'Miss Scarlet and the Duke' Recap: Season 3 Episode 2

Miss Scarlet and the Duke airs Sundays at 7:00 pm and is available to stream. Recap the previous and following episodes.
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You’d think Eliza would be sympathetic to Arabella Acaster, another woman trying to run a business in a world that finds the idea ridiculous. But the two women have some unhappy history: they were at school together, where Arabella was cruel to Eliza, who believes Arabella stole a shell necklace from her back then. Even worse, William finds Arabella charming when he and Eliza dine at Arabella’s restaurant, posing as a married couple in order to look for wrongdoing because several people have recently been robbed of jewelry near the restaurant.

So of course Eliza thinks Arabella is involved with the crimes, especially after she herself becomes a victim. As she and William leave the restaurant, a lavender seller calls out that a boy is taking her purse. William takes off in pursuit, then a man brandishes a knife at Eliza and takes her brooch despite her resistance before fleeing. William returns, having lost both the woman and the boy—they were probably in on the robbery of Eliza, as a distraction.

Arabella escorts Eliza home as William heads to Scotland Yard, then stays for a cup of tea and endears herself to Ivy by complimenting her cake while Eliza sulks. (Back in school, Eliza nearly burned the kitchen down trying to learn to bake a Victoria sponge.) When Ivy realizes that Arabella was Eliza’s youthful tormentor from a comment about the fancy gems her jeweler father gave her in school, she’s pleasantly surprised at Arabella’s change for the better. 

But Eliza still believes Arabella is involved in the jewel thefts, especially after she and William track down the man who robbed her. William has found the boy who “robbed” the lavender seller at a boardinghouse near the restaurant, and he admitted that he and the woman were hired to cause a distraction. He sends William to a tavern frequented by the thief, a Hungarian man named Tibor. 

As William and Fitzroy ask the bartender about Tibor, the thief himself sneaks out. Eliza, forced to wait in the carriage, recognizes him and slams the carriage door in his face, knocking him to the ground to be arrested by William. Tibor is carrying one of Arabella’s business cards, with “lady blue dress spilla” written on it, presumably referring to Eliza. Eliza is convinced of Arabella’s guilt, but William tells her to take a step back from the case; she has a conflict of interest clouding her judgment.

Tibor claims to have found the card on the ground, but when William threatens to extradite him to a notorious Hungarian prison, he admits that a waiter in the restaurant, Enzo, gave it to him. When William and Fitzroy arrive at Arabella’s restaurant to ask after Enzo, they find Eliza already there, also suspecting Enzo—she looked up “spilla” in her dictionaries and learned it was Italian for “brooch,” then recalled that the waiter who served her and William at Arabella’s was Italian. 

But Enzo’s not at the restaurant; he has called off sick. Arabella has no address for him since he’s a relatively new hire. 

She’ll soon be hiring more people, she tells Eliza, outlining plans for expansion given the restaurant’s success. And yet Eliza saw her firing a worker, Grace, who tells Eliza after she buys her a drink that Arabella has had to lay off several employees due to financial struggles. But Grace did see Arabella put a large wad of cash into her safe, so she must have secured a loan.

Eliza visits Arabella’s mother—Arabella moved in after her husband died—and pretends to be well-connected in order to learn more. Arabella’s husband left her with debts, and her mother is scandalized that Arabella is trying to run a business, so she won’t lend her money. Arabella, like Eliza, tried to secure a loan, but every bank rejected her. 

Meanwhile, William questions Arabella’s staff about Enzo but learns nothing. Arabella and he enjoy each other’s company, however, and she admits that she was hoping to renew her friendship with Eliza, but it seems that Eliza isn’t interested.

She’s right—Eliza follows Arabella to a slum, looking for evidence of guilt, and sees her talk to the lavender seller who pretended to be robbed. Eliza sends for William, and when he arrives shows him the building Arabella and the woman entered. Inside, she finds Arabella serving leftover food from her restaurant to the poor. She and the lavender seller don’t know each other; the woman just wanted a meal. 

Confronted with what Grace told Eliza, Arabella admits that she lied about the success of her restaurant out of pride. The wad of money was simply a night’s earnings, and it immediately went to cover expenses. Nevertheless, Eliza gets angry and tells Arabella in front of William that she suspects her because of the bad character she showed during their school days.

Eliza returns home, chastened by William and her outburst, and tries to bake a Victoria sponge. She admits to Ivy that she would pick fights with Arabella as a girl; it wasn’t all Arabella’s fault. Eliza decides to go apologize to her old nemesis.

While waiting in Arabella’s office for her to arrive, Eliza can’t help herself from picking the lock on Arabella’s safe and looking inside. She finds jewelry, and pockets a pawnshop receipt. When Arabella enters, Eliza has disappeared. 

But William and Fitzroy have recovered the stolen jewelry, and not from Arabella. Fitzroy has discovered Enzo has an uncle who fled back to Italy from London while being investigated for theft, but the jewelers’ workshop he used seems to once again be active. When William and Fitzroy visit, they find it empty of people and full of stolen jewelry. 

William returns Eliza’s brooch to her, and she gives him Arabella’s pawnshop receipts—she still thinks Arabella has committed a crime. William questions the pawnbroker, who wouldn’t talk to Eliza, and learns that all of the items Arabella sold were accounted for as hers with documentation, even though some of the pieces are similar to those that Eliza saw in Arabella’s safe. 

In their continuing search for Enzo, Fitzroy and William visit a jeweler for whom his uncle once worked and see Eliza’s brooch—which William just returned to her—in the window. They break in and realize that the jeweler has been selling glass fakes of the jewelry stolen by Enzo, so that they can sell the same piece several times. 

Eliza comes to the same conclusion when she notices the “gems” come off her brooch easily. Her new associate, the antiquities trader Solomon, confirms it’s a fake. 

Eliza confronts Arabella at her restaurant, and sees Grace—the fired employee—with a heavy bag. It’s full of jewels. Grace was in a relationship with Enzo; he came to her and said he was in trouble and needed money. If she didn’t help him, he would hurt Arabella’s mother. And indeed, he is at Arabella’s mother’s house, threatening her with a knife. But Eliza has tipped off William, who arrests Enzo.

Arabella explains that Enzo learned about her financial struggles and told her to sell her jewels. She needs to appear well-off to her customers, so he suggested she have glass replicas of the pieces made before selling them. She didn’t know about his criminal activity. William won’t charge her.

Arabella also explains to Eliza that she was cruel to her in school because she was jealous that Eliza’s father encouraged her interests rather than neglecting her, as her own father did. Arabella offers the necklace she stole from Eliza as a girl as a peace offering, and asks her to dinner.

Eliza is ready to say yes, but then demurs, perhaps made jealous by William’s attention to Arabella and her more traditional feminine charms. Ivy has successfully taught Eliza to bake a Victoria sponge that she has triumphantly brought to William, but it was quickly upstaged by an assortment of treats from Arabella brought to William and his men in thanks for saving her mother and solving the crimes around her restaurant. Envy still colors Eliza’s relationship with Arabella.