Her Family Cast Her Out for Being Barren — Three Months Later, a Widowed Duke with Five Heirs Chose Her as His Bride, but the Real Reason He Wanted Her in His Home Left Everyone Stunned.

PART 3

“I understand the staff may have questions,” Victoria said.

“We have none, your grace.” Mrs. Puitt’s eyes flicked over her traveling dress — three seasons old, carefully mended at the cuff. “His grace’s late wife wore Worth. But I’m sure we’ll manage.”

The steward, Mr. Crewe, was worse. He cornered her on her second day, ledgers tucked under his arm like a shield.

“I manage the estate accounts, your grace. All of them. His grace trusts me entirely.” A pause, deliberate. “I’d advise you not to involve yourself in matters you weren’t raised to understand.”

“I was raised in a house with accounts, Mr. Crewe. A house that sold me off the moment I proved unprofitable.”

He didn’t even have the decency to look ashamed. “Forgive my bluntness. I simply want to know what I’m dealing with.”

She held his gaze until he looked away first. A small victory. It didn’t feel like one.

The children were the wall she hadn’t braced for. Edward, sixteen and already taller than his father, wouldn’t look at her at all — passed her in the hallway like she was furniture that had been moved without his permission. The twins, Charlotte and Beatrice, eleven, were polite in a way that was its own kind of cruelty. Perfect curtsies, perfect silence, eyes that said, we have buried two mothers, and we will not bury our hearts for a third. Henry, nine, simply stayed in his room. And the youngest, Thomas — six, small for his age — watched her from behind the nursery door with an expression she couldn’t quite read. Not hostility exactly. Something closer to fear of hoping.

At dinner the first week, Edward set down his fork with deliberate precision.

“Father didn’t ask us before he married you.”

“Edward.” Vincent’s voice carried warning.

“It’s a fair question.” Edward didn’t flinch. “We’ve had a nurse leave. A governess leave. We don’t need another woman who’ll be gone in a year.”

“I’m not leaving,” Victoria said.

“That’s what the last one said, too.”

He pushed back from the table and walked out. No one stopped him.

Then came the dowager. Vincent’s mother arrived unannounced on the tenth day, swept into the drawing room in black bombazine, and looked at Victoria the way one might examine a stain on good linen.

“So this is the creature my son has saddled himself with.”

“Mother —”

“Don’t mother me, Vincent. I have buried two daughters by marriage and watched you grieve them properly.” She gestured at Victoria without looking at her directly. “This one comes with a scandal attached like a smell that won’t wash out.”

“She is my wife.”

“She is a barren woman from a disgraced family, married for convenience, and everyone in London knows it.” The dowager finally turned her full gaze on Victoria. “I will not pretend otherwise for your comfort. You are not wanted here. You are merely tolerated, because my son has made a decision I cannot undo. But don’t mistake one for the other.”

Victoria kept her spine straight. “I didn’t come here for your approval, your grace.”

“No.” The dowager’s mouth twisted — almost admiring, almost contemptuous. “You came here because you had nowhere else to go. Don’t dress it up as anything braver than that.”

She left without another word, and the silence behind her was heavier than her voice had been.

That night, Victoria stood at her bedroom window — a different room than Vincent’s, a separate wing entirely, a marriage in name only — and watched the gardens go dark below. A house full of people, and not one of them hers.

She thought of her father’s voice. Anywhere that isn’t here. She had traveled so far, married so strangely, and still ended up exactly where she started — unwanted, in someone else’s house, waiting for the next person to tell her to leave.

She didn’t cry. She was almost proud of that.

But somewhere down the corridor, behind a door left a few inches open, a small voice was crying instead — and Victoria found she couldn’t quite walk past it.

The crying came from Thomas’s room. She almost turned away. Almost remembered Mrs. Puitt’s warning look, Edward’s cold shoulder, the dowager’s voice still ringing in her ears.

But the sound was small and frightened in a way that didn’t care about any of that.

She pushed the door open gently.

“Thomas.”

He was curled at the foot of his bed, not in it, knees to his chest, cheeks flushed an unhealthy red. When he saw her, he flinched, then seemed to remember he was too tired to be afraid.

“My head hurts,” he whispered. “And I’m cold, but I’m hot, too. That doesn’t make sense.”

Victoria crossed the room and pressed her hand to his forehead before she’d even decided to move.

Burning.

“How long have you felt like this?”

“Since this morning. I didn’t tell anyone.” His eyes were glassy, too bright. “Nobody comes when I call anymore.”

Something in her chest cracked clean through.

“I’m here now.”

She rang for Mrs. Puitt, who took one look at Thomas and went pale beneath her starch.

“I’ll send for the physician, your grace. But he’s two hours out at this time of night. The roads —”

“Then we don’t wait for him.” Victoria was already moving. “I need cool water, vinegar if you have it, and clean linen. Now, please.”

Mrs. Puitt hesitated half a second — old loyalty warring with old suspicion — and then went.