned away, his shoulders stiff. “Think again, Robert. Think again. I wouldn’t trade what I have—cell, lice, and all—for all your fortune.”

  “And what is it you have that is so valuable?”

  “I have a family that loves me.”

  Those words hit Robert hard. He’d just begun to hope for
the possibility of happiness, only to have it wrested from him. He couldn’t seem to draw breath. He felt as if he’d been struck in the stomach, struck hard enough to send his lungs into spasms.

  He looked up at his brother standing before him, his face in half-profile. What little light there was glinted off his glasses, illuminated his bright hair.

  It wasn’t just Oliver he saw behind those cold iron bars, but everyone who cared about him—gruff, menacing Mr. Marshall, the stately Mrs. Marshall, three sisters, an aunt, two nephews… and reflected in the light of his spectacles, a brother.

  A brother he’d found at twelve, one who had adopted him with a cheerful happiness that had shocked Robert. Oliver had taught him everything he knew about being part of a family.

  “Yes,” Robert said, his voice a little hoarse. “Well. As it turns out, I have a family that loves me, too. And I’m not about to abandon him.”

  He put his hand up to the iron bars.

  “I have lice,” Oliver reminded him.

  “Shut up and take my hand.”

  It was an awkward handclasp they shared, an iron bar between their palms, but Robert wouldn’t have traded it for the world.

  “Let me do this for you,” he said. “Because when we met at Eton, you could have knocked me down and kicked me in the ribs, and instead you chose to be my brother.”

  “Also,” Oliver said brightly, “your latest source of contagion.”

  Robert laughed. “I have two gallons of carbon oil waiting for you already. I can spare a pint to douse my fingers, if necessary.”

  A throat cleared behind him, and Robert turned. What little humor he’d found turned to ash.

  He didn’t know how long the woman had been standing there. He’d seen her once before, more than a decade ago, but that one time had been enough. She was burned on his memory.

  Mrs. Marshall was far shorter than her son. Her chestnut hair had a little more white in it than when last he’d seen her, but it only made her seem all the more regal. They looked at each other across the room, like two gazelles scenting each other across a meadow—watching, watching, watching, hoping that nothing would hunt them down.

  “I’m sorry,” Robert said. “I’m going now.” He slid past her, giving her as wide a berth as he could without actually flattening himself against the wall. He went out the door into the courtyard. Plaster and timber rose two stories above him, shielding them from the late autumn sun. It was cold; he drew on gloves, pulled his hat down over his ears.

  And just as he was readying himself to go, footsteps sounded again, and Mrs. Marshall came out of the holding room. Their eyes met again across the courtyard; Robert dropped his.

  Ever so slowly, she crossed the paving stones to him.

  “Mrs. Marshall.” He could scarcely breathe. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Your Grace.” She looked at him and then immediately looked away.

  “No honorifics.” He folded himself onto a bench at the edge of the courtyard. It was wet from last night’s rain; he could feel the damp seeping through his trousers. But he didn’t want to tower over her. Bad enough that he’d encountered her at all during this time and brought to her mind those other memories. “You, of all people, shouldn’t be Your Grace-ing me.”

  She turned to him. He studied the paving stones beneath his feet.

  “After what the collective dukes of Clermont have done to you and yours,” he said quietly, “we don’t deserve the respect. All I can say is that I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry that Oliver—”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “It most certainly is. My brother is awaiting trial for an act that I committed, for no reason except that they can’t get at me. If that isn’t my fault, I don’t know what is.” He contemplated the walls. “But I promise you, I won’t let anything happen to him. I won’t.”

  She stood before him a few moments longer. He kept his head down, aware of her every breath.

  And then, very slowly, she brushed her skirts to the side and sat gingerly on the stone bench next to him. Six inches away, but still next to him. “You’ve been a good friend to my son.”

  “I’ve been his brother.” He still didn’t look at her.

  “He talked about you all the time when he was home from school. You and Sebastian Malheur—but especially you. Needless to say, Mr. Marshall and I found it rather alarming. But he didn’t talk about a boy who seemed like a younger version of your father. You sounded thoughtful and quiet, two things that the Duke of Clermont never managed to be. I always wished I had been better prepared all those years ago. When Oliver spoke of you, you sounded so sweet that I had envisioned a completely different boy. To walk in the room and see you looking at me—with his eyes, and his nose, and his mouth—I don’t know what came over me. I didn’t even really come back to myself until I was half a mile away.”

  “There’s no need to explain. I know what my father did. If I were you, I wouldn’t be able to look at me, either.”

  “Oliver said after, he thought I’d hurt your feelings.”

  Robert shook his head. “There is no room for my feelings in this. You were wronged. It’s not your responsibility to extend the olive branch, but mine, to get out of your way. To give to you what little comfort you can find.”

  “Maybe,” she said slowly. “Maybe. But what I can’t help thinking is this.”

  The sky was blue overhead, without a single cloud in it. It seemed impossible at this time of year, and yet there it was. Robert tilted his head back and shut his eyes.

  “We told Oliver the truth about his birth when he was quite young. Or, I should say, Hugo told him. Not everything, you understand, but a child’s version. There was a bad man. He hurt me. Some people might say that other man was his father, but we loved him, and it wasn’t true. I didn’t want to say anything at all, but Hugo convinced me.” She sighed.

  Robert tried to imagine what it would be like to have parents who actually considered what to tell their children, who cared about these details. Who assured him that they loved him.

  I want to be that kind of parent. His fists clenched.

  “Hugo was very matter-of-fact about it, and so Oliver took it in stride. Until he found out about you. Then he had nightmares.”

  “About me?” Robert repeated.

  “Yes. He woke up crying one night, and wouldn’t stop. When I asked what was wrong, he said that the bad man had his brother, and we had to go get him.”

  Robert felt a lump form in his throat. “Ah,” he managed carefully.

  “I thought it was sweet, actually, and that stage passed. But…” She turned to look at him directly. “But now, it has been almost thirty years since I saw your father. What he did to me took all of ten minutes, and I still remember it.” She paused and then reached over and tapped him on the knee.

  He looked over into her eyes. This time, she didn’t flinch from him.

  “You,” she said quietly, “you grew up with him. That must have been awful.”

  For a second, Robert saw his father looming over him, so much taller back then, so much bigger.

  What kind of a son are you? He’d thrown up his hands in aggravation. Any other boy, and things would be so much better. Even your mother doesn’t want you enough to stay.

  “Oh,” Robert said quietly. “It wasn’t so bad. Most of the time, my father didn’t even remember I was there.”

  And perhaps Mrs. Marshall heard that tiny catch in his voice, because ever so slowly, she put her arm around him.

  “You poor, poor boy,” she said.

  Robert’s duty for the afternoon did not promise to be so enlightening as his morning.

  “I have no idea what to think of you, Your Grace.”

  Robert stood in the entry to the Charingfords’ home. It seemed a comfortable enough place, papered in cream and blue, the entry itself bright and cheerful. But Mr. Charingford, who stood across from him, looked neither bright nor happy. His hair was graying and thin, and he’d folded his arms
over his chest.

  “I’ve agreed to this,” the other man said, “because you showed good sense on precisely one occasion.”

  “One occasion?” Robert raised an eyebrow. “When was that?”

  “When you married Miss Pur—I suppose I cannot call her that now, can I?” Charingford tilted his head and almost smiled. “When you married your wife. I tried to convince my son to have a look at her, but he never could get past that scar. Her friendship with my daughter… We spent four months together in Cornwall on a journey, and I think I know her better than anyone in town besides her great-aunts. She was a good choice.”

  She had been. Robert ached to think of what would come tomorrow.

  “I can only hope that some of her sense has begun to seep into your consciousness. I cannot know what you were thinking to write those handbills. To come here and try to convince people like me to support voting reform.” Charingford gave him a look under lowered eyebrows.

  “If you know I wrote those handbills,” Robert asked, “why did you indict Mr. Marshall?”

  Charingford’s eyes dropped. “There was enough evidence to support his involvement. And…”

  “And Stevens asked you,” Robert filled in.

  Charingford bit his lip. “You know about that?”

  “Don’t lecture me on sense,” Robert said. “I asked to see your factory, and you agreed to show me. Let’s get on with it.”

  Charingford gestured and a footman opened the front door. As he did, the dull vibration that came from the factory across the street accelerated to a roar.

  “If you will,” he said grimly. “Your Grace.”

  The clatter of the machinery was almost overwhelming as they crossed the cobblestones of the street. The factory doors had been newly painted a gleaming green, standing out against the coal-streaked brick of the walls. The noise surrounded them, a cacophony of shrieking and shaking. Mr. Charingford ushered him inside with a series of gestures and then, when they’d made their way up a small staircase to stand on a metal platform that overlooked the operation, turned to face him.

  “This is the main room,” he shouted, straining to be heard over the clatter of the machines below. “Here’s where the yarn is knitted into hose.”

  He pointed down into the factory below. A woman, her white-streaked hair tied back in a careless bun, operated a machine that wound yarn onto metal bobbins on one side of the room. A handful of men strolled from one circular frame to the next, moving pieces when necessary, replacing bobbins, handing the products off to boys who scampered with them into an adjacent room. They moved with an economy of motion that seemed to spring more from weariness than expertise.

  “Each machine can produce two pairs of stockings in nine minutes,” Charingford shouted. “And the men are needed only to take the work off the stitch hooks at the end and to reset the cylinder that guides the shape of the stocking. Look at them, Your Grace. They don’t even have to make decisions in their daily work. How could we trust them to decide the future of our country? To understand the workings of industry?”

  Robert simply tilted his head, listening over the racket of the machines. “They’re singing,” he said. “Why are they singing?”

  Mr. Charingford paused and put one hand to his ear, listening. “They’re happy to be at work, Your Grace. They’re singing a hymn—praise to God.”

  Robert was a man looking down on a factory floor from above. All he had to do was look, while the workers below turned and wound and cut.

  Lucky you, he could hear Minnie say, that you can consider the future without terror. He didn’t think he could even understand what it meant to stand down there, to toil in this unrelenting noise for day after day. All he knew was that it wasn’t as simple as gratitude and hymns.

  Over the short course of their marriage, he’d never been farther from Minnie than he was at this moment. He’d lied to her, and tomorrow he was going to break his promise to her and hurt her. And yet he could hear her right now over the thunder of the machinery.

  “I don’t pretend to understand what it means to be a working man, Mr. Charingford, but I am a factory owner. I inherited a good bit of industry from my grandfather. And when I look at your factory floor, I don’t see men who are happy to be at work.”

  A woman on the floor looked up at them as he spoke. There was no hatred in her eyes, no contempt. Just a soft look around the edge of her eyes—a quiet yearning.

  Perhaps she had once been a genteel young lady who failed to marry. Maybe she’d had no choice but to take on work until her hair grayed before her time and her skin turned to leather. Still, she looked up. Like everyone else, her lips moved in song.

  “Well?” Mr. Charingford said. “What is it that you see instead?”

  “I see Minnie.” His voice caught. “I see who she might have been in ten years, when her great-aunts’ health faded away.”

  Mr. Charingford drew in a sharp breath.

  “I see your daughter if the market for hosiery should vanish.”

  “Not Lydia,” Charingford said in shocked tones. “Surely not…” But he trailed away unhappily.

  “I see who my brother might have been if another man hadn’t stepped in to raise him. I see my childhood cook, if I hadn’t pensioned her off. The only person I don’t see is myself.” He let his hands trail over the catwalk. “I have never been there, and I never will. The only thing I understand now is that I cannot comprehend what it is like to stand on a factory floor and look up and sing.”

  Mr. Charingford tilted his head and looked at him, really listening now.

  “I’ve a goodly share of faults. I rush in, where I should tread carefully. I speak, where I should listen. But when I hear them sing, I don’t just hear a hymn. They’re singing to God because they haven’t found anyone else who will listen.”

  Charingford spoke cautiously. “Stevens says that if we listen once, we’ll only stir the workers on to greater unreasonableness.”

  “Have you found that Stevens becomes more reasonable the more you give in to his demands?”

  Charingford looked away.

  “How much has he asked of you, Charingford? You’re a magistrate. Has he said he won’t help you if you don’t do as he says? Has he asked for money? Or did he simply demand that he be awarded the hand of your beautiful daughter in exchange for his efforts?“

  Charingford’s hands closed on the metal rail in front of him. He closed his eyes. “That,” he said. “He did—all of that.”

  “I have found,” Robert said, “that in the long run, paying my workers enough that they do not consider the future with terror costs far less than employing men to terrorize them.”

  “You sound like Minnie,” Charingford muttered. It sounded like a complaint.

  Robert simply smiled and shook his head. It was, perhaps, the sweetest compliment he’d been given.

  A young boy darted across the floor below, conveying a full bobbin to a man who had turned to one of the machines.

  “If you don’t look carefully,” Robert said, “the men and women on the floor fade into indistinguishable browns and grays. You don’t have to see them as anything except the working arms of the machines, flesh and blood instead of steel and iron. Drawing wages, instead of being purchased upfront. But machines don’t sing. Machines don’t hope. And Charingford, I don’t think we could stop them, not with a thousand copies of Captain Stevens. I don’t intend to try.”

  “You’re a radical.” There was no heat in the accusation. Charingford looked out over the factory. But now, his gaze stopped here and there—on women who bound the hose up in paper, on men who worked the machines.

  “I know,” Robert said.

  “If you’d talked to me when first you arrived, instead of writing handbills…”

  “I’m growing up. And my wife, it appears, is having some effect on me.” Robert shrugged. “You never know. By the time I’m thirty, I might actually start making a difference.”