My fiancé didn’t break my heart. He appraised it, weighed it, and sold it to England’s most feared recluse—the so-called “Rotting Duke”—to settle his gambling debts, certain I would wither away inside that crumbling estate. But instead, I became a Duchess… and when the locked West Wing finally opened, it revealed the heartbreaking reason the Duke had chosen me long before I ever knew his name.

PART 2

I should not be writing this. I was a junior clerk at Finch & Hollis for nine years, and I signed a paper when I left that said I would not discuss the firm’s business. But I am sixty-one years old, my wife is dead, and I have carried this file around in my chest for five years like a swallowed stone. So.

Everyone in this comment section is repeating the same story: that Henry Pendleton ran up a debt, that the Duke of Harwood bought his fiancée off him, and that the poor girl was driven north like cattle to a slaughterhouse.

I copied every page added to the Pendleton file over the course of fourteen months.

Here is what nobody is saying.

The Pendleton debts did not accumulate naturally. A man who gambles badly accumulates debt in bursts — a bad night at Watier’s, a horse that does not run, a panic in the spring. What I copied was a pattern. Every note Pendleton signed, every bond he discounted, every moneylender he went to in a panic at two in the morning — all of it was being purchased. Quietly. Through three separate brokers. Always at a small premium, always within a week.

Fourteen months. Somebody had been standing in the water for over a year, waiting for Henry Pendleton to drown.

I asked Mr. Hollis once, very carefully, whether the purchaser was a client of ours. He looked at me the way a man looks at a dog that has learned to open a door, and he told me to go and file the Chancery briefs.

Then, five winters ago, the last piece of paper on the table was the marriage contract. And that is when we were told to prepare a conveyance, and a special licence, and a settlement of five hundred pounds a year for a woman none of us had ever heard of.

So I will ask the question that has kept me awake in a small house in Bermondsey for five years.

Why would a man spend fourteen months buying up a fool’s debts, if all he wanted was a wife? A duke can have a wife. He can have any wife in England — the scar on his face has never once stopped a family with a daughter and a mortgage.

He did not buy a wife. He bought the one piece of paper that Henry Pendleton could not wriggle out from under.

Which means he chose her a long time before she ever got in that carriage. And I would very much like to know why.

Oh — and one more thing, since this seems to be the place for it.

The fire. I handled the insurance correspondence, because Finch & Hollis did everything for that family. The inquest took eight days. The finding was an overturned lamp in the west wing. Nobody quarrelled with it. Nobody asked for a second survey.

But the settlement paid out enough to rebuild the entire west wing twice over, and in five years not one stone of it had been touched, not until whatever has happened up there since. It stood black and open to the sky for the better part of a decade, and the estate was never poor enough to explain it, because I have seen the accounts and I know exactly what that man is worth.

You do not leave a wing of your house burnt and empty for years because you cannot afford to fix it.

You leave it because you cannot bear to.

So somebody please tell me what is in the west wing.