Maribel stared at them, her breath misting in the cold air, her thoughts spinning into territory she was not prepared to explore.
He had gathered them himself. From his mother’s abandoned garden. He had carried them across the miles to lay them on his brother’s grave, and the tenderness of that gesture—the private, unwitnessed devotion of it—unsettled everything she thought she knew.
Who was Thaddeus Blackwood, truly?
Not the cold autocrat she had dismissed. Not the unfeeling guardian she had condemned. Something else. Something far more complicated, far more wounded, far more dangerously human than she had permitted herself to believe.
In two days, she would bind herself to him for life.
And standing there in the brightening churchyard, the wildflowers swaying gently in the morning breeze, Maribel realized with dawning unease that she no longer had any notion what that life might hold.
CHAPTER 5
“You’re doing the right thing. For the boy.”
Maribel did not turn from the mirror. She could see Lady Eleanor’s reflection in the glass—the older woman standing in the doorway of the guest chamber, her silver hair pinned in a style too simple for her standing, her weathered face arranged into an expression that might have been meant as reassurance.
It did not reassure.
“I know,” Maribel said quietly. Her fingers had stilled upon the fabric of her dress—a simple gown of ivory silk that Lady Eleanor had produced from somewhere in the depths of her wardrobe.It was mine, once, she had said when she pressed it into Maribel’s hands the evening before.Before I put on weight and before I put on years. It will suit you better than anything you might purchase at such short notice.
The gown fit well enough. The color was flattering, if subdued. And yet Maribel could not shake the feeling that she was looking at a stranger—a woman dressed for a funeral rather than a wedding, her dark chestnut hair arranged in a style too severe, her eyes too bright against the pallor of her cheeks.
She had risen before dawn, unable to sleep, and had spent the grey hours pacing the confines of this borrowed room whilst the household slumbered around her. When the first light crept through the curtains, she had begun the solitary ritual of preparing herself for the day ahead.
No mother to help her dress. No sister to fuss over her hair, to laugh at her nerves, to whisper reassurances that all would be well.
Only silence.
“Maribel Blackwood,” she whispered now, testing the shape of the words upon her tongue. “The Duchess of Blackwood.”
The words felt strange. Wrong. Like a garment tailored for a different woman entirely—one who had been raised for such elevation, who had been trained from the cradle to navigate the treacherous waters of ducal society.
Not a disgraced baron’s daughter with mud on her hem and defiance in her heart.
Lady Eleanor crossed the room, her footsteps muffled by the carpet, and came to stand behind Maribel. Their eyes met in the mirror—grey and brown, age and youth, pragmatism and despair.
“Allow me,” Lady Eleanor said. “You’ve missed the buttons at the back.”
Maribel merely nodded. Lady Eleanor was the closest she had to a mother and she felt tears well up in her eyes. She felt the gentle tug as Lady Eleanor worked the small pearl buttons into their fastenings, one by one, with the practiced efficiency of someone who had performed this service countless times before.
“My mother used to do this,” Maribel heard herself say. “Before she became too ill. Before everything fell apart.”
Lady Eleanor’s fingers paused for the briefest moment before resuming their work. “I remember your mother. She was a proud woman. Too proud, perhaps—but she loved you and your sister fiercely.”
“Do you think she would have approved of this?”
“Your mother would not have approved of the exact circumstances, I believe.” Lady Eleanor fastened the final button and rested her hands upon Maribel’s shoulders, turning her gently back toward the mirror. “But she would have understood necessity. And she would have been proud of your courage.”
Maribel’s throat tightened. She wanted to believe that—wanted to imagine her mother watching from somewhere beyond, nodding her approval at this sacrifice made in the name of family. But the woman who stared back from the glass looked neither courageous nor proud. She looked like a woman walking toward her own execution, her spine held straight by nothing more than stubborn will.
“My hands won’t stop shaking,” she admitted. She held them up as evidence—those treacherous fingers trembling despite every effort to still them. “I cannot seem to make them stop.”
Lady Eleanor took Maribel’s hands in her own, her grip firm and warm. “That is not weakness, child. That is the body’s acknowledgment that you are about to do something terrifying.” She squeezed gently. “Bravery is not the absence of fear. It is the decision to act despite it.”
Maribel drew a shuddering breath. She thought of Oliver—of his small face when she had left him the previous evening, his brown eyes wide with a hope he was too young to fully articulate.You’ll come back?he had asked, clutching her hand as though afraid she might vanish if he loosened his grip.You promise you’ll come back?
She had promised. And now she would keep that promise, whatever the cost.
