The Duke saw her hesitation; something like pain crossed his face. He reached into his coat, took out a folded, yellowed letter, and held it out to her.
"My father's last letter to me," he said. "Read the bottom line."
Clara took it with trembling fingers and read it by the faint gray light from the window. When she came to the last line—*A torn page is like a broken promise*—she pressed her hand over her mouth, and tears ran down her dirty cheeks. Those were her father's words, in the old Duke's handwriting.
She looked up at him. "Polly has it," she whispered. "My sister. It is sewn inside her rag doll. Please, she is very ill—she is all alone. Please, Your Grace, find her."
He was already turning toward the door.
"Wait," Clara said. "Please, will you come back?"
The Duke stopped in the doorway and looked back at her for one long moment. "Your father kept his promise to the truth," he said quietly. "I intend to keep mine."
And he was gone.
The boarding house door was opened by Mrs. Crabbe, who took one look at the Duke's fine coat and turned the color of a boiled beetroot.
"The sick girl..." she stammered. "Why, I... that is, she couldn't pay, sir, and I can't have a dying girl in my house! So yesterday I—"
"Where is she?" The Duke's voice was so cold that the landlady stepped backward.
"The church, sir! St. Anne's at the end of the street. They let the poor sleep in the porch."
He found her there, curled up on a cold stone step in the church porch, wrapped in a thin blanket. She was burning with fever, her breath rattling in her chest, but in her arms, held tight against her heart, was a ragged old doll made of blue cloth.
When Henry knelt down beside her, Polly opened her eyes. She looked at him, a stranger in a fine coat, and her arms tightened around the doll.
"You can't have her," she whispered fiercely. "I promised Clara."
The Duke of Ravenshire, who had not cried since his father's funeral, felt his eyes sting.
"I know," he said gently. "Clara sent me. She told me to find you. My name is Henry. I am going to take you somewhere warm and fetch the best doctor in London, and then I am going to bring your sister home."
Polly looked at him for a long time. "You're the Duke," she said. "Clara said you were cold."
"I was," said Henry. "I am trying very hard not to be."
He lifted her in his arms as if she weighed nothing at all—doll, blanket, and everything—and carried her out to his carriage.
That afternoon, in a private room at Drummond's Bank, old Mr. Drummond unlocked a long steel box and lifted the lid. Inside lay a thick bundle of papers tied with a faded red ribbon.