“You are normal.”
“I am many things, but I suspect normal is not among them.” He smiled faintly. “Still… perhaps I am not quite so strange as I believed. Perhaps the world is not as cruel as I was taught to expect.”
“The world does contain cruelty,” Fiona said. “You met some of it today, with Henry.” She reached across and took his hand. “But it also contains kindness. And curiosity. And thewillingness to reconsider old judgements when given reason. The blacksmith’s wife saw you as you are, not as the rumours describe you. Others will too, in time.”
“In time,” he repeated softly. “I suppose I have time now. Thanks to you.”
“Thanks to us.” She squeezed his hand. “We are doing this together, remember?”
“I remember.” He lifted her hand to his lips and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “And I shall remember it every day of my life.”
The carriage rolled steadily on, carrying them back toward the castle.
Yet something had shifted, Fiona realised. Something fundamental.
Christian had faced the world—and the world had not destroyed him.
It was, she thought, the first real step toward freedom.
Chapter Thirteen
Fiona did not tell him.
She woke the next morning with every intention of confessing everything—Mrs Blackley’s warning, the whispers in the village, the gathering storm—but when she opened her eyes and saw Christian’s face on the pillow beside hers, softened by sleep and utterly at peace, she could not do it.
One more day,she told herself.One more day of happiness before the world intrudes.
It was a coward’s choice, and she knew it. But she made it nonetheless.
The morning dawned grey and mist-laden, the sort of weather that wrapped the castle in cotton wool and hushed the world beyond its walls. Christian suggested a walk—he wished to show her the old chapel on the far edge of the estate, a ruin he had loved since boyhood—and Fiona agreed, grateful for the distraction.
They set out after breakfast, wrapped in heavy cloaks against the damp. The mist clung to everything, transforming the familiar landscape into something dreamlike and strange. Trees loomed out of the whiteness like spectres; the path beneath their feet seemed almost to float, severed from the earth.
“I used to come here as a boy,” Christian said, his voice softened by the hushed air. “When my mother’s silences grewtoo heavy, or my father’s disappointment too sharp. I would slip out of the castle before dawn and walk until I reached the chapel. It felt like escaping into another world.”
“A world without cruelty?
“A world without people.” He glanced at her, a wry curve touching his mouth. “I was not yet wise enough to understand that the cruelty lived within me as much as beyond. That I carried their voices with me wherever I went.”
Fiona tightened her hand on his arm. “You were a child. You should never have been required to be wise.”
“No. I should have had parents who loved me regardless of my appearance. I should have had a world that did not recoil from difference.” He exhaled softly. “But should and did are rarely the same thing.”
They walked on in silence for a time, the mist curling about them, the only sound the muted crunch of their footsteps on the path. Fiona found her thoughts circling the conversation she continued to avoid—the truth she ought to share—and felt guilt twist quietly in her stomach.
“Tell me more,” she said instead. “About your childhood. About the boy you were before you became the duke.”
Christian was silent for a long moment. Then, slowly, he began to speak.
“I was born in the London house,” he said. “My mother endured a difficult labour—nearly two days, the midwife said—and when I finally arrived, I was not what anyone expected. The birthmark was visible from the first moment, spreading across my chest and up my neck. The midwife screamed. My mother fainted. And my father—”
He paused, his jaw tightening slightly.
“My father took one look at me and left the room. He did not return for three days.”
“Christian…”
“When he did return, it was to inform my mother that the child would be kept out of sight. I was not to be presented to visitors. I was not to be taken into society. I was to be raised quietly, privately, until a solution could be found.”
