The fire crackled in its grate, casting dancing shadows across walls lined with leather-bound volumes that had witnessed every Ravensleigh failure since the sixteenth century. Somewhere in this room stood the journal where his father had recorded his mother’s death—the stark, brutal entries of a man watching his beloved waste away while medicine offered nothing but platitudes and bloodletting. Edmund had read those pages once, years ago, and never opened the volume again. The anguish in his father’s careful handwriting had been unbearable.
Better not to feel at all than to feel that deeply.
Except Isadora was making it impossible not to feel. She moved through his carefully ordered household like summer wind through winter barley, disrupting everything she touched and leaving chaos in her wake. The servants smiled when she passed now—actually smiled, as though her presence gave them permission to experience something beyond nervous efficiency. Mrs. Pemberton had begun humming while she worked, soft melodies that drifted through corridors like ghosts of the house his mother had kept.
And Lillian—heaven help him, Lillian had started asking questions again. Real questions, not the careful inquiries designed to avoid his disapproval. Yesterday at breakfast she’d challenged his assertion that young ladies had no need for understanding political economy, citing Mary Wollstonecraft with the sort of passionate conviction that reminded him painfully of James.
He should have been furious. Instead, he’d felt something uncomfortably close to pride.
This was untenable. All of it. He’d married Isadora to solve a problem—to provide Lillian with appropriate female guidance while maintaining the rigid control that had kept him functional for ten years. But she wasn’t solving anything. She was creating new complications faster than he could contain them, forcing him to examine failures he’d been carefully avoiding since James’s blood had stained his hands.
The note from Lord Fairfax sat on his desk, innocent cream paper bearing an invitation that felt more like a summons. Christmas dinner with Yorkshire’s minor nobility, the sort of social obligation Edmund had been declining for years. But Fairfax had been pointed in his phrasing: The neighborhood would be honored to welcome your new duchess. Surely even you cannot decline the season’s festivities indefinitely.
The implication was clear. Edmund’s isolation might be tolerated for a hermit duke, but a married man had obligations. Social responsibilities. The duty to present his household as something approaching normal rather than the Gothic nightmare of whispers and speculation.
And underneath that polite insistence lay darker currents. Whispers about Lillian had intensified since his marriage—questions about why the Dangerous Duke had suddenly acquired both a ward and a wife within months of each other. Speculation about the girl’s parentage that came uncomfortably close to truth. The sort of gossip that could destroy whateverchances Lillian had for decent marriage prospects when she came of age.
He needed to control the narrative. Needed to present himself as reformed rather than dangerous, his household as respectable rather than scandalous. Needed society to believe the Duke of Rothwell had transformed from isolated recluse into devoted family man.
The problem was that none of it was true. And the only person who could make it appear true was his wife.
Edmund rose from behind his desk, pacing the length of his study with movements sharp enough to betray the agitation he couldn’t quite suppress. Outside, wind rattled windowpanes, driving snow against glass with the persistence of ocean waves. The storm would worsen before it cleared—he could feel it in the pressure building behind his eyes, the peculiar stillness that preceded Yorkshire’s worst weather.
They’d be trapped here together. Him and Isadora and Lillian and the entire household, sealed in by snow and forced into proximity that Edmund had spent years carefully avoiding.
Unless he accepted Fairfax’s invitation. Unless he used the dinner as opportunity to reshape how the neighborhood saw him. Unless he asked his wife to pretend devotion she didn’t feel for the sake of protecting a girl she barely knew.
What choice did he have? Lillian’s future depended on his reputation, and his reputation was currently somewherebetween “dangerous eccentric” and “possible murderer who got away with killing his best friend.” If he wanted society to accept his ward, he needed to become someone they could trust. Someone worthy of raising James’s daughter.
Someone he’d never been and had no idea how to become.
Edmund stopped before the portrait of his mother that hung opposite the fireplace. She gazed down at him with painted eyes that held warmth he could barely remember—had it really been eighteen years since her death? Sometimes it felt like yesterday. Sometimes like centuries ago, a different life lived by a different man who’d believed the world might be kind if you approached it honestly.
That man had died in a field outside London, kneeling in wet grass while James’s life bled away beneath his useless hands.
“What would you do?” he asked the portrait quietly. “How did you manage Father when his grief threatened to consume him? How did you reach him when he’d armored himself in duty and distance?”
The painted face offered no answers, but Edmund could imagine what she might say. His mother had possessed a talent for seeing through masculine bluster to the fear beneath. She would have told him to stop being a coward. To ask his wife for help instead of demanding it. To trust that Isadora’s strength was genuine rather than performance designed to manipulate him.
But trusting people had consequences Edmund couldn’t afford. The last time he’d trusted someone completely, James had died. The last time he’d allowed himself to care without reservation, he’d ended up scarred and isolated and branded dangerous by everyone who mattered.
Better to maintain distance. Better to keep Isadora at arm’s length where she couldn’t witness the full extent of his inadequacy. Better to treat this marriage as the business arrangement it was rather than allowing foolish hope to take root.
Except he’d watched her comfort Lillian in that frozen garden. Had seen the way she’d wrapped arms around his ward and offered the exact sort of maternal warmth he’d been incapable of providing. And something in his chest had cracked at the sight—some wall he’d built carefully around whatever remained of his capacity for tenderness.
She was getting too close. Making him want things he had no business wanting. Making him imagine futures where Rothwell Abbey felt like a home rather than a mausoleum.
Making him hope, which was the most dangerous thing of all.
Edmund checked his pocket watch—half past nine. Late, but not unconscionably so. Isadora would likely still be awake, perhaps reading in her chambers or playing that damned pianoforte that made him remember his mother’s hands moving across ivory keys while his father watched with an expression of suchprofound contentment that young Edmund had understood what love looked like.
He should send a note requesting her presence in the morning. He should approach this conversation with the formal distance that characterized all their interactions. He should absolutely not go to her private chambers this late in the evening, when propriety demanded he keep appropriate distance from a wife he barely knew.
But Edmund had never been particularly good at doing what he should. It was one of his more consistent failures.
He found himself in the corridor before conscious decision had been made, boots silent on carpet runners decorated with Christmas greenery that Mrs. Pemberton had arranged with her newfound enthusiasm. Candles burned in wall sconces, their flames dancing behind glass chimneys, casting shadows that transformed familiar passages into something almost mysterious.
The house felt different at night. Less oppressive, perhaps. Or maybe Isadora’s presence had already begun working transformation he was too stubborn to acknowledge.
