"The girl ruined my gown," the Duchess said, lifting her chin. "And she dares wear filth like that in front of our guests. I want her gone before the tea is cleared."
Arthur looked at the spreading stain on his wife's hem, then at the maid. He had meant only to smooth the matter over, send the girl to the kitchens, and let the afternoon recover its calm. But as his gaze moved to Clara, it caught on her sleeve.
The cuff was worn nearly to ruin, the threads pulled loose with age, yet beneath the fray, half-hidden, ran a band of embroidery: tiny silver-gray stitches looped and crossed in a pattern of interlocking thorns and a single rising lark.
The work was so fine, so particular, that no ordinary seamstress could have made it. He had seen that pattern before, long ago: on a banner, on a crest, on a signet ring pressed into wax. And the family it belonged to had been disgraced, ruined, and erased from polite society ten years past—accused of fraud, stripped of their name, scattered like ash on the wind: the House of Crestwood.
His breath stilled in his chest. He looked at the maid's bowed head, at her pale face and trembling hands, and a cold thought began to rise in him—a thought too strange, too impossible to speak aloud in a garden full of gossips.
"Your Grace," Beatrice's voice cut through, "did you hear me? I said: send her away."
Arthur did not answer at once. His eyes had not left that frayed silver thread.
"Leave her," he said at last, and his voice was quiet, but something in it made the whole pavilion go still. "I shall deal with this matter myself."
Beatrice stared at him, certain she had misheard.
Clara lifted her eyes for the first time and found the Duke watching her with an expression she could not read at all.
The candles in the Duke's study had burned low by the time Clara was summoned. She stood just inside the door, her hands folded tight before her, while a footman announced her and withdrew.