The Duke’s Guests Laughed as the Maid Fell Into the Lake — She Said, “I’ll Remember Every Face”
Chapter 30
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And for the first time since she had walked through the gates of Ravensworth, Clara Doyle laughed.As she walked back up the aisle on the Duke's arm, past all the rows of silent, staring guests, she looked at their faces one more time: Henry Faraday, Lavinia Price, Sir Walter Bigg, the Misses Clarendon. Not one of them could meet her eyes.One year later, on a bright June morning, Ravensworth Church was full of white roses once again. But a great deal had changed in that year.Lord Edmund Vane had stood trial at the Old Bailey in London. The newspapers called it the trial of the century. Every day, crowds gathered outside the courthouse, pushing and shouting to get a look at the silver-haired lord who had murdered his best friend. Silas Crane testified for three days. Ned Turner stood in the witness box with a bandage still on his head, held up his crooked fingers, and told the court what had been done to him 15 years before. And a young woman with serious dark eyes described a lantern in a stable, a knife, and a man in a gray coat with silver buttons.The jury took less than an hour. Lord Vane escaped the hangman only because of his great age; instead, the judge sentenced him to transportation for life to Australia—the same terrible voyage he had once sent an innocent man to make in his place. The newspapers said he wept like a child when he heard the sentence. Nobody felt sorry for him. Silas Crane went with him on the same ship, in the same chains.Lady Cordelia was quietly sent away by her relatives to Scotland, where she was married to a very old, very strict laird who lived on a cold, windy island with no balls, no parties, and no lakes to push anyone into. Nobody in London ever heard much about her again.Mrs. Pratt was dismissed without a reference. The last anyone heard, she was scrubbing floors in a boarding house in Manchester on her knees.And on the front page of every newspaper in England, in large black letters, the truth had been printed at last: John Doyle was innocent.On the morning of her wedding, Clara stood alone at the window of her bedroom at Ravensworth Hall in a gown of soft ivory silk, and she was not completely happy. She looked down at the stable yard where she had once ridden an old gray mare round and round, laughing while her father watched.The Duke had kept his promise. He had written to every governor in every prison and every church in Australia; for a whole year, his men had searched. In the spring, the final letter had come: there was no record of John Doyle anywhere after the fever ship. None at all.Clara had cried that night until morning. Then she had dried her eyes and told herself that she must accept it. Her father's name was clean; that was what mattered. That was what he would have wanted. But today, of all days, she missed him so much that it hurt to breathe.