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

Chapter 8

They stood in the great hall until the fire burned low, and then they walked together through the darkened house to the room at the end of the east gallery, the room with the journals and the lavender and the window over the moors.

The Duke sat in his mother’s chair. He looked, for the first time, his true age — a man who had been carrying something heavy for so long that he had forgotten there was any other way to stand.

“My mother,” he began, “kept one companion in all her years here. A girl from the village, younger than she was, with a voice like clear water. She used to sing to my mother at night, when the old Duke was away and the house was quiet. She sang to her the way you sing to a child who is afraid of the dark — patiently, gently, as if she could pour enough light into the room to keep it.”

He looked at Isolde, and something in his face broke open.

“That girl’s name was Rosalind. Rosalind Rynne.”

Isolde’s breath left her.

Your mother.

“When my mother died,” the Duke said, “Rosalind left this house. I was twelve years old. I stood at the gate and watched her walk away with nothing but a cloth bundle and the song still in her throat. She married your father a year later. She wrote to me, once — a single letter, telling me she was safe, that she had a home now, that she would always sing the song to her own children the way she had sung it to my mother.”

He reached into his coat and drew out a folded, yellowed piece of paper, creased along lines so deep the paper had almost split.

“She wrote to me the year you were born,” he said. “She told me she had a daughter. She said she would name her for the morning, because that was what the song had always felt like to her — light arriving before you are ready for it.”

Isolde’s eyes filled. She had never known — had never been told — that her mother had written to anyone from this house, that there had been a thread connecting her to this lonely hall her whole life without her knowing.

“I did not seek you out,” the Duke said. “I want you to understand that. I knew of you, the way a man knows the weather of a place he once loved — distantly, without visiting. I kept her letter. I kept the song. I told myself I would not interfere. Rosalind had made a new life, and it was not mine to touch.”

“Then why—” Isolde’s voice broke. “Why did you marry me? Why did you save me?”

“Because when your stepmother signed you to Thorne,” he said quietly, “they did not tell me who you were. I was at that settlement to buy a horse, and I heard your name, and I thought —” He stopped. His hands were shaking. “I thought the world had arranged an accident for me. I had spent thirty years carrying my mother’s grief and Rosalind’s song, and here was the child of one, standing in the same room where a man was signing away the other. I could not — I could not stand by and let the pattern repeat. I could not let this house, or any house, take another woman I loved.”

He said the word without hearing it. Isolde heard it.

“You gave me the key,” she said, “and you let me believe you were cold.”

“Because I could not bear the alternative.” His voice was raw. “I could not bear for you to love me out of gratitude. I could not bear for you to stay because you owed me. I have spent my whole life watching women be traded into obligation, and I would have died before I added your freedom to that account. If you stayed with me, I wanted it to be because you chose it — with nothing owed, nothing owed me, nothing but the choice itself.”

Isolde crossed the room and knelt in front of him.

“Sing it,” she said.

“What?”

“The song. My mother’s song. The one you have carried for thirty years.” She took his cold hands in hers. “I want to know what I have been humming all my life without knowing where it came from.”

The Duke looked at her, and then, in a voice rough and low and ancient, he sang.

It was a simple lullaby — three verses, a melody that moved like water, like light moving across a floor. And as the notes rose in the dead woman’s room, Isolde felt her own throat fill with the shape of it, because she knew it. She had known it forever. Her mother had hummed it to her in the dark, on the nights when the debts had been loudest and the world had felt smallest. She had grown up inside this song and never once known its name.

“Your mother,” the Duke said, “sang this to my mother. And I have never once heard it without weeping.”

Isolde pressed her forehead to his.

“Then let us stop weeping alone,” she said.

Outside, the light was dying over the moors, and somewhere in the depths of the house, in a room that had been locked for thirty-five years, the song moved through the walls like the house exhaling at last.

Thorne was still out there, holding a piece of paper and a grudge and a need that would not be satisfied.

But in the east gallery, in the dust and the lavender and the lamp-light, two people who had each been traded once were learning, very slowly, what it meant to choose.