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

Chapter 6

In the days that followed, the warmth of Hollowmere Hall receded like a tide going out.

The Duke stopped taking tea at four. He stopped leaving notes. When Isolde passed him in the corridors, he looked through her as though she were made of glass — not coldly, but desperately, the way a man looks at a thing he is trying not to want. Letters went out and came back. A lawyer began to visit, a thin man with a face like a ledger, who shut himself in the study with the Duke for hours and left looking graver each time.

Isolde was not kept in the dark. Not deliberately. The Duke simply had no language for telling her the truth, and so he told her nothing, and the silence grew between them like a wall of frost.

She did what any woman with a silver key and a broken heart would do. She found out for herself.

The solicitor’s name was Mr. Hale, and Isolde cornered him in the front hall one grey afternoon with her chin lifted and her voice steady, the way Eleanor Marlow had once written she would.

“You will tell me,” she said, “what Baron Thorne wants with my husband. Or I will walk into that study myself and force a scene that will entertain the servants for a generation.”

Mr. Hale looked at her for a long moment, then sighed — the resigned sigh of a man who had been fighting this particular battle for weeks and had lost it a dozen times over.

“Your stepmother,” he said, “signed you away, Your Grace. Not to the Duke. To Thorne.”

The floor tilted. Isolde gripped the edge of a table.

“She negotiated your father’s debts with Baron Thorne before the funeral mud had dried,” Mr. Hale went on, his voice low and careful. “Thorne agreed to assume them in exchange for you. A bride of twenty. That is his particular taste — young, frightened, broken of family. His first wife fell from a balcony. His second wasted away so slowly the doctors stopped coming.”

“But I married the Duke,” Isolde whispered. “How? Why?”

“Because the Duke was present at that settlement. He was there to buy a horse, of all things — it is on record. He heard the terms. He saw your stepmother sign the paper that would have handed you to a man who has never kept a wife alive long enough to bury her properly.” Mr. Hale’s voice softened. “And he stood up, in front of everyone, and offered to assume your father’s debts himself — every shilling of them — on one condition.”

Isolde could barely breathe. “What condition?”

“That the marriage contract be drawn in his name instead of Thorne’s. That night, in your father’s study, he made her a deal he knew she could not refuse. He paid more than the debts were worth, and he took you — cold, reluctant, rumoured to be a widower with a dead heart — because he knew that if he did not, Thorne would.”

The room was very quiet.

“He never told you,” Mr. Hale said. “He swore the whole town to silence. He wanted you to believe it was a debt-marriage of convenience, an old man buying a girl to fill his hall. He thought —” The lawyer stopped, and for a moment he looked almost ashamed. “He thought that if you knew the truth, you would feel obligated. Indebted. He did not want you to owe him your freedom. He wanted you to choose it.”

Isolde sat down without meaning to, her legs gone.

All those weeks. The tea. The books. The notes in his careful hand. The way he stood in doorways, afraid to take up space. The note on her wedding night — No one should be forced to love — a vow he had made at his mother’s grave, and a vow he had now kept at the cost of letting her believe the worst of him.

He had let her think he had bought her cold.

Rather than let her think she owed him anything at all.

“And Thorne?” she said, her voice barely a thread.

Mr. Hale looked at her with something like pity. “Thorne has discovered that the marriage was not the settlement he thought it was. He is claiming the original contract is still binding — that the Duke stole what was signed and paid for, and that he intends to reclaim it.”

A servant appeared at the door of the hall, breathless.

“A carriage, Your Grace. At the gate. The seal on it is —” The man swallowed. “Black. It bears a boar and a broken spur. Baron Thorne’s arms.”

Isolde stood up. Her hands were shaking, but she pressed them flat against her skirts, the way she had pressed the key against her chest on her wedding night.

“Tell His Grace I am coming,” she said. “And tell the Baron that the Duchess of Hollowmere will receive him in the great hall. If he wishes to reclaim anything of mine, he may do it in the light, in front of witnesses, where everyone can see what he is.”

The servant stared at her. Mr. Hale stared at her.

Somewhere above, a door opened, and the Duke’s footsteps began to descend.

And in the great hall of Hollowmere, past all the portraits of the women who had come before her and the ones who had not survived, Isolde Rynne — who had been sold twice, who had expected chains, who had been given a key instead — began, at last, to become someone no one could trade.