Page 97 of The Duke

“If my Lord Chancellor gives me leave, I would read this evil letter aloud.”

The noise from the public was growing louder, and the lords themselves were unsettled, half seated, half standing.

“May I remind my noble friends,” came the harried voice of Lord Pecke, “that this isnotthe matter under discussion! My Lord Chancellor, we are debating the—”

“But how may My Lords properly pass judgement on the bill in question,” Lord Wroth said, “if they do not fully understand the character of one whom it concerns?”

Lord Pecke’s objection found no support, naturally. Everyone present wished to hear the contents of that letter. There was now no possibility of its being passed into private committee to be read and considered.

“Lord Wroth, you may proceed.”

Just before he thumbed open the seal, Lord Wroth looked up and met her eye. Markham had been right. Kate did her best to show Lord Wroth nothing that would satisfy him.

In the corner of her eye she saw, passing through the spectators from the back, white sheets of paper. A pamphlet. In a detached sort of way, she realised that was the source of the growing noise in the crowd: not the proceedings on the floor, of such existential importance to her, but something from outside, intruding. She caught a glimpse of Markham, pushing her way through and trying to make her ruined voice heard.

But Kate’s attention was fixed on Lord Wroth, who had opened the letter.

“My friend,” he read aloud, his powerful voice carrying, full of satisfaction, “for such I consider you. Will you blush when I tell you it was not the dream of my girlhood to sell my body for… money…”

He broke off as jeers and guffaws filled the chamber.Read it, read it!It was a few voices at first, and then hundreds.Read it!Kate’s ears were ringing.

What…What had Lord Wroth just read?Before the lords and hundreds of public citizens? That was not what she had written to Bastien. It was not her letter.

“Duke. Duke!” It was Shaw’s urgent voice, and he was shoving something into her hands, a piece of white paper. A pamphlet. “Duke, read this. My God.My God.”

It seemed to take an age for her mind to make sense of what her eyes were seeing, even as phrases were already being shoutedacross the chamber, and the lords in their benches were receiving the pamphlets that had by now flooded the room.

Confessions of a Public Woman, read the bold heading. The first paragraph began, conversationally,My friend, for such I consider you. Will you blush when I tell you it was not the dream of my girlhood to sell my body for money? No idea could have been further from the mind of that small child you see squatting in the dirt, watching a man peel an orange…

She scanned the pages of tiny, dense type, her mind spinning. It was Celine’s life, every difficult and true detail, laid out for all London to read. The poor village. The oranges. The sadistic clockmaker. The parties. The fucking. The guillotine. The spoiled well.

The only omission was their first night together, and the only falsehood came at the end—when Celine claimed that she had represented herself to the Duke of Howard as the daughter of an old friend; that she had represented herself to Lord Seaton as a distant cousin; that she, fleeing revolutionary violence and desperate to live by any means, had perpetuated such crimes against these gentle nobles because she had been coerced into doing so by the Earl of Wroth.

The ground went out from under Kate.

She had handed her heart to Celine and thought Celine had destroyed it. She hadexpectedCeline to destroy it. That was what love did. But Celine had held Kate safe between her neat, square hands, and destroyed herself instead.