“I have a family, Your Grace. Two little ones. If they find out I talked…”
“If you do not talk, I will ensure that every magistrate in London knows your name and face by morning.” Hugo held the man’s gaze. “If you talk, I will ensure that you and your family are protected. I will find you work, honest work, and no one will know you spoke to me. You have my word.”
“The word of a Duke,” Rawley whispered.
“The word of a man who keeps his promises. Ask anyone in this room.”
Rawley’s shoulders sagged. The fight went out of him all at once, like air from bellows.
“It was a lady,” he said. “She came to me at the Cock and Bull on Drury Lane. Gave me the papers and told me where to leave them. Paid me five pounds.”
“Describe her.”
“Tall. Dark hair. Well-dressed, too well for that part of town. She had a way about her, like she was used to giving orders and having them followed.”
Hugo’s jaw tightened. “Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”
“I would, Your Grace. I am not likely to forget. She looked at me like I was something she had scraped off her shoe.”
Hugo glanced at Edward. Edward’s expression confirmed what Hugo already suspected.
“Did she give you a name?” Hugo asked.
Rawley swallowed. “She did not give one. But the man who pointed me to her, the one who set up the meeting, he called her Lady Stapleton.”
The name landed in the room like a stone dropped into still water.
Hugo stood motionless. The drawing room, the faces, the flickering candlelight, all of it sharpened into focus around a single point of clarity that had been gathering for weeks.
The Continental connections. The access to the Fenwick guest list. The careful positioning of Beatrice beside Wilfrey at every opportunity. The cool, appraising gaze that swept every room she entered, cataloging weaknesses, measuring distances, filingaway information to be weaponized at the precise moment it would cause maximum damage.
He turned to Lily.
She looked up at him, and the shock in her green eyes had already hardened into something fiercer.
CHAPTER 25
“Lady Stapleton.”
Lily repeated the name into the silence, and the silence swallowed it. The drawing room felt smaller than it had five minutes ago. The walls pressed inward, and the candlelight grew dimmer, as though the room itself had absorbed the shock and contracted around it.
She understood it at once. Not in pieces, not gradually, but whole. Lady Stapleton had not been spreading gossip for sport. She had been hunting. Every pamphlet, every forged Lady Fairhart column, every carefully timed attack had served a single purpose.
To drive Lily away from Wilfrey so that Beatrice could take her place.
Lady Stapleton had watched Lily’s progress with Wilfrey the way a chess player watches an opponent’s queen cross the board, and each time the queen advanced, she moved to remove it.
Hugo crossed the room to where Rawley stood trembling. He reached into his coat and withdrew a leather purse. He pressed it into the man’s hands without counting the coins.
“Leave London tonight. Take your family and go somewhere no one knows your name.” Hugo’s voice was low, stripped of performance. “If you are ever approached again by anyone asking you to deliver papers, refuse. Once you are settled and ready to work, write to this address.”
He handed Rawley a card. Rawley clutched the purse and the card against his chest and nodded, his eyes wide with the desperate gratitude of a man who had expected prison and received mercy.
Colborne escorted him out. The door closed behind them. No one moved. Lady Brimsey gripped her husband’s arm. Lord Brimsey’s face had aged ten years in the space of ten minutes. Sophia stood rigid beside Edward, her fingers white around her teacup. And Hugo remained by the window, his hands clasped behind his back, his jaw locked, his gaze fixed on some point beyond the glass that none of them could see.
Sophia was the first to speak. She crossed to Lily and took both her hands.
“I should have acted faster.” Sophia’s voice was steady, but her eyes glistened. “When the first pamphlet appeared, I should have pushed harder, investigated sooner. I let the engagement distract me from the forgery, and now…”
