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

Chapter 9

Thorne came again at dawn, and this time he did not come alone.

The carriage that drew up to the gate of Hollowmere bore two seals — the boar and broken spur, and beside it, smaller and faded, the crest of the Rynne family. Isolde watched from the window of the great hall as the door opened and her stepmother stepped down, wrapped in grey, her face a careful mask.

Beatrice Rynne had aged a decade since the wedding. She had aged in the particular way of a woman who has made a bargain with something and only later understood what she had sold.

“She has come to testify against us,” Mr. Hale said quietly, at her shoulder. “She has agreed to swear the contract is valid, that she had the right to sign you away. Thorne has promised her a share of the settlement if she does.”

“Or she has come,” Isolde said, “to see what she sold.”

The great hall filled with cold light. Thorne stood before the hearth, smirking. Beatrice stood behind him like a shadow that had forgotten how to be attached to anything. The Duke entered from the far door, and Isolde saw the calculation in his face — the arithmetic of a man who had planned for this moment and hated every version of it.

“Your Grace,” Thorne said, “I have brought you a gift. A witness. The woman who signed your wife away, ready to swear to the validity of the contract in front of God and the county. The courts will hear her. They always do. A mother’s testimony carries weight, even a stepmother’s, especially when it condemns a child.” He smiled. “It is rather poetic, is it not? A hall full of Marlow wives, and the one thing that finally brings down the last Marlow is a mother handing over a daughter.”

Isolde stepped forward, past the Duke, past Mr. Hale, until she stood in front of her stepmother.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

“You told me,” Isolde said quietly, “that a girl without a dowry has no right to dreams. You told me to be grateful. You adjusted my veil with sharp fingers and sharp words, and you handed me to a man you had already signed me over to — a man who buried his first wife from a balcony and his second from a sickbed. You knew. You knew what he was, and you sold me to him anyway.”

Beatrice’s mouth opened.

“Don’t,” Isolde said. “Don’t tell me you had no choice. You had the same choice I had. The same choice my mother had. The same choice Eleanor Marlow had, and every other woman whose portrait hangs on these walls, waiting to see whether the house would take another one of us. You chose.” She held her stepmother’s gaze. “And now you have come here, to finish what you started, and stand in front of the fire of the house that saved me, and watch.”

The silence that followed was terrible.

And then Beatrice Rynne began, very quietly, to cry.

She had not meant to. Isolde could see it — the way her mask cracked, the way her hands went to her face as though she could scrape the tears back in. But they came anyway, in ugly, graceless sobs, the sound of a woman who had spent years telling herself a lie and had just heard it spoken back to her in a voice she could not outrun.

“He was going to have me killed,” Beatrice said at last, her voice a ruin. “Thorne. If I did not sign, if I refused — he had the papers, he had the witnesses, he had a man who owed him a favour in the county court. He was going to take the house. Everything your father left. Everything I had. I was going to lose it all, and I — I told myself a daughter was worth less than a roof.” She looked up at Isolde, and her eyes were naked. “I was wrong. I have known I was wrong every day since.”

Thorne’s smile had gone.

“Isolde—”

“Don’t.” Isolde’s voice was steady, though her hands were not. “You sold me. You cannot un-sell me, and I do not think you even want to. But you are going to stand here, in front of these witnesses, and you are going to tell the truth. Every word of it. The contract, the threats, the man in the county court. And then you are going to leave this house, and you are going to live with what you did.”

She turned to Thorne.

“And you,” she said. “You have buried two wives, and you have come to my house with a piece of paper to try to bury a third. But you are standing in the hall of a family that has buried a hundred women, and every one of them is watching you. You may have the courts. You may have your contract. But you do not have me, you never did, and you never will.”

Thorne looked at her for a long, cold moment. Then he looked at the Duke.

“Get your things,” the Duke said quietly. “The bailiffs will meet you at the gate. There is a man in the county court who has been waiting fifteen years to testify about what happened on your balcony. He is my witness, and I have paid for his passage.”

Thorne’s face went white.

“I have kept it quiet,” the Duke said, “because I did not want my mother’s name dragged through your muck. But you came to my door, and you threatened my wife, and you brought a woman here to sell her own child in my hall. So now you may spend the rest of your life fighting off the truth, and you may do it in the light, in front of everyone, the way you always should have had to.”

The great hall was silent.

Thorne turned and walked out. The door closed behind him like a held breath, and then, a moment later, the sound of a carriage leaving the gravel drive, fading into the morning.

Beatrice stood alone in the middle of the hall, exposed in the pale light, a woman who had sold her daughter and found, at the last possible moment, that the sale would not stand.

Isolde did not watch her go. She had already turned away.

The servants retreated. Mr. Hale bowed and withdrew. And Isolde stood alone in the great hall of Hollowmere, in the light of the winter morning, and drew from her pocket the silver key.

It was warm. It was hers.

And she knew, finally, what she was going to do with it.