Champagne tastes of stale apples when you are twenty-five and officially a spinster. Bella Halloway toasted the ballroom doors and swore she would marry the next man through them — and the Duke of Westford walked in with coal dust under his nails, just as her reckless promise began spreading across the ballroom.

 PART 10

Bella let out a shattered sob. She pressed her face into the mattress beside his hip, her shoulders shaking violently.

The cynical spinster from the London ballroom was completely gone — burned away by the harsh, unyielding reality of the moors.

Augustus’s hand moved to her hair, stroking the loose, damp strands with a clumsy, agonizing tenderness.

“I don’t care about the money,” Bella wept into the blankets. “I don’t care about the estate. I just need you. Do you understand me? I just need you.”

“I’m here,” he promised, his voice rough. “I’m right here.”

She lifted her head and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. She looked down at him.

He was battered, broken, and smelling faintly of medical alcohol.

He was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“No more going down the main shaft,” Bella demanded, sniffing harshly.

Augustus’s mouth twitched. “Are you giving me orders, Duchess?”

“I’m renegotiating our terms.” She rested her hand gently over his bandaged chest, feeling the steady, heavy beat of his heart. “You are grounded permanently.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” he whispered.

His eyes fluttered shut, the laudanum finally dragging him down into a heavy, healing sleep.

“But I accept.”

Bella stayed in the wooden chair until the sun broke over the craggy hills, casting a pale, cold light through the frosted windows. The fire burned down to glowing embers. She rested her head on the edge of the mattress, her hand securely anchored to his.

The debt was paid. The ledgers were balanced.

They had built a fortress out of iron and soot, and inside it, they were entirely safe.

Three weeks later, the Duke of Westford was permitted to leave his bed, and he did it the way he did everything else — too early, too fast, and without asking anyone.

Bella found him in the study.

He was standing at the window with his arm still strapped in its sling, looking out at the valley where the smoke rose from the rebuilt headgear of the eastern seam. The new timbers had gone down on the ninth day. She had signed the order herself, and she had signed it in his name and her own, side by side at the bottom of the page.

“You are meant to be resting,” she said.

“I am resting.” He did not turn around. “I am resting standing up.”

“That is not a thing.”

“It is the only kind I can manage.”

She came and stood beside him. Below them, the men were coming up out of the dark in shifts, black-faced and alive, carrying their picks over their shoulders. Somewhere in the sorting sheds, the widows’ fund had already sent support to all seven grieving households, and Bella had written every one of the letters herself, in ink, in her own hand, because she had decided that a printed form was not what a woman deserved to receive in the week after.

“The roof will hold,” Augustus said. “The new beams are sound.”

“I checked them.”

He turned his head. The gray light from the narrow window caught the new scar across his temple — still pink, still healing. He would carry it the rest of his life, and so would the five men who had come up in the cage with him, and so would she, though hers would not be visible.

“You checked the beams,” he said.

“I went down.”

Augustus went very still.

“Six hundred feet. In the cage. With Miller and two of the engineers.” Bella kept her eyes on the valley. “I wanted to see the new timber in place before the men went back to work in it. It seemed unreasonable to send a hundred men down a shaft I would not go down myself.”

He said nothing for a long moment.

Then he let out a slow breath and, with his good hand, reached over and took hers.

“Seven hundred feet,” he said. “Not six hundred.”

“Six hundred and forty, at the junction.”

“Duchess.”

“I counted the rungs on the way back up,” Bella said, and allowed herself the smallest smile she had permitted herself in three weeks. “You are not the only one in this marriage who cannot ask a man to go where he will not.”

Augustus laughed — a real laugh, rough and short, the first true one she had ever heard from him, and it cost him his ribs, and he did not care.

That spring, the child came — a girl, small and furious and loud, with her father’s flat, dark eyes and her mother’s absolute refusal to be soothed.

They named her Caroline, after nobody at all, because Bella had said that a child ought to begin with a name that carried no debt and no obligation and no family arithmetic, and Augustus had looked at her for a long moment and said, Yes. That is the correct reason.

High Ridge Manor was never beautiful. It stayed dark stone and narrow windows and ivy that refused to come back to life. But by the second winter there were fires in every room, and a cook who did not steal, and a steward who had learned to stand up straight.

And in the study, every evening, two people sat on opposite sides of the same heavy oak desk with a single lamp between them — she with the household ledgers, he with the colliery accounts, each of them crossing out the other’s errors, saying very little, entirely at ease.

Augustus kept his arm in the sling a week longer than the physician required. When Bella asked him why, he said the physician had not specified, which was a lie, and both of them knew it, and neither of them minded.

He had discovered that when his arm was bound, she reached over and turned the pages for him.

Outside, the wind came down off the moors with the blunt force of a swinging anvil, and the valley breathed its slow black breath into the sky, and the crags stood exactly as they had stood for a thousand years — indifferent to titles, indifferent to fortunes, indifferent to the opinion of any drawing room in London.

Inside, the lamp burned.

And in the warm, cramped, unromantic room that smelled of ink and coal dust and tobacco, a woman who had once toasted an empty doorway for want of anything better to do turned a page for a man who had walked through it.

THE END.