“I Never Should Have Married You,” the Duke Told His Steward — But When His Wife Smiled and Replied, “Good News, You No Longer Have To,” He Had Only Five Weeks to Stop Her Leaving and Confess the Love He Had Hidden for Nearly a Year

PART 1 

The Duke of Fossborough said the words low and hard to the empty hearth rather than to his wife — a quieter echo of the very same sentence he had shouted at Hollis not five minutes before, on the servants’ stair, in a temper he had thought private. He had not known, crossing back into the drawing room to compose himself before the fire, that his wife had come in just behind him, having heard every word of that first outburst already, and had simply waited, arms folded by the window, to see whether he meant to repeat it to her face.

“I never should have married you.”

“Good news,” Odelina answered, not turning from the window where she had been standing all this while, arms folded, chin lifted in the particular way that made grown men at his club reach for their collars. “You no longer have to.”

The words landed in the cold drawing room like a dropped glove.

Ketrick turned. He had expected tears, perhaps, or that brittle silence she wore so well when the dowagers of the county examined her gown and found it a season out of fashion. He had not expected this. Her voice even, almost pleasant, as if she were remarking on the weather rather than the ruin of an eleven-month marriage.

“I beg your pardon.”

“You needn’t. I heard you the first time, Your Grace. And I dare say half the servants’ hall heard you as well, given how you shouted it at poor Hollis on the stair, as though the man had married me himself.”

She came away from the window at last, skirts whispering over the old carpet. There was nothing meek in the way she crossed the room to stand before him — not close enough to touch, but closer than propriety strictly allowed for a wife who had just been told, in essence, that she was a mistake.

“You did not marry me for love. You have said so in one fashion or another at least four times since Michaelmas. So let us not pretend this evening is a tragedy. It is merely a candor. Rather late, but candor nonetheless.”

He looked down at her. He was accustomed to looking down at people, being tall enough that most society hostesses arranged their rooms around the simple fact of his height. And he had grown used to the way that height alone could silence a room. It did not silence Odelina Alcott. It never had. Not from the very first evening she had walked into Fossborough as its new duchess with a trunk of books and a look on her face that suggested she had come to inspect the property and found it wanting.

“You mistake my meaning,” he said, though in truth he was no longer certain what his meaning had been. He had said the words to Hollis on the servant’s stair in a moment of raw, unthinking frustration. After Lord Ashwell had made his cutting little remark at dinner about the Duke’s economical bride, and half the table had laughed behind their wine, and Ketrick had sat there with his jaw locked, unable to say a single word in her defense. Because to defend her would have been to admit that her dignity mattered to him, and admitting that felt like handing a weapon to a woman who already had too many.

“Did I?” she said. “Then pray, enlighten me as to your true meaning, Your Grace. For I confess the sentence ‘I never should have married you’ admits of very little interpretation.”

There it was again. That voice. Quick and dry as a struck flint. The voice that had first caught him off guard in the small parlor at Alcott Grange nearly a year ago, when he had come to inform a grieving, penniless young woman that his father’s dying wish bound him to marry her, and she had looked at him with red-rimmed eyes and said, “I do not recall asking your opinion of the arrangement, Your Grace. Only your signature.”

He had thought her cold then. He understood now that she had simply refused to let him see her break.

“You know of the clause,” he said, because it was easier than the truth. Easier than saying that he had not meant the words as cruelty, but as confession — that he had watched her all evening handle Ashwell’s barb and a dozen smaller ones with a grace he did not deserve to benefit from, and it had frightened him. The wanting that rose in his chest when he watched her do it.

“Twelve months from the date of our marriage, either party may petition privately to have the union set aside. Provided —”

“Provided it remains unconsummated, and provided both parties consent.” Odelina finished for him without a flicker of the maidenly blush the sentence ought to have produced. “Yes, Your Grace. I have read the settlement papers rather more thoroughly than you appear to credit me with. I read them the week I signed them, sitting at my father’s desk with his spectacles still upon it, because I did not intend to enter a marriage blind, whatever else I intended to enter it as.”

Something moved behind her eyes then, quick as a bird crossing a window, gone before he could name it.

“Twelve months from our wedding date is the eleventh of next month. Five weeks from tonight. I imagine that is precisely what you were calculating when you told poor Hollis you never should have married me.”

He had not, in fact, been calculating anything so precise. He had been thinking only of the dinner, and Ashwell’s smirk, and the particular way Odelina’s shoulders had gone very straight when the remark landed, as though she were bracing to be struck and determined not to flinch when it came. But she had handed him the explanation so neatly, so plausibly, that he found himself simply nodding. Because the alternative — telling her the truth, that the words had been a confession of fear rather than regret — was not a door he knew how to open.

“Five weeks,” he repeated.

“Five weeks,” she said, “in which you may at your leisure decide whether you wish to invoke your father’s mercy and be rid of an inconvenient wife who reads settlement papers and corrects the steward’s arithmetic and has, I am reliably informed, embarrassed you at no fewer than three dinners this season by knowing more of the Corn Laws than the gentleman present.”

A small, humorless smile.

“Do consider it a courtesy, Your Grace, that I have saved you the trouble of composing the request yourself. I shall have my things packed within the week, if that is your wish. I have no great attachment to Fossborough’s cold hallways, whatever attachment its silver plate might have to me.”