“You are cold, and proud, and utterly insufferable.”
“Accurate.”
She stared at him. He stared back. And somewhere in the impossible space between them, something shifted—something neither of them would acknowledge, much less name.
“Very well,” Lady Maribel said at last. “I will marry you, Your Grace. For Oliver’s sake.”
Thaddeus inclined his head, ignoring the way his chest had tightened at her words. “For Oliver’s sake.”
“This changes nothing between us.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
The door remained ajar. The candles guttered in their sconces. And outside, the whispers had already begun—rippling outward through the glittering company like poison through water, unstoppable and absolute.
But Thaddeus found, to his considerable surprise, that he did not care.
Lady Maribel Ashcroft would become his duchess.
CHAPTER 4
“Ihave made such a mess of things, Margaret.”
The words hung in the grey morning air, dissolving into the mist that clung to the churchyard like gauze wrapped around old wounds. Maribel knelt upon the cold earth before her sister’s grave, the damp seeping through her worn wool cloak, her gloved fingers pressed flat against the carved letters of the name she could no longer speak without her throat closing and tears welling up.
Margaret Elizabeth Talbot, Beloved Wife and Mother.
The inscription told the world nothing of consequence. Nothing of the way Margaret had laughed—that full, unguarded sound that had scandalised their mother and delighted their father in the years before disgrace had hollowed him into a stranger. Nothing of the fierce light in her eyes when she had announced her intention to marry Nicholas Talbot, of her desperation to protect her husband from the stench of her father’s name. Nothing of the tender way she had held Oliver in those firsthours after his birth, tears streaming down her cheeks as she whispered promises Maribel had thought would last forever.
Forever.What a fool’s word that had proven to be.
“I am to become the Duchess of Blackwood.” Maribel heard the tremor in her own speech and pressed her lips together until it steadied. “Can you imagine? Your stubborn, sharp-tongued little sister, married to a duke. Mother would have been beside herself with triumph—though I suspect even she might have baulked at the circumstances.”
“He proposed in a library,” she continued, her breath misting in the cold air. “After a scandal. After Lady Forsythe and her coven of gossips discovered us alone together, standing too close, arguing too fiercely about matters that were none of their concern. He did not ask, Margaret. Heinformed. As though my consent were a mere formality to be dispensed with before moving on to more pressing business.”
She thought of the expression on Thaddeus’s face in that moment—the hard set of his jaw, the determination in his eyes, the absolute certainty with which he had delivered his verdict.We will marry. Tomorrow, if it can be arranged.
Not a question. Not a request. A statement of fact, as immutable as the stone beneath her fingers.
“The infuriating thing,” Maribel said quietly, “is that he was right. There was no other choice—not if I wished to remain in Oliver’s life, not if I wished to protect him from the crueltyof a society that delights in punishing children for the sins of their elders.” Her jaw tightened. “And so I said yes. What else could I say? What else could I do, when the alternative was watching your son become fodder for drawing-room whispers and ballroom sneers?”
The mist had begun to thin, pale shafts of morning light piercing through the grey to illuminate the weathered headstones scattered across the churchyard grounds. Maribel watched the patterns shift and change, light chasing shadow across the carved names of the dead, and thought of all the mornings she would never share with her sister again.
“I do not trust him.” The admission tasted bitter on her tongue. “I have tried, Margaret. I have watched him with Oliver—watched him attempt to offer comfort and falter at the last moment, watched him retreat into schedules and rules when what that child needs is a pair of arms around him and a promise that he is not alone. He is not cruel. I will grant him that much. But he is...”
She searched for the word and found only inadequate substitutes.Closed. Guarded. Armoured against the world in ways I cannot fathom.
“He is a man who has forgotten how to feel,” she said at last. “Or perhaps he never learned. And now I am to bind myself to him for the rest of my days, share his name and his home and his life, and I cannot shake the fear that I am making the most catastrophic mistake of my existence.”
A gust of wind stirred the branches overhead, sending a shower of yellowed leaves drifting down around her. One landed on the grave, bright against the grey stone, and Maribel reached out to brush it gently aside.
“Do you remember what you told me, the night before your wedding?” Her throat constricted around the memory. “You said that love was worth any price. That you would rather have one year of true happiness with Nicholas than fifty years of comfortable emptiness with any other man.” She laughed, though the sound held no warmth. “I thought you were being dramatic. I thought you were young and foolish and drunk on romance. But you were right, were you not? You had four years of genuine joy, and I...”
The tears came without warning, hot and silent, sliding down her cheeks to drip onto the cold ground below. Maribel did not wipe them away. Here, in this quiet place where no living soul could witness, she permitted herself the grief she had held at bay for three long months.
“I have nothing,” she whispered. “No family left save Oliver. No prospects save this arrangement. No future save the one being dictated to me by a man who sees marriage as a solution to a problem rather than a beginning of any kind.” She pressed her palm harder against the stone, as though she might somehow reach through it to clasp her sister’s hand one final time. “I feel as though I am betraying everything you believed in. Everything you fought for. You chose love over duty, and I am choosing duty over... over everything else.”
The wind stirred again, gentler this time, and Maribel imagined she could hear Margaret’s voice in its whisper.You are not betraying me, you ridiculous creature. You are protecting my son. What could be more important than that?
