“I would do anything for him,” she said, her speech hoarse with weeping. “Anything. Even this. Even marrying a man who looks at me as though I am an inconvenience he cannot quite manage to dismiss.” She drew a shuddering breath. “I only pray that when Oliver is grown, he will understand. That he will know I did this not out of ambition or desperation, but because I love him. Because I could not bear to lose the last piece of you that remains in this world.”
She remained kneeling for a long while, her tears gradually slowing, the ache in her chest settling into the familiar hollow that had become her constant companion. The churchyard held its peace around her—the ancient stones standing sentinel, the mist curling between them like the ghosts of all who had come before, the distant call of birds marking the passage of time she could not bring herself to track.
At last, she reached up to wipe her eyes with the back of her glove, the wool rough against her tender skin. Her knees protested as she shifted her weight, cramped from the cold and the damp, and she pressed one final kiss to her fingertips before touching them to her sister’s name.
“I must go,” she murmured. “They will notice my absence, and I have no wish to explain where I have been, much less explain why I took a horse without permission. But I will return,Margaret. I will always return. And I will bring Oliver, when he is ready. I will tell him stories of his mother—of how brave she was, how fierce, how utterly unwilling to let the world tell her what she could not have.”
She rose slowly, brushing the grass from her cloak, and turned to face the path that led back to the churchyard gate.
Then she stopped.
Her heart seized in her chest, her breath catching sharply, every muscle in her body going rigid with shock.
Thaddeus Blackwood stood perhaps thirty paces distant, near the iron gate that marked the boundary between the living and the dead. He wore riding clothes rather than his customary immaculate attire—his dark hair windswept and disordered, his jaw shadowed with stubble, his bearing stripped of its usual rigid formality. In his hands, held with a carefulness that seemed utterly at odds with the man she knew him to be, he clutched a spray of wildflowers.
Purple clover and white yarrow. Delicate stems of something she did not recognise, their petals pale as cream. All of it bound together with simple twine, gathered roughly, as though he had picked them himself rather than sending a servant to procure them.
For a suspended moment, neither of them moved.
Maribel became acutely aware of her own dishevelment—her tear-stained cheeks, her mud-dampened cloak, the strands of hair that had escaped their pins and now clung to her temples in wild disarray. She looked precisely like what she was: a woman who had fled before dawn to weep over a grave. And he had witnessed it. He had seen her at her most vulnerable, her most broken, her most raw.
The humiliation of it burned through her, hot and sharp.
“Your Grace.” She forced the words past the tightness in her throat, forced her chin to lift in something approximating dignity. “I had not... I did not anticipate your presence here.”
Thaddeus remained where he stood, his grey eyes unreadable in the thin morning light. The mist curled around his boots, softening the hard lines of his figure, lending him an almost spectral quality.
“Nor I yours.” His tone held none of its usual clipped authority. “Though perhaps I ought to have considered the possibility.”
“I came to visit my sister.”
“Yes.”
The single syllable hung between them, heavy with all the things neither of them knew how to say. Maribel watched him, waiting for the dismissal, the cool instruction to compose herself, thereminder that displays of emotion were unseemly and served no practical purpose.
It did not come.
Instead, Thaddeus took a step forward. Then another. His boots crunched softly against the frost-stiffened grass as he approached, and Maribel found herself rooted to the spot, unable to retreat, unable to advance, caught in the strange pull of a moment she did not understand.
He stopped beside her, close enough that she could see the individual petals of the flowers in his hands, close enough that she caught the scent of horse and leather and something sharper beneath—ink, perhaps, or the remnants of a fire long burned to ash.
“Nicholas,” he said quietly. “I came to pay my respects to Nicholas.”
Maribel’s breath caught.
She thought of what she knew of the bond between them—fragments gleaned from Margaret’s letters, from Oliver’s scattered memories, from the guardianship papers that had bound Thaddeus to a promise made long before tragedy had demanded its fulfilment. Comrades in arms, he had called them once. But the word seemed inadequate for whatever had driven this man to rise before dawn, to gather wildflowers with his own hands, to stand in a fog-shrouded churchyard with grief carved into every line of his face.
“You were close.” It was not a question. She could see the truth of it in his eyes—that winter grey softened by a pain he could not quite conceal.
“He was my brother.” The words emerged rough, scraped raw by emotions Thaddeus clearly had no practice expressing. “Not by blood. By something that ran deeper than blood ever could. We served together in Portugal—two young fools convinced we were immortal, convinced the rules that governed lesser men did not apply to us.” His looked down, avoiding her gaze. “He saved my life when I was too arrogant to recognise the danger I had placed myself in. Took a bayonet wound that should have killed him, bled half to death in my arms whilst I screamed for a surgeon who took too long to arrive.”
Maribel’s chest constricted. She had not known. Margaret had never spoken of it—had perhaps never known herself, for Nicholas had not been the sort of man to burden others with tales of his own heroism.
“I owed him a debt beyond repaying,” Thaddeus continued, his gaze fixed on the paired headstones before them. “I swore to him, when he recovered, that if ever he had need of me—if ever there was anything within my power to give—he had only to ask.” A muscle leapt in his cheek. “And then he married and he asked me to watch over his son, should the worst ever happen. I gave him my word without hesitation. And now...”
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
Maribel watched as he moved past her, crossing the remaining distance to the grave with slow, deliberate steps. He knelt upon the same patch of earth where she had knelt moments before, heedless of the damp that would stain his riding breeches, and placed the wildflowers at the base of Nicholas’s headstone with a gentleness that stole her breath.
