“I’m Not Marrying You,” She Told the Duke After Discovering Her Name in an Old Church Register — But He Smiled and Revealed That One Forgotten Childhood Promise Had Already Made Her His Wife Twelve Years Ago.

PART 1

“I’m not marrying you,” she said.

The Duke of Overwald had braced himself all morning for tears, for fainting, for the sharp edge of a lady’s temper. He found instead that he wanted, quite badly, to smile. He did not. A lifetime of guarding his own face had taught him that much.

He only inclined his head toward the young woman standing rigid before the tall library windows, her chin lifted, her gloved hands knotted white at her waist.

“You already have,” he said.

The words dropped into the quiet room like a stone laid in an old wall.

Marisel Darnley did not gasp. She did not sway. She only looked at him as though he had spoken in a foreign tongue, and then her dark brows drew together over eyes the precise gray of a sky before rain.

“I beg your pardon.”

“You needn’t. It is I who should beg yours.”

He crossed to the great oak table where the document lay open, its ribbon faded from crimson to the brown of old blood, and turned it a quarter turn so the light fell across the ink.

“Come and look, Miss Darnley. I would not ask you to take a stranger’s word for so grave a thing.”

She did not move.

He had expected that too. In the three days since her letter had reached him — stiff, proud, pressed too hard on the downstrokes, informing him she meant to call and settle a matter of family business, and would he kindly not make it difficult — he had formed a picture of her. Spinsterish. Sharp-elbowed. Sour.

He had been wrong on nearly every count.

She was younger than he’d supposed. Four-and-twenty, perhaps. And she was not sour at all. She was afraid, and hiding it behind pride the way a soldier hides a wound beneath his coat, and the sight of it did something to Godric he had not felt in a long time and did not entirely welcome.

“There has been a mistake,” she said. “Some clerk’s error. Darnley is not so uncommon a name. I came here to have it corrected. Your grace, I am not — ” She faltered, color rising, and pushed through it anyway, which he admired against his will. “I am not to be told nonsense.”

“It is not nonsense. It is your name. Marisel Darnley, written in your own hand. I would know that hand anywhere, though it has grown a great deal steadier in twelve years.”

That reached her. He watched the small flinch, the flicker of doubt beneath the defiance, and was sorry for it even as he pressed the advantage — because there was no kind way to tell a woman she’d been married for twelve years without her knowledge, and the unkind way, told plainly, was at least honest.

She came to the table the way a cat crosses open ground — all wariness, all readiness to bolt — and stopped as far from him as its length allowed. He watched her face, not the document. He had read it a hundred times. He wanted to see her read it for the first time.

Her lips parted. One gloved hand rose to the table’s edge and did not quite touch it.

“That is not — ”

“It is. You were twelve. You had a scraped knee and a great deal to say about the injustice of a June bonnet.”

Her head came up sharply. For the first time she looked at him — not the cold gray column the county spoke of in lowered voices, but the particular man before her — and he watched her try to fit that face to whatever ghost his words had stirred, and fail, and be troubled by the failing.

“You,” she said slowly. “The tall boy at the May.”

“I was seventeen, and thought myself a very great man indeed.” A corner of his mouth moved, briefly, before he mastered it. “I was mistaken about that as well.”

She put both hands flat on the table and bent her head to read. He gave her the silence to do it in.

Beyond the windows the park rolled away green and gray under a low sky — forty thousand acres of it, his, and he had walked most of it alone, and it had never once occurred to him that the thing he lacked might have a name, and a scraped knee, and an opinion about bonnets.

Her voice, when it came, had gone flat and careful.

“‘On this day, before God and these witnesses, at the ancient custom of the parish of St. Cuthbert, did Godric Aldric and Marisel Darnley take hands and speak the words of truth, one to the other, freely and of their own will —'”

She stopped. Straightened.

“This is a country game. A May custom. Children play at it. It means nothing.”

“It means a great deal in this parish.” He kept his voice gentle, and heard how out of true it rang, like a bell with a flaw in it. “This is a peculiar corner of the country, Miss Darnley. The parish courts here were never fully brought under the newer marriage acts, and the bishops long ago let the old custom stand rather than fight it. There is a form here older than the church itself. Troth spoken in the churchyard at sunrise, witnessed, entered in the register by the parson’s own hand. Where the reformed law never troubled to reach, the old custom stands in its place still, and is honored as binding by the ecclesiastical court itself. Once made and witnessed, it is held to be a marriage. Not a betrothal. A marriage.”

“We did not know.”

“The form does not ask whether we knew. Only whether we spoke freely, were witnessed, and were of an age to consent. You were twelve. In this parish, in that year, a girl of twelve could be bound.”

She was very white.

“Then it is undone,” she said. “Whatever it is, it is undone. There must be ways. Men put aside wives they have grown tired of. This is nothing. This is two children playing at May morning.”

“There are ways,” he agreed. “I have spent a fortnight learning them.”

Hope leapt into her face, naked, for an instant — and he hated what he had to say next.

“Every one of them requires the matter be made public. A suit in the ecclesiastical court. Witnesses called. The register produced, examined, argued over. Your name and mine spoken in a courtroom, and then in every drawing room from here to London within the week. And at the end of it, perhaps, a decree — if the court is persuaded, which is by no means certain — that we were bound in error and are now released. Perhaps a year of it. And a woman who has been the subject of such a suit, Miss Darnley, whatever its outcome, is not afterward a woman the world is kind to.”

She turned to the window. One hand pressed to her mouth. He looked elsewhere and let her have the moment unwatched.

“You are enjoying this,” she said at last, to the glass.

“No. You are a man who has been handed a card he did not look to hold, and finds it a trump.”

She turned. Her eyes were bright and dry — she had not let herself weep, and he understood the cost of that, and honored it.

“Do you mean to hold me to it, your grace? Is that the shape of this? A duke must marry someone, and here is one already stamped and sealed and delivered to his own library.”

It was so nearly the truth of what a lesser man would do, and so entirely wrong about him, that for a moment Godric could not answer at all.