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 4

It came to a head in the fifth week, in the matter of a suitor.

Isan told him of it haltingly, ashamed though she had done nothing to be ashamed of. A Mr. Crale — a coarse, prosperous cornfactor of fifty, a widower with money and no manners, who did business with the widow and came sometimes to the house. Lately, she said, he had begun to look at her. And the widow had begun to notice him looking, and had begun, instead of anger, to speak of gratitude, of prospects, of what a girl with no fortune could not afford to be nice about.

The Duke felt something go very cold and very still and very dangerous in his chest — an old sensation, remembered from other years, the feeling that comes before a man does something that cannot be undone.

“She has said nothing outright,” Isan said, looking at the ground. “But I have heard them talking low. She has begun to say I am a burden. That I must be settled.” Her hands tightened on the basket. “He frightens me, my lord. When he looks at me I feel — I feel as I felt when I was small, before I learned to be still, when a thing was coming I could not stop. And I have nowhere to go. If she gives me to him, I have no way to refuse. A woman with nothing cannot refuse.”

“Look at me,” the Duke said. She looked up. “You will not marry Crale. That will not happen. I give you my word on it, and I am a man whose word has never once been broken. But I must think how it is to be done rightly — so it cannot be undone, so you are safe and stay safe. That will take a little time. Can you be safe a few days more?”

Something came into her gray eyes he had not seen there before — something that frightened him with its size, because it was hope. Raw, new, and terrible. The hope of a person who has not dared to hope in seven years.

“I will try,” she whispered. “I always try.”

“A few days,” he said again. “Isan.” It was the first time he had used her name, and it stopped them both — the sound of it in his own mouth. “If it goes wrong before then — if you are in danger and cannot wait — you will come to Dunbear. Day or night. Say my name at my gates and you will be brought to me, and no power on this earth will take you out again. Do you understand?”

She could not speak. She only nodded, weeping silently, the way she did everything — without sound, tears simply running while she stood quite still.

He wanted, more than he had wanted anything in years, to get down from his horse and carry her away that instant. But it was not yet time, and a thing done in haste could be undone. So he only said “Friday,” as he always did, and rode away — and this time he looked back once, and saw her small and alone on the gray road, watching him go.

He did not sleep that night. He sat up in his study, planning cold and thorough, the way he did everything — and beneath the coldness of the planning burned something that had not been cold since a girl knelt in the frost and did not flinch. He would go to the house. He would make the widow an offer she dared not refuse. He would take Isan out of that house in the light of day, lawfully, honorably, so no shadow could ever fall on her. That was the clean way. The way that could not be undone.

He meant to do it on the Monday.

But cruelty does not keep appointments.

It was near midnight on the Saturday, a hard frost coming down under a thin cold moon, when the Duke — unable to settle, riding out late along his own boundaries as he’d taken to doing — came along the low road by the mill and saw a small figure stumbling toward him through the frost.

He knew her at once. He would have known her at any distance. She was running, or trying to, though clearly spent, with no shawl and no cloak against the killing cold — running from the direction of the house. He put his heels to his horse and was beside her and down out of the saddle before the beast had fully stopped.

“Isan—” She had not the breath to answer. She half fell against him, and he felt at once how cold she was, shaking so hard she could not stand. He stripped his cloak off his own shoulders in a single motion and wrapped it around her, drew her close, felt her clutch at it and press her face into his coat and shake.

“You are safe,” he said. It was not a thing he had ever said to another living soul. “You are safe. I have you.”

It came out of her in pieces between the shaking and the tears. Crale had come to supper. He had drunk. The widow had left them alone on purpose. He had put his hands on her, said things, and she had got away and run to the kitchen — and the widow had found her there, and had not been angry with Crale. She had struck her, more than once, and said she would be locked in her room without fire or food until she came to her senses and agreed to have him. Crale had laughed. The widow had locked her in the cold room under the eaves, and Isan had waited until the house was quiet, climbed out onto the low roof over the scullery, dropped into the yard, and run — in the dark, in the frost, with no clear thought in her head but to reach Dunbear before she was missed.

The Duke listened with his arms around her and his face gone very still, the cold, dangerous stillness rising in him until it filled him entirely.

“You will never go back there,” he said at last, very low. “Never.”