Read Chapter 13: A Moment Alone

The rain began as Eleanor reached the pavement, a thin, miserable drizzle that plastered strands of hair to her temples and turned the gaslight into wavering halos. She had not thought beyond escape—only that she must be away from those crystal chandeliers, away from the whispers that had followed her flight from the salon like a trail of gunpowder.

Her mother would be furious. That thought arrived with a dull, familiar weight, and Eleanor almost laughed. Furious. What a small word for the conflagration awaiting her at Wentworth House. But she could not face it yet. Could not face the carriage, the questions, the theatrical collapse her mother would stage the moment the door closed behind them.

So she walked. The evening gloves were ruined, the silk of her gown soaked through at the hem, and her slippers squelched with every step. She did not care. The rain was cold enough to numb, and numbness was a mercy.

Behind her, carriage wheels slowed to a crawl. She heard the horses before she saw them, the jingle of harness, the creak of lacquered wood drawing alongside. She did not turn. She simply walked faster, and the carriage kept pace.

“Miss Wentworth.”

His voice was low, and even through the rain it carried no mockery. She stopped. She did not have the strength to pretend she had not heard him.

The carriage door opened, and Ashworth leaned into the light, his face half-shadowed. He had removed his greatcoat and his evening coat hung open, his cravat loosened at the throat—a state of dishabille that would have scandalized the ballroom had anyone seen it. He looked, for once, like a man rather than a monument.

“Get in,” he said.

“I would rather drown.”

“That can be arranged, but it would be a waste.” He extended a hand. “I am not your enemy, Miss Wentworth. Whatever you believe of me, I am not that.”

Eleanor stared at his hand. Rain dripped from her chin. Her teeth had begun to chatter, and she knew that when the chill broke, she would be shaking too hard to walk another block.

She took his hand. His fingers closed around hers—warm, dry, unnervingly steady—and he drew her up into the carriage with a single, efficient pull. She landed on the opposite seat, dripping onto the velvet cushions, and he shut the door against the storm.

The interior was dark, lit only by the faint glow of the streetlamps through the rain-streaked windows. He did not light the carriage lamp. Perhaps he wanted the darkness. Perhaps he knew she could not bear to be seen clearly.

“You will ruin your upholstery,” Eleanor said, because she could not think of anything else to say.

“I will survive it.”

The carriage lurched into motion. She did not know where it was bound. She did not ask. For a long moment, there was only the rhythm of the wheels and the hiss of rain against the glass.

Then he spoke, and his voice was different. Softer. Almost gentle.

“I have known since the Harrowby dinner.”

Eleanor’s breath caught. She stared at the dark shape of him, willing her face to remain blank, though he could barely see it. “Known what?”

“That you are Mr. Ellery.”

The words landed like stones in still water. She opened her mouth to deny it, to resurrect the invalid brother, the family genius, the whole elaborate fiction she had spun for Jarvis and for him, but he held up a hand.

“Do not. Please.” He leaned forward, and now the faint lamplight caught the planes of his face—the sharp cheekbones, the grave mouth, the eyes that seemed to see straight through the pretty lies she had constructed. “I do not say this to trap you. I say it because I have been reading your column for eleven months, and I have been reading you for three weeks, and I know the difference between a clever woman and a plagiarist.”

Eleanor’s throat tightened. “You cannot know that.”

“You predicted the Cotton Exchange correction in March. You warned against the Yorkshire coal scheme in May—two weeks before it collapsed. You wrote, in your July issue, that the Bank of England’s tightening policy would push the discount rate to unprecedented heights, and you were right within a quarter point.” He paused. “I do not believe an invalid half-brother you have never mentioned to anyone wrote those lines. I believe you did, because I have watched you at dinner parties correct your own mother’s arithmetic, and I have seen you read a balance sheet the way other women read novels—with hunger.”

Eleanor’s hands were trembling. She pressed them flat against the velvet seat to still them. “You have been following my column closely.”

“I have.” He did not look away. “I admire it. I admire you. I think you are the most remarkable mind I have ever encountered, and I think you are wasting it on deception.”

The words struck her like a physical blow. She had expected accusation, triumph, some ducal display of superiority. She had not expected this—this quiet, almost pained sincerity that made her want to weep.

“You do not know me,” she said, her voice a whisper.

“I know you write under a man’s name because no publisher would take a woman’s financial column. I know you do it well enough that the City has begun to listen. And I know that whatever hand guided your last railway piece, it was not yours.”

She flinched. He saw it. Of course he saw it.

“I am not here to accuse you of fraud,” he continued, his voice dropping lower. “I am here because I believe you were used. The question is whether you were used knowingly, or whether you are as much a victim of Thaddeus Finch’s disappearance as the investors who lost their bonds.”

Eleanor’s chest constricted. She thought of the threatening note, the postmark from the moneylender’s district, the faces of the men in the bank who had spoken of Finch as though he had merely stepped out for a cigar and never returned.

“I did not know,” she said, and the words came out raw, unguarded. “I swear to you, I did not know what they would do with my column. I wrote what I believed. I recommended what I thought was sound.”

“I know.” His voice was very soft. “That is what makes this so difficult.”

The carriage slowed. Through the window, she saw the familiar facade of Wentworth House, the windows dark except for a single lamp burning in her mother’s sitting room. The carriage stopped.

Neither of them moved.

“Here is what I propose,” Ashworth said, and his tone shifted—still gentle, but with steel beneath it now. “You will appear at my solicitor’s office within the week, with either a written confession or a public retraction acknowledging the railway piece as fraudulent. You will name your sources, disclose your meetings with Finch, and cooperate fully with my investigation into the collapsed bonds.”

Eleanor’s blood went cold. “And if I refuse?”

“Then I will publish your identity myself. Not to destroy you—though it would, I think the scandal would be considerable—but because I will not allow the damage to continue. Those investors lost their savings. Some of them will lose their homes. I cannot stand by while the author of the piece that ruined them hides behind a man’s name and a fragile fiction.”

“You would ruin me to save them?”

“I would do what is necessary.” He said it simply, without malice, and that was somehow worse. “You are not a villain, Miss Wentworth. But you are not blameless either. You chose to write under a false name. You chose to keep writing even after you suspected your column had been manipulated. Those choices have consequences, and I cannot spare you from them simply because I—” He stopped. Swallowed. “Because I do not wish to see you hurt.”

Eleanor sat very still. The carriage smelled of rain and leather and something faintly floral—his cologne, she realized, something subtle and expensive that she had noticed before, at the ball, when he had held her in the waltz.

“You have no proof,” she said.

“I have enough.”

“You have a name in a ledger and a dinner-party observation. That is not proof. That is suspicion dressed in ducal authority.”

He was silent for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was quieter still.

“You are right. I have no proof. And that is why I am giving you the choice.” He turned to face her fully, and in the dim light she saw something flicker across his features—something that might have been pain. “I am asking you, Eleanor. Not Miss Wentworth, not the heiress, not the debutante with her careful lies. I am asking the woman who wrote that column about the Cotton Exchange correction, who saw what no one else saw, who had the courage to put her name—his name—on the page. I am asking her to trust me.”

Eleanor’s eyes burned. She blinked, and a tear slipped down her cheek, hot against the cold of her skin.

“I cannot,” she whispered. “You are asking me to surrender everything I have built.”

“I am asking you to let me help you build something truer.”

She shook her head. It was a small movement, almost involuntary. “You do not understand. If I am revealed, I have nothing. No reputation, no future, no—” She stopped herself. She had almost said no identity. She had almost told him that Ellery was not a mask but a mirror, that she had become more real in those anonymous pages than she had ever been in ballrooms or drawing rooms or the gilded cage of her mother’s ambitions.

The door opened. A footman stood in the rain, holding an umbrella.

Eleanor rose. Her legs were unsteady, but she made herself stand straight. She turned to face him one last time.

“I will not confess,” she said. “And I will not stop writing. If you publish my name, you will destroy me, and you will do it knowing that you were wrong about me.”

He did not answer. His face was unreadable in the darkness.

She stepped out into the rain. The footman’s umbrella sheltered her, but she could feel the cold seeping through her ruined slippers, the dampness of her gown against her skin.

She did not look back. She walked up the steps, through the door that Jarvis held open with a face like stone, and into the dim warmth of the house.

Behind her, the carriage did not move for a long time.

In her room, Eleanor stripped off her wet clothes with shaking hands and stood before the looking glass in her shift, pale and dripping and utterly alone. Her reflection stared back at her—a woman with no money, no allies, and a duke who had just offered her a choice between ruin and surrender.

And she had chosen a third path, one she had not yet fully articulated even to herself. She would not confess. She would not stop. She would find Finch, uncover the fraud, and clear Ellery’s name so completely that no accusation could ever stand.

And she would do it before Ashworth’s patience ran out.

She pulled on her dressing gown and sat at her desk. The candle had burned low. She dipped her pen in the inkwell and began to write, not a column this time, but a list.

Finch. The moneylender. The postmark. The missing bonds.

She would start with her father’s old friend, Lord Whitmore. He had known her since she was a child. He was perhaps the only man in London who might believe her.

And she needed someone to believe her badly.