She Stayed Silent as Her Husband Called Her Mute Before the Entire Table — Then the Feared Iron Duke Set Down His Fork, Defended Her Before Everyone, and Began Uncovering the Secret Behind Her Three-Year Marriage

PART 2 

He did not sleep well that night.

Haldane lay in the dark of his townhouse on Grosvenor Square, turning over the memory of gray eyes that had looked at cruelty and refused to be diminished by it. Somewhere in the small hours between one turn of thought and the next, he made a decision he did not yet fully understand the shape of: that he would learn the truth of Githanoris Rexol’s marriage, whatever the cost of the learning, and that whatever he found, he would not stand by a second time and watch a good woman be shamed for another man’s sport.

By the second week of March, he had learned three things.

The first came from his aunt, Lady Orilia Vance, who knew the particulars of every family in three counties the way a general knows terrain.

“Githanoris Norris,” she said, turning the name over as though tasting a vintage. “Sir Aldis Norris’s eldest girl from the Herefordshire branch. A good family, old blood, though thin in the pocket these last years. There was some trouble with the father’s investments. A canal scheme that swallowed a great deal more than it returned. And then a very sudden marriage three years back to that Rexol creature. New money. Coal and shipping interests. I recall thinking it an odd match even then.”

Orilia’s sharp eyes fixed on him. “Why do you ask, nephew? You have never in your life shown the slightest interest in another man’s marriage.”

“I witnessed something at Fenwick House I did not care for.”

Which was true, and told her nothing, which was also true.

The second thing he learned from his solicitor, Mr. Elias Marsh. Haldane asked him, with the studied casualness of a man discussing the weather, to make discreet inquiry into the financial circumstances of Sir Aldis Norris of Herefordshire, and into the marriage settlement concluded between that gentleman’s daughter and one Corbin Rexol.

It took Marsh a fortnight to bring back what he found.

And what he found made Haldane set down his pen very slowly and sit for a long moment in the silence of his study, looking at nothing at all.

Sir Aldis Norris had indeed lost heavily in a canal speculation. In the year before his daughter’s marriage, he had found himself under significant pressure from a creditor holding some £4,000 of his paper. A creditor who had purchased that debt from its original holders at a considerable discount.

“The creditor’s name was Corbin Rexol,” Haldane said slowly.

“So it would appear, your grace. Six months before he ever proposed marriage.”

Haldane turned this over, feeling something cold and precise settle into place in his mind. A man did not buy up a struggling gentleman’s debt at a discount, sit upon it quietly for half a year, and then present himself as a suitor for that gentleman’s daughter — unless the debt itself was meant from the beginning as a lever rather than an investment.

It was not proof of coercion. Not on its own.

But it was the shape of a trap drawn in a moneylender’s careful, patient hand.

And Haldane had seen enough traps in his life to recognize the pattern when it lay before him on his solicitor’s paper.