Rosalind turned toward him.
The engineer was walking through the smoking ruins with a strange, manic grin on his soot-streaked face. He took a long metal rod and struck one of the internal supports.
Clang.
The clear note rang across the wet courtyard.
“He is a fool, Miss Carstairs,” Beckford croaked, his voice raw from smoke. “Your Duke is a man of the old world. He thinks houses are held up by wood. He did not know about our Sheffield iron.”
Rosalind rushed forward and wiped wet ash from the nearest support.
The cast-iron core stood intact.
The fire had devoured scaffolding, trim, and temporary framing, but the structural bones of the rebuilt house had survived.
Iron did not burn.
Dominic came to stand beside her, soaked through and smelling of rain and smoke.
“My brother intended to break your spirit,” he said quietly. “Instead, he merely cleared away what we had not finished replacing. The foundation holds.”
Rosalind looked at the blackened house.
Then she looked at him.
“We still need money.”
“Yes.”
“And your brother will not stop.”
“No.”
Dominic’s expression changed.
“But I have something that may stop him.”
That evening, by the flickering light of a hearth in Rosalind’s temporary study, Dominic laid a leather-bound ledger on her desk.
He had taken it from Kingswood before leaving England years earlier.
“Richard portrays himself as the wealthiest peer in the county,” Dominic said. “It is a façade.”
The ledger told the story in dense, frantic columns. There were private loans disguised as estate improvements, withdrawals from ward accounts recorded as temporary transfers, and desperate attempts to hide losses behind inflated land valuations. Several entries bore Richard’s own notation. Others referenced intermediaries who had been quietly paid to move money where trustees would not immediately see it. Dominic had taken the book years earlier because he suspected his brother was lying about the family finances, but he had never known how desperate the situation had become until Rosalind forced him to read every page closely.
Five years earlier, Alderley had invested heavily in West Indian sugar interests just as shipping disruptions crushed returns. He had lost staggering sums. To hide those losses and maintain his lifestyle, he had begun improperly drawing against trust funds, ward accounts, and entailed St. John assets.
If the evidence reached the Lord Chancellor, the consequences could be catastrophic.
Rosalind stared at the figures.
The Duke who had mocked her poverty was drowning in invisible debt.
“We do not expose him yet,” she said.
Dominic looked up sharply.
“If we expose him now, he is ruined. But I still lose the wager if Ashdown is unfinished. No. We let him believe he has won. We let him walk into Almack’s, or into this house, confident in his triumph. Then we show everyone exactly what he is.”
Dominic studied her for several seconds.
Then he smiled.
To fund the final winter push, Dominic quietly contacted Sir John Soane, one of London’s most celebrated and forward-thinking architects. Soane reviewed Beckford’s plans and was fascinated by the experimental combination of historic architecture, iron structure, glass, and heating systems.
He privately helped arrange a five-thousand-pound loan to replace windows, restore damaged plasterwork, and finish the interior.
Winter was brutal. The workmen slept in shifts. Supplies arrived frozen into carts. Lime mortar had to be protected from the cold, glass panes handled with numb fingers, and every delay threatened the date written into the wager. Rosalind kept a calendar pinned beside the accounts and crossed out each day as if cutting away another chance to fail. More than once she woke at her desk with ink dried on her fingers and calculations beneath her cheek. Dominic would quietly leave a blanket over her shoulders rather than wake her.
Blizzards buried the moors. Roads vanished beneath snow. Men worked by lamplight while wind battered unfinished outer walls.
Inside, however, the new heating system finally came alive.
Boilers roared in underground service rooms. Heated water moved through pipes beneath floors and along concealed runs. While several feet of snow buried the grounds, the interior of Ashdown remained astonishingly warm.
The glass dome was sealed.
The mahogany floors were polished until they reflected candlelight like dark water.
By March of 1816, Rosalind and Dominic were no longer pretending their relationship was merely professional.
One night beneath the sweeping glass canopy of the conservatory, with stars burning cold above Yorkshire, Dominic pulled her into his arms.
“When this is over,” he said, “when my brother is defeated and this house is safe, I want to stay. I have wandered Europe for five years looking for a home. I did not know it was right next door, being built by the most formidable woman I have ever met.”
Rosalind looked up at him, her heart racing.
“Ashdown may need a master who is not afraid of the future.”
Then she kissed him.
The stage was set.
The trap was ready.
April 14, 1816, arrived exactly one year after the wager.
For weeks, society had been buzzing with rumors. The Duke of Alderley had boasted at White’s that Rosalind Carstairs was living in a burned-out shell, eating scraps, and hiding from creditors.
He was so certain of victory that he arranged a convoy of luxurious carriages to carry prominent members of society to Yorkshire, including Princess Lieven, Beau Brummell, Thomas Coutts, and Lord Chancellor John Scott, Lord Eldon.
Alderley intended to host a victory celebration among the ruins before taking possession of the deed.
He rode at the head of the procession.
Then the carriages turned onto Ashdown’s long drive.
They cleared the final line of ancient oaks.
And stopped.
A collective gasp came from the carriage windows.
Ashdown Park was not a ruin. For a moment, even the horses seemed to quiet. Guests leaned toward the carriage windows as if refusing to trust what they saw. Men who had repeated Alderley’s jokes for a year now stared at the finished house in silence, each of them privately rearranging the story they had expected to tell that evening.
It was breathtaking.
The Elizabethan façade had been restored, its warm stone glowing in the evening light. Yet what stunned the visitors most was the illumination.
Rosalind had installed modern gasoliers that flooded the entrance and principal rooms with a brilliance unheard of in most country houses. The conservatory dome glowed like a lantern against the darkening moors.