His hands lingered there, pressed flat against the cold ground, and she saw his shoulders bow beneath a weight she had not known he carried.
When he spoke again, his words were not addressed to her.
“I am doing my best, Nicholas.” So quiet she barely caught it. “I know it is not enough. I know I am failing in ways you would never have failed. But I am trying. For Oliver. For—” He stopped. Drew a breath that shuddered visibly through his frame. “For all of it.”
He remained there for what felt like an eternity—head bowed, hands pressed to the earth, the mist curling around him like a shroud. Maribel stood frozen, uncertain whether to speak or to flee, caught between the urge to offer comfort and the certainty that he would reject it.
At last, he rose.
His movements were stiff, his face entirely blank when he turned to face her. But his eyes—those winter-grey eyes that she had thought incapable of warmth—held a rawness that made her throat ache with unexpected sympathy.
“The wedding will take place in two days.” His tone had recovered some of its customary flatness, though the effort it cost him showed in the tension around his mouth. “I have made the necessary arrangements. It will be a small ceremony—private—with only the essential witnesses present. Lady Eleanor has consented to attend, and Julian will stand for me.”
“Two days,” Maribel repeated. The words felt foreign, unreal, as though they belonged to a language she had not yet learned to speak.
“There is no purpose in delay. The gossip spreads as we stand here, and every hour we wait grants it further purchase.” He clasped his hands behind his back—that familiar gesture of self-containment, of armour donned against the world. “I will send the carriage for you within the hour. There are practical matters to discuss. Settlements. Arrangements. The particulars of your new position.”
Hernew position. As though she were being hired for a post rather than bound in matrimony.
She ought to have bristled at the phrasing. She ought to have offered some sharp retort, some reminder that she was not a servant to be assigned duties at his convenience.
But the image of him kneeling on the cold ground, his hands pressed to Nicholas’s grave, his shoulders bowed beneath the weight of a grief he had no notion how to bear—it would not leave her. It had cracked open something in her understanding,revealed a fault line in the bedrock of her assumptions, and she could not quite find her way back to solid ground.
“Very well,” she heard herself say. “I shall be ready.”
Thaddeus inclined his head, a gesture of acknowledgement that fell short of gratitude. He turned away, his boots crunching against the frost-stiffened grass, his figure cutting a solitary path through the dissipating mist.
Then he stopped.
Maribel’s heart stuttered in her chest.
He did not turn. His back remained rigid, his shoulders squared, his hands still clasped with white-knuckled precision. But his head bowed slightly, and when he spoke, the words fell into the morning air like stones dropped into still water.
“He was the best of us.”
Maribel drew a sharp breath.
“I ought to have told him that whilst he lived.” The roughness in his voice cut through her like a blade. “I ought to have said it every day we served together, every letter I wrote, every moment I stood in his presence. Instead I said nothing, because I believed there would always be tomorrow, always another opportunity, always more time.” His hands tightened behind his back. “Andnow there is no time left. Only a grave and a child and a debt I can never repay.”
He walked away without waiting for a response.
Maribel stood motionless, watching his figure retreat through the iron gate, listening to the sound of hoofbeats as he mounted his horse and rode into the thinning mist. Her pulse hammered against her ribs. Her thoughts churned like storm-tossed water, refusing to settle into any pattern she could recognise.
The man she had agreed to marry—the cold, controlling Duke of Blackwood, who treated emotion as weakness and sentiment as liability—had just laid bare a grief so profound it had stripped him of every defence.
She did not know what to do with that knowledge. She was not certain she wished to know.
The mist had nearly lifted now, pale sunlight spilling across the churchyard in golden shafts that illuminated the weathered headstones and the frost-touched grass and the iron fence that marked the boundary of consecrated ground.
Maribel turned to begin her walk back toward the waiting carriage, her mind still reeling, her heart still pounding?—
And stopped.
Along the base of the iron fence, growing wild and untended between the rusted bars, a tangle of wildflowers caught the morning light. Purple clover and white yarrow and those delicate cream-coloured blooms she did not recognise.
The same flowers Thaddeus had laid upon Nicholas’s grave.
The same flowers she had seen growing in the overgrown garden at Blackwood—the garden Mrs. Allen had said belonged to the late Duchess, the garden that had been left to ruin since her death.
