His Fiancée Ripped Her Necklace Off at the Ball—The Duke Saw the Royal Seal Inside

"His Fiancée Ripped Her Necklace Off at the Ball, The Duke Saw the Royal Seal Inside" | Regency Romance Audiobook Letitia Bowyer makes cord. Fringe, tassels, bell-pulls, the crimson silk that holds up the curtains in great houses, plaited five strands over a linen core exactly as her father's shop plaited it for sixty years. She comes to Wenbury Chase on a carrier's cart with a deal box on her knees and a girl of sixteen beside her, and she is told at the door to go round. She goes round. She has expected to go round. The Duke of Wenbury is to be married in five weeks to a handsome, clever, faultlessly composed woman who knows to a shilling what everything in a room has cost, and Letitia has come to do the trimmings for the betrothal ball and then go home. At her throat she wears a small brass locket with a disc of red wax inside it, the seal off a letter to her dead father, and she has been told since she was eleven that it came to nothing. A seal without its paper proves nothing at all. That is why she wears it openly. Then, at the ball, in front of two hundred people, the Duke's betrothed crosses the entire length of the room, closes one gloved hand on the cord at Letitia's throat, and pulls. The locket comes open in her fist. And a crown, a garter, and a quartered shield swing out into the light of eleven hundred candles. What follows is not a scream and not a scene. It is a sworn charge of theft, a very old man who walks nineteen miles to say what he has been ashamed of for nineteen years, and a Crown lease that must be renewed in November before a surveyor who reads his own papers aloud. Letitia will ask the Duke for one thing only, and it will not be rescue. Everybody in that room will look at the wax. She will be looking at the plait.