Given to a Duke Far Too Old, She Wept for Her Dreams—But on Wedding Night His First Gift Amazed Her

Chapter 3

Should you wish.

The words followed Isolde all day, soft and strange, like a language she half remembered. She explored the manor the way a person explores a wound — carefully, expecting pain, finding instead a vast, deep loneliness that was nothing like cruelty. The halls were long and lined with tapestries. The bookshelves were thick with dust and the smell of old paper. Portraits crowded the walls, generations of Marlow faces watching her pass with the same calm, resigned eyes.

She stopped in front of one portrait and could not move for a long time.

A young woman, no older than Isolde herself, with dark hair swept up and a face of extraordinary, aching stillness. She wore a gown of grey silk and a silver key on a ribbon at her throat. Her eyes were not resigned like the others. They were aware — as if she knew exactly what was about to happen to her and had decided, in that quiet way of martyrs, to let it.

“Eleanor Marlow,” Mrs. Caldecott said from behind her, and Isolde startled. “The Duke’s mother. She came here at eighteen. The old Duke, his grace’s father, was a hard man.”

“She looks… sad.”

“She was. But she was also kind.” Something flickered across the housekeeper’s face, an old grief politely boxed away. “She used to say that a house was only as cold as the people who let it be. She tried to warm this one. She was not allowed to.”

Isolde wanted to ask more — about the key at the woman’s throat, about the son she had left behind, about the shape of the life that had carved that stillness into her face. But Mrs. Caldecott had already turned, already retreating into the practised silence of a servant who had learned that some doors, once opened, never close again.

The music room was the only place in the hall that did not feel dead.

A grand piano stood at the centre of the room, covered in dust that had settled like snow. Isolde lifted the lid, ran a finger across the keys, and pressed a single note. The sound rang out — clean, honest, alive — and she almost laughed at how loud it felt in all that silence. She played a few halting bars, then stopped, embarrassed by her own rust. But the piano did not judge her. It only waited, like everything else in this house.

On the way back to her rooms, she passed the library and drifted inside. The shelves rose to the ceiling, ladders leaning against them, and somewhere in the middle of the third row she found a small book of poetry with flowers pressed between the pages — pale, dried roses that had been flattened and kept with almost religious care.

“My mother’s,” said a voice behind her.

Isolde spun. The Duke stood in the doorway, still in his black coat, watching her with that unreadable, steady gaze. “She believed beauty should be saved,” he said quietly. “She pressed a little of it into everything she touched. It was all she could keep.”

He did not come further into the room. He stood at the threshold, a man permanently on the edge of rooms, as if he had long ago taught himself not to take up space that did not belong to him.

“The library is remarkable,” Isolde said, because she could not think of anything else. “I found astronomical charts.”

“The stars are constant,” he said, “when people are not.”

It was the first time he had ever been in a room with her for more than a minute, and she noticed he did not look at her the way men usually looked at women. He looked at her the way a man looks at a painting he is afraid to touch — from a distance, with respect, as if she were something that might break.

“I must attend to estate business,” he said. “But I hope you will walk the gardens this evening. The conservatory orchids are in bloom. You may enjoy them.”

He was gone before she could answer, his footsteps fading into the depths of the house.

That night, Isolde ate dinner alone in a dining room so large her voice would have echoed. Mrs. Caldecott stood against the wall like a carved figure, and when Isolde had finished, the housekeeper hesitated at the door.

“You asked about the lady in the portrait,” she said. “His Grace was twelve when his mother passed. The old Duke remarried within the year — a girl even younger than Eleanor, and she did not survive the second winter.”

Isolde’s throat tightened. “He grew up in this?”

“He grew up watching women be traded into this house and buried out of it.” Mrs. Caldecott’s voice was level, but her hands were white-knuckled on the tray. “He swore at his mother’s grave that he would never do to a woman what his father did. He swore it, and he has kept it. He has never once —” She stopped, caught herself. “Forgive me, Your Grace. I have said too much.”

“Please,” Isolde said. “What did he swear?”

But the housekeeper only shook her head and withdrew, leaving Isolde alone in the vast, candlelit room, the silver key burning like a live coal against her thigh.

She sat very still, and the house seemed to hold its breath with her.

The key at her throat in the portrait. The key in her pocket. The note in his careful hand. No one should be forced to love.

It had never been about her, had it? It had been a vow written for a woman long dead, a promise a twelve-year-old boy had made at a graveside in the rain, and he had been keeping it, alone, for thirty-five years, for every bride who would never have his mother’s luck.

Isolde pressed the key to her lips and wept — not for herself, for once, but for the man who had given her freedom because he had never been able to give it to the woman who deserved it most.

She thought she understood him now.

She was wrong. The truth was much larger, and it was already moving toward her across the dark moors.