He Rode Out to Settle a £400 Debt and Found a Beaten Girl Kneeling in Icy Water Beneath Her Stepmother’s Roof — Then the Silent Duke Asked Her Name, and Everything in That House Began to Break

PART 2

He rode the four miles home through a hard gray country and saw none of it. He saw a pail of iced water. A pair of raw hands. A bruise the color of a dying leaf. A girl who had not flinched from him when the whole world flinched from him — not because she had no spirit, but because she had learned that spirit was a luxury she could not afford, and had put it away somewhere deep, where no one could reach it and break it.

He knew something of that. He had put a great many things away in his own life, too.

By the time he reached his own black, silent house, the short day was already failing. He gave his horse to the groom, answered his steward’s questions shortly, and stood alone at the foot of his own staircase in the dark, thinking of a house four miles off, where a girl was most likely going without her supper again.

He was not a man given to sudden action. He had learned patience the hard way, in years when patience was the only thing left to him. But he stood there a long time, and when he went up to his cold bed at last, he had made a decision, though he could not yet have said what it was.

He only knew he would go back.

It was not pity. He distrusted pity — in himself and in others. Pity was cheap, and it warmed no one. This was something harder, something that had settled into him at a low gate that morning with the quiet finality of a bolt shot home.

He lay awake a long time, listening — absurdly — for a footstep that could not possibly come, and found that the silence of his own great house, which had suited him for years, had in the space of a single day begun to feel less like peace and more like something missing.

He found his reasons quickly enough. A man of his rank never wants for reasons, if he cares to make them. There was the note, which wanted a second visit to arrange its payment. There was a stretch of disputed common land that suddenly seemed to want surveying.

What he did not yet know — could not yet know, lying awake in his cold room while a girl four miles off slept, if she slept at all, with an empty stomach and a locked door between herself and warmth — was that the widow already had a use in mind for her stepdaughter. A use with a name and a face and fifty red-faced years behind it. A use that was, at that very hour, being quietly discussed over a glass of the widow’s cheapest brandy, in a house where the Duke of Dunbear was not there to overhear.