'Miss Scarlet and the Duke' Recap: Season 2 Episode 6

Miss Scarlet and the Duke is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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William is leaving for Glasgow at the end of the week to take a promotion he was forced into in order to keep his job. He and Eliza both rehearse goodbye speeches they will give to each other at one final dinner at Eliza’s home. But of course things don’t go as planned.

Patrick Nash, Eliza’s rival detective, again offers to hire her—this time with a better deal. He has already been sending surplus cases her way and taking a finder’s fee, but he wants to formalize the arrangement, especially now that Eliza is losing her connection at Scotland Yard, William.

Ivy thinks Eliza should work with Nash, but Eliza unsurprisingly rejects him again. His offer is at the back of her mind when she meets with William, however. After giving William some embroidered handkerchiefs as a parting gift, she decides that she can save him from leaving London: she’ll offer him a job. William is insulted—shocker! They fight, he leaves, and he throws the handkerchiefs in his office's trash can the next day.

Eliza finds a surprise in her office: Mrs. Parker. (Hattie has a key to Eliza’s office, Eliza now learns.) Eliza tells her that Hattie wants to marry for love, not someone her aunt chooses, and Mrs. Parker explains that she once thought she wanted freedom from marrying out of need, having not taken another husband after her husband’s death. But now that she is aging, she is alone, and needs Hattie to set up a household in her home with her to keep her company and in care. She must think of her future.

Eliza takes Mrs. Parker’s warning to heart, and goes to meet Nash to tell him she will take one of his cases, as a trial run of their arrangement. As they agree on the deal outside Nash’s office, someone shoots at them and hits Nash three times in the leg. In the hospital, Nash asks Eliza to find out who shot him: he trusts her more than his own employees.

Both Nash and Eliza got a glimpse of the shooter: he was tall, wearing a green coat, and he glanced at something, perhaps a photo, before shooting. The bullets came from an antiquated gun, as Eliza learns by swiping one from Fitzroy.

Fitzroy is in charge of the case, and Munro has ordered William to help him in the investigation before he leaves. He’s already struggling: his whole team has abandoned him for the pub. William encounters another annoyance when Potts appears and asks him for help dealing with Eliza, now that Potts is romantically interested in Ivy. Potts does at least prove helpful when he informs William and Fitzroy that a corpse killed by a similar antiquated bullet has just arrived in the morgue.

He was tall, and wearing a green coat. His name was Isaac Marshall, and he just got out of jail after a decade there. He moved into a violent slum after his release.

Eliza has also learned this about Nash’s attacker, independently. Moses brought her to a kooky trader of oddities, who admitted with the help of a bribe that he just sold some antiquated bullets to Marshall. Moses warns Eliza not to go to the slum where Marshall lived alone, but she of course ignores him and is nearly robbed—but Moses appears and fires a gun, scaring off the would-be bandits.

Moses and Eliza find a photo of Eliza in Marshall’s rooms. She was his target, not Nash.

Moses again sends Eliza to stay with the prostitute Clementine for safety. He also steals the police files on Marshall, leaving Fitzroy and William to examine the carbon copies. They all realize the same thing: Marshall was cellmates with Joseph Simms, the man Eliza poisoned and prevented from getting an inheritance in her very first case. Simms was just released after a year’s hard labor.

William tells Fitzroy he’s taking over the case, but Fitzroy, having finally internalized William’s advice to stand up for himself, refuses to let him—until William explains that Fitzroy is the real reason he’s leaving London. He makes Fitzroy wait at Eliza’s office.

Both William and Moses go to take Ivy away from Eliza’s home, lest Simms attack it. Moses sent a telegram for William to Eliza’s office, thinking he would be there, but Fitzroy received it instead—and decided to confront Simms in the slum. Simms isn’t threatened by Fitzroy and shoots him in the arm, just as William appears. Simms flees.

He heads to Eliza’s office, where Clementine is waiting, sent by Eliza to find William. Simms tells her he’s William and thus learns where Eliza is hiding. As he points a gun at Eliza, she tries to delay him by paying him off. He collapses: she poisoned the money. Clementine knows what William looks like; Eliza told her to send Simms her way. Simms is arrested.

With the case closed and Eliza safe, William again says goodbye to Eliza, and this time both he and she get through their rehearsed speeches. He returns to pack up his office—he retrieved the handkerchiefs from the trash—as he is leaving that night.

Eliza has an engagement in the evening, too: Hattie has acquiesced to her aunt and is engaged to a man she’s never met, and she is having an engagement party that evening.

Before attending, Eliza tries to return her fee to Nash, since she is the reason he was shot. But he refuses; Eliza makes him want to use less underhanded tactics. She can keep the money as a down payment for their next case together.

Eliza then heads to the party, along with Ivy and Potts. But when the clock strikes nine, an hour before William’s train leaves, she sets off to find him.

He’s already looking for her. The commissioner has tried to blame William for Fitzroy’s gunshot wound, but William has stood up to him and blamed the commissioner for pushing Fitzroy too hard. The young man himself appeared and defended William, telling his father that he would resign if William was sent away. The commissioner didn’t care—until Fitzroy revealed that the entire station would join him. He had organized a vote, and it’s unanimous: if William is forced out, they’ll all leave. The commissioner backed down; William gets to stay in London.

Eliza and William finally find each other outside her office—she has cried in her carriage, having found his office empty. She has something to say to William—but it is interrupted by first his news that he is staying in London and then by the arrival of Potts and Ivy, who went searching for Eliza when they realized she had left Hattie’s party.

As Ivy and Potts head into the office for a game of charades, Eliza tells William she’ll reveal what she was going to say to him tomorrow—but he knows she won’t. They both go inside to play a game they hate with a man neither loves.