The Duchess War

“I’ll have my portion.” Lydia raised her chin.

Scarcely enough to live on, Minnie knew. And having severed her relationship with Stevens in so uncivil a fashion, Lydia would be unlikely to find anyone else. Besides…

“What if next time, the rumor is about you?” Minnie persisted.

She didn’t have to say that it might be. Too many people knew Lydia’s secret. The doctor who had diagnosed her. Anyone who had seen her in Cornwall during those dreadful months. Lydia lived with the possibility of public ruination every bit as much as Minnie did.

“What does it matter who knows?” Lydia said, looking away. “Apparently, truth is no bar to rumor. After all, Stevens is spreading that vile rumor about you.”

Explaining the source of the rumor would raise questions—questions that Minnie couldn’t answer. Questions like, why was there no record of the birth of one Wilhelmina Pursling? What had her name once been, and why was it necessary to change it?

Minnie shook her head. “My parents were married. I can assure you of that.” That, and nothing more. “But Lydia, you must not be so neglectful of your future. Throwing away a fiancé, simply because he said one thing you did not like? Nobody is perfect.”

Lydia simply wrapped her arms around herself and shook her head. “How can you ask? How could I stay silent?”

“But he was…” She stumbled. “You said…”

Lydia had said Stevens would make her happy. She’d said it over and over, as if trying to believe it herself. It was the way Lydia was. She believed the best. She wished everyone happy. She could have found the bright side of a solar eclipse.

Lydia turned to Minnie now. “Sometimes,” she said slowly, “one is faced with choices. When something seems inevitable—when, for instance, marriage to a man would do my father good—when he’s a decent man who likes me… Well, it didn’t seem that I would find a better match. It makes sense.” She frowned fiercely. “It made sense.”

“So go back and apologize.”

Lydia’s features hardened. “After what he said about you? He told me I should have nothing more to do with you. I cannot believe this world is so cruel as to require me to sacrifice my dearest friend in order to make a good marriage.”

Oh, Lydia. Minnie’s heart hurt for her. Even with all that had happened to her friend, she still believed that.

“It might be that cruel,” Minnie whispered. And then, because she knew how cruel it could be, she added: “It is.”

“It is not.” Lydia unfolded her arms, but only long enough to put them around Minnie, to draw her close. “I won’t let it be.”

Minnie could almost let the warmth of that embrace fool her. Almost.

Someday…

Someday, Lydia would discover all that Minnie had withheld from her. Their friendship couldn’t survive it. It wasn’t the truth of what had happened that would destroy their intimacy, but the fact that she had held it back all those years. That she’d been the repository for her friend’s darkest secrets, while holding her own selfishly close to her chest.

It wasn’t a matter of if they would stop being friends. It was a question of when. And yet Minnie had been unable to give her up. Lydia was warm and hopeful and happy, and sometimes, despite Minnie’s logical bent, Lydia managed to infect her with sheer optimism.

Sometimes, she believed they would be happy. There would be no more fears for the future. It would all come out right, and they would be friends forever.

Of all the fool fantasies that Minnie could have indulged in, that was the one that hooked deep under her skin, the one that she could never let go. And so she simply held her friend and prayed that she would not be proven right too quickly.

“So,” Lydia said. “The Duke of Clermont spoke to you for a long while there. What did he say?”

“Nothing.” But Minnie smiled despite herself. “Nothing at all.”

THE DWELLING—IF YOU COULD CALL IT THAT, and Robert was uncertain it deserved the title—was the worst kind of slum. What plaster remained on the wall of the single room was cracked and streaked with soot. The single room smelt of sour vinegar and old cabbage. The chair he sat in was uncomfortably close to the ground, as if one leg had broken and they’d cut the rest down to match. If he leaned too far to either side, the chair squeaked and swayed. This squalid tenement represented everything that Robert’s father had put wrong in Leicester, and he’d come to fix it all.

It had taken Robert far too long to try to make amends. But in his defense, he’d only recently discovered what had gone wrong.

In front of him, the resident—a thin, coughing man by the name of Finney—pulled his coat around him.

“Graydon Boots.” Finney pushed back in his seat and stared at the ceiling. “Now that is a name I’ve not let myself think in years. I last worked for them back in…’58, was it?”

“That is what the records say,” Robert told him.

The man pointed his pipe at Robert. “And you’re telling me that after all these years, after Graydon Boots has been gone for over a decade, that some high Muck-a-Muck wants to award me a pension. Me.”

Robert nodded.

“Mr. Blaisdell, I spent four months in prison. It ruined my health, but my mind still works. I’ll not be believing that, I won’t. There’s some kind of trick.”

There wasn’t a trick. Robert’s grandfather had given the factory to his father as part of a devil’s bargain. His father—who had known nothing of industry—had handed the factory over to an overseer and ordered him to extract as much profit from it as he could get. Robert had only discovered the place while looking over his grandfather’s records from decades before. His father’s books, incomplete as they generally were, hadn’t even mentioned it.

“Mr. Finney,” Robert said, “I am not telling you that Graydon Boots is awarding you a pension. That would be absurd. The charity I represent has been looking into the events of that year. They’ve decided you were unfairly imprisoned.”

“I’ve been saying that for years.”

“In fact, Leicester has a curious history in that regard,” Robert said. “Did you know that more people have been convicted of criminal sedition in Leicester in the last decade than in the entirety of England?”

Another thing his father’s overseer had started, as best as Robert could tell, and that hadn’t ended when the factory went under.