“I will not stop until I avenge you, no matter how many men must mistakenly die!” the duke shouted.
“Duke, truly, I fell off the roof. I was attempting to see you in the bath.”
“See me in the bath? No governess tries to see a duke in a bath!”
“But you see, I was hoping I might view…your missing eye.”
“But how? It is missing!”
“Well, I wished to see if I could live with it missing.”
“I see! At least, I see out of one eye! Did you view it, my gentle governess?”
“Um no, you were facing the wrong way.”
“The wrong way? So you would have only viewed my…”
“Yes, I did view that. And then fell into the bushes from the shock of it.”
“You must view my missing eye now. It is very terrible, but I must show you and then you will know!” the duke cried.
“I am ready.”
The duke slowly removed his eye patch. The gentle governess braced herself for the horror she was to view.
Surprisingly, the only thing the gentle governess saw was a perfectly good eye blinking back at her.
“But Duke! It is just an eye!”
“No, the eye is gone!”
“To the looking glass, Duke, it is not gone.”
The duke raced to a looking glass. “My eye. How did I all along think it was gone?”
“You are not missing an eye. Duke, you are mad!”
“Mad? I suppose I am! Gentle governess, can you live with a madman?”
Miss Mayton closed the book. “So now the question is, can the gentle governess live with a madman?”
“He had his eye all along,” Cordelia said happily. “Well, I am pleased.”
“The poor gentle governess was thinking so much about the missing eye that she did not notice the duke was mad,” Viola said.
“I really am on tenterhooks about how the whole thing will turn out—so many twists and turns,” the earl said.
Beatrice thought Lord Dunston, Lord Jericho, Mr. Cahill, and Sir William looked less on tenterhooks and more stunned. Van Doren only sat shaking his head.
“That certainly was a twist and turn,” Mr. Cahill said. “A mad duke…”
“Dukes are no more exempt from the malady than anybody else, I suppose,” Van Doren said.
“Yes, but for him to imagine he’d lost an eye when it was there all along?” Sir William asked.
Van Doren stared at him and said, “Perhaps he was led astray somehow. He was led to believe a thing that never was.”
Beatrice could feel them all growing uncomfortable in the idea that Van Doren was hinting about their ruse to draw out the tortured gentleman.
