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 4

Three weeks bled into four, marked not by the calendar but by the slow, agonising reduction of grime.

The smell of lemon wax began to wage a successful war against the mildew. Fires burned in the drawing rooms, casting warm flickering light against the ancient tapestries. But a clean house was merely a polished sinking ship.

I sat at the massive oak desk in the estate office, my fingers stained with cheap iron-gall ink. The ledgers Nathaniel had initially tried to withhold from me were now my daily obsession. The mathematics of ruin were laid out in jagged, aggressive handwriting — generations of neglect, compounded by the fire, accelerated by Nathaniel’s own isolation.

“You are scowling at the paper as if it offended you personally.”

I did not look up. I dipped my pen into the inkwell.

“It does offend me. Your grandfather sold the best grazing land to a neighbouring baronet for a pittance, and your father somehow managed to lose money during a boom in the wool trade. It is a legacy of spectacular incompetence.”

Nathaniel stepped into the room, bringing the scent of the moors with him — damp earth, crushed heather, cold wind. His riding coat was mud-splattered to the knee. He walked with a slight limp today, the cold settling into old injuries.

“My ancestors were not known for their financial acumen,” he admitted, leaning against the edge of the desk. Closer than he usually allowed himself to be. I could see the fine webbing of scars pulling tight across his jaw. “They preferred hunting and gambling.”

“And what do you prefer, Nathaniel?”

He met my gaze. The milky cloudiness of his left eye made him difficult to read, but his right was sharp and endlessly tired.

“I prefer quiet. I prefer the moors.”

“The moors do not pay the butcher’s bill.”

I closed the ledger with a heavy thud.

“We are losing the northern tenant farms. Three families packed up and left in the dead of night because their cottage roofs are caving in and the lower valley is drowning in peat bog. You cannot collect rent from people who are starving.”

“I know.”

The admission was quiet, stripped of the defensive anger he had wielded in our first week.

“I sent the estate manager away two years ago. He was stealing from them. Stealing from me. I thought I could manage it myself. Then the winter came, and the isolation—” He stopped. “It was easier to simply close the door.”

“Then we are opening the door.”

I stood, smoothing the front of my wool skirt.

“Have the horses saddled. We are riding out to the lower valley.”

He frowned, crossing his arms. “It rained for three days straight, Cecilia. The roads are a slurry of mud. You have no business out there in a riding habit.”

“I am not going to a garden party, Nathaniel. I am going to inspect my investments.”

I pulled my heavy cloak off the hook by the door.

“Unless you prefer to stay here and hide.”

It was a low blow. But it worked. His jaw tightened, the scarred tissue pulling taut.

“I will tell the stables to prepare your mount,” he said. “Try not to break your neck.”

The ride to the lower valley was brutal. The Yorkshire wind bit through my cloak, carrying a fine icy mist that settled into my bones. The landscape was a desolate, bruising expanse of greys and browns. Beside me, Nathaniel rode a massive, ill-tempered black gelding, handling the beast with an effortless raw strength that belied his damaged appearance.

We arrived at a cluster of miserable stone cottages hunched against the side of a hill. The thatched roofs were rotting, black with moisture. A few scrawny chickens pecked desperately at the frozen mud.

A man emerged from the largest cottage, his face weathered into permanent grooves of exhaustion. He stopped dead when he saw Nathaniel. Fear — raw, instinctual — flashed across his eyes before he yanked his flat cap from his head and bowed stiffly.

“Your Grace,” the man mumbled to the mud.

“Mr. Higgins,” Nathaniel replied. His voice was flat, devoid of warmth. He remained on his horse, a looming, intimidating figure against the grey sky.

This was how he ruled. Through fear and distance.

I swung down from my mare before Nathaniel could offer assistance. My boots sank an inch into the freezing muck.

“Mr. Higgins,” I said, stepping forward and forcing a pleasantness into my voice that I did not feel. “I am the Duchess of Harwood. We have come to look at the drainage ditches in the lower field.”

The tenant stared at me, then up at Nathaniel, utterly bewildered.

“The ditches, Your Grace — they’ve flooded. The stone collapsed a month ago. We haven’t had the hands to clear the debris.”

“Show me.”

For the next two hours I waded through ankle-deep mud, inspecting the ruined infrastructure of the farm. Nathaniel followed in silence. He did not intervene when I peppered Higgins with questions about crop yields, seed costs, and the health of the sheep. I wrote the figures in a small notebook, shielding the pages from the mist with my body.

We found the collapsed ditch at the edge of the property. A massive limestone boulder had dislodged from the hill, crushing the stone culvert and damming the water — turning an entire acre of arable land into a useless, freezing swamp.

“We tried to move it,” Higgins said miserably, shivering in his thin coat. “Me and my boys. But we’d need a team of draft horses and block and tackle we don’t have.”

I looked at the boulder.

Then I looked at Nathaniel.

He did not say a word. He dismounted, handing his reins to a terrified farm boy who had crept out to watch us. He walked to the edge of the ditch, his boots sinking deep. He stripped off his heavy riding coat and tossed it over a fence post. Underneath, his linen shirt clung to the broad, heavy musculature of his back and shoulders.

He stepped down into the freezing water.

“Nathaniel, what are you doing?”

He did not answer. He called for the two farm hands who had followed Higgins down from the cottage, and set them to wedging a long fence rail beneath the boulder’s underside as a lever, propped against a flat stone for purchase. He waded to the boulder himself, wedged his hands into the thick muck beneath its base, and braced his boots against the slick stone of the collapsed culvert.

“Higgins!” The gravel in his voice cut through the wind. “You and your boys bear down on that rail. When I lift, you pivot it into the mudbank.”

Higgins and his sons threw their weight onto the rail, driven by shock and the sheer command in the Duke’s voice. Nathaniel closed his eyes. The muscles in his back coiled tightly against the wet linen. He let out a low, guttural breath and drove upward, adding his own raw strength to the leverage of the rail.

The sound of sucking mud and grinding stone filled the air. For an agonising second, nothing happened.

Then, slowly, painfully, the boulder began to shift. The veins in Nathaniel’s neck stood out like cords. The unscarred half of his face flushed a deep crimson.

“Now!”

The farm hands threw their combined weight against the rail. The boulder groaned, tilted, and rolled heavily into the soft bank — clear of the water. Instantly, the dammed, muddy water surged forward, rushing through the cleared channel.

Nathaniel stood in the knee-deep muck, chest heaving, his hands raw and bleeding from the rough stone. He looked up at me, standing on the bank.

He was not a monster hiding in the dark. He was a man who had forgotten he still had strength left to use.

I reached into my pocket, pulled out a clean linen handkerchief, and stepped to the edge of the muddy bank. I held it out.

He stared at the white square of fabric. Then at my face.

Slowly he waded out of the ditch, took the handkerchief, and wrapped it around his bleeding palm.

“We will send a cart of dry timber from the estate stores tomorrow, Mr. Higgins,” I told the stunned farmer, not breaking eye contact with my husband. “To repair your roof. In exchange, you will clear the rest of this drainage channel before the first freeze.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” Higgins breathed, staring at Nathaniel with a newfound, profound reverence. “Thank you, Your Grace.”

We rode back in silence. The rain began to fall harder, washing the mud from the horses’ flanks. When we finally reached the courtyard of Harwood Hall we were both soaked to the bone and shivering.

Nathaniel dismounted and came to the side of my horse. He reached up, grasped me by the waist, and lifted me down to the cobblestones.

He did not let go immediately. His hands — massive and warm even through my damp cloak — lingered on my hips.

“You ruined your boots,” he said quietly, looking down at my feet.

“They are just boots, Nathaniel.” I looked up into his face. The rain had plastered his dark hair to his forehead, obscuring the worst of the scars. “I can buy new ones when the spring rents come in.”

A small, genuine smile cracked the rigid lines of his face. It transformed him utterly.

“You are a very stubborn woman, Cecilia. And you are surprisingly useful in a ditch.”

I stepped back, breaking the contact, though my skin burned where he had held me.

“Go inside before you catch your death. We have ledgers to balance.”