Dawson hesitated. It was unlike him to hesitate. “The letter, Your Grace. It concerns a matter of some… urgency.”
Benjamin’s hand tightened upon the terrace railing. The scarred skin across his knuckles pulled uncomfortably, areminder that even simple gestures came at a cost. “What manner of urgency?”
“I could not say. The seal was intact.”
“Then how do you know it is urgent?”
“Because Mr Thornton dispatched it by express at four o’clock this morning, Your Grace. The rider pressed his horse to its utmost in reaching us.”
The mist was beginning to burn away. Somewhere in the garden, a thrush began to sing—bright, oblivious music that felt almost offensive in its cheerfulness.
“Bring it to my study,” Benjamin said. “And have Cook send up coffee. Black.”
“Very good, Your Grace.”
“And Dawson?”
“Your Grace?”
“Find me another solicitor. I mean it.”
***
The study at Thornwood Park had once been a warm room. Benjamin remembered it from childhood: his father seated behind the great mahogany desk, sunlight streaming through windows that were never curtained, the scent of pipe tobaccoand old books mingling into something that had seemed, to a boy of eight, the very essence of safety.
Now the curtains were drawn. The desk lay buried beneath correspondence he could not bring himself to open. The only light came from a single lamp, positioned to cast shadows rather than illuminate, because shadows were kinder to a face like his.
You are being maudlin,he told himself. Read the damned letter.
He broke the seal.
The contents were, as Dawson had suggested, urgent. They were also, in their own tedious fashion, inevitable. Benjamin had known this moment would come eventually. He had merely hoped—foolishly, it now seemed—that eventually might stretch a few years longer.
To His Grace the Duke of Thornwood, the letter began,I write with regret to inform you of a matter pertaining to the terms of your late father’s will...
He skimmed the preliminaries. Legal language possessed a singular talent for burying simple truths beneath mountains of verbiage, but Benjamin had spent sufficient years reading military dispatches to recognise obfuscation when he encountered it.
The essence was this: his father, in his infinite wisdom, had included a clause requiring the heir to marry before reaching the age of five-and-thirty, or forfeit a significant portion of the estate—including the dower properties, the London house,and controlling interest in three profitable mines—to a distant cousin.
Benjamin was four-and-thirty. His birthday lay eleven months hence.
Clever man, he thought, without affection. His father had been many things, but never a fool. He had known, even then, that his scarred and silent son would resist marriage. He had merely constructed a trap elegant enough to spring years after his own death.
The letter continued with suggestions—lists of eligible ladies from respectable families who might overlook certain deficiencies in exchange for a ducal title. The phrasing was delicate.‘Deficiencies’was not the word employed. But Benjamin could read between the lines well enough.
Women sufficiently desperate,the letter truly meant.Women with no better prospects. Women who would not object that their husband resembled something drawn from a nightmare and spoke perhaps twenty words in a day.
He set the letter down.
Outside, the thrush was still singing. The cat had likely finished eating by now and retreated to whatever hidden corner it claimed during the daylight hours. The household was stirring—he could hear the distant sounds of servants beginning their work, the rhythms of a great house coming to life around a master who wished, above all things, simply to be left in peace.
Marriage.
He had considered it, of course. One could not be a duke without considering marriage. The title required an heir; the estate required management; society required a hostess. These were facts, immutable as gravity, and Benjamin had always known he must address them eventually.
But knowing and doing were entirely different creatures.
He thought of ballrooms. Of crowded drawing rooms and dinner parties, and the endless, exhausting performance demanded by polite society. Of women who would smile at his title and flinch at his face. Of the whispers that would follow him—poor creature, trapped with that monster—and the pity that was somehow worse than disgust.
