They Mocked Her When Her Groom Arrived In A Farmer's Cart — He Was The Duke In Disguise
Chapter 24
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She did not go to him that night, but she left her window unlatched—some small unspoken invitation she was not yet ready to voice aloud—and slept for the first time since the ball without the ring pressed cold and accusing against her palm.News of Victor Holloway's circumstances arrived not long after, carried on the same swift currents of gossip that had once carried word of the farmer's cart wedding across every drawing room in London.Victor's banking fortune, it emerged in careful whispers among men who understood such matters, was not the solid inheritance London society had always assumed. A string of poor investments concealed behind an increasingly precarious web of borrowed credit had left the Holloway name balanced on considerably thinner ice than anyone outside a small circle of solicitors yet realized.His only remaining hope of solvency, it was quietly said, rested on securing investment from one of the few great fortunes in England still untouched by the recent economic turbulence—a fortune controlled, as it happened, entirely by His Grace, the Duke of Thornwick.Victor Holloway, without yet knowing it, had spent months mocking the very man who now held his entire future in one calm, unhurried hand.The Royal Investment Banquet gathered London's wealthiest families beneath a single roof to celebrate the coming year's charitable and commercial ventures: long tables gleamed with silver plate and hothouse fruit stacked in careful pyramids; above the assembled guests hung banners bearing the crests of England's oldest banking houses, each one competing quietly with its neighbors for the appearance of greater permanence and greater wealth.Victor Holloway arrived that evening with the confidence of a man who believed his troubles were about to be quietly resolved. He had arranged through careful back-door correspondence an introduction to the mysterious northern investor whose fortune had lately become the subject of hushed admiration among London's financiers—a man known only in the circles that mattered to Victor as the Duke of Thornwick. He did not yet know the two names belonged to the same face.Matilda arrived at Callum's side that evening in a gown of deep wine-colored silk, chosen at last by a woman who no longer felt the need to shrink from any room she entered. She had not fully forgiven her husband; the wound of his deception still ached somewhere beneath her ribs. But she had come to understand, slowly and painfully, that the man who had held her through the rainstorm, who had learned her tea before she asked for it, who had kissed her beneath the moonlight as though she were the only truth he had ever needed, had never once been a lie.She stood beside him now, not because her anger had vanished, but because her love had proven stronger than it.The Royal Chamberlain entered the hall precisely as the evening's toasts were set to begin, his staff striking the marble floor three times in the old formal manner that silenced every conversation in the room.