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 4

The Tuesday library meetings became, without either of them quite naming the arrangement aloud, a fixture of Haldane’s week.

He told himself the first two or three times that he attended the subscription rooms on Bond Street purely by chance. That a man of his position had a hundred reasons to require a quiet hour among books. That if Githanoris happened to occupy the same table by the tall windows on the same afternoon, it was no more than coincidence, twice repeated.

By the fourth Tuesday, he had abandoned the pretense entirely.

He learned across those quiet hours the whole shape of her. Not merely the facts of her circumstance, which Marsh’s careful inquiries had already begun to sketch, but the woman herself. Curious. Quick-witted. Starved, he came to understand, of any company that did not require her to make herself smaller than she was.

She had opinions on Mrs. Radcliffe’s novels that made him laugh aloud in a reading room, drawing a scandalized look from an elderly gentleman two tables distant. She had a fondness for pressing wildflowers between the pages of whatever book she carried — a small, private habit she confessed with the particular shyness of someone unused to having her small pleasures noticed at all, let alone admired.

He learned too, in fragments she let slip without quite meaning to, how thoroughly her days outside those library hours had narrowed. Rexol did not permit her an allowance beyond what was strictly necessary for household economy. She mended her own gloves rather than replace them. And Haldane, watching her turn a page with fingers bare of any ornament beyond a thin, plain wedding band, understood that even the small vanities most gentlewomen took for granted had been rationed out of her life along with everything else.

He learned that her younger sister, Honora, married and settled in Devonshire, wrote faithfully every fortnight, and that those letters were, Githa admitted once quietly, the one correspondence in her life she still permitted herself to treasure without guilt — because Rexol found provincial family gossip too tedious to bother reading over her shoulder.

It was in the second week of April, on an afternoon when rain kept the streets nearly empty and the library unusually quiet, that Githa arrived later than her custom and paler. There was a stiffness in the way she held her left arm that she attempted unsuccessfully to disguise as she drew off her glove.

“You are hurt.”

Haldane had not meant the sharpness in his own voice. He saw her flinch — not from him, he realized at once, but from the reflexive expectation that any comment on her condition would be followed by demand rather than concern.

“It is nothing, your grace. I caught my arm against a doorframe. I am dreadfully clumsy of late.”

The lie sat badly on her. Delivered too quickly, too smoothly rehearsed. And Haldane felt something cold settle beneath his ribs at the evident practice behind it.

The practice of a woman who had, over three years, developed a whole private vocabulary of explanations for marks that were never truly accidents.

He did not press her that day. He had learned enough in his weeks of careful watching to know that pressing only drove her further behind her walls, and he wanted — more than he wanted immediate answers — for her to trust that his concern carried no obligation attached to it.

But he went that same evening to Marsh’s chambers and set the man a new, more urgent task.

Learn whether Rexol’s temper at home matched the cruelty he displayed so freely at other men’s dinner tables. And whether any servant in that household might be persuaded, gently and at no risk to their own position, to speak of what passed behind closed doors.

What Marsh brought back within a fortnight confirmed every fear Haldane had not wanted confirmed.

A lady’s maid, dismissed the previous autumn under circumstances the household steward described only as “an unfortunate misunderstanding,” had been found. Reassured of her own safety, she had spoken freely to Marsh’s inquiry agent of a household where raised voices were common. Where Mrs. Rexol wore long sleeves in summer more often than fashion alone explained. And where the servants had learned, as servants in such households always eventually learn, to move quietly and ask no questions.

Haldane read the report standing at his study window in the last gray light of an April evening. He felt, for the second time since Fenwick House, the particular cold clarity that came over him only in the presence of a cruelty he had decided, absolutely and without further debate, that he would not permit to continue unanswered.

He thought of his own father. A distant, correct man who had never once, in Haldane’s memory, raised either voice or hand to his mother, and who had nonetheless taught his son, by the sheer unbending example of his own restraint, that a gentleman’s strength was measured precisely by how carefully he governed it.

Haldane had spent twelve years since his broken engagement believing that restraint meant distance. Meant walls. Meant never again permitting himself to want anything enough that its loss could wound him.

He understood now, watching rain streak the glass exactly as it had streaked the library windows, that his father’s true lesson had been something else entirely.

That strength was not the absence of feeling. But the discipline to feel a great deal — and still choose the harder and more honorable course.

The harder course, he decided that evening, was not to watch and wait and gather evidence. However necessary, that patient work would continue. But it was also to ensure that whatever came of his growing feeling for Githanoris Rexol — and he no longer pretended to himself that feeling was small or manageable, or anything less than the first true crack in twelve years of careful armor — it must be built on a foundation strong enough to survive whatever scandal her freedom might cost them both.

He doubled Marsh’s efforts that week. He instructed Fielding to begin the quiet, preliminary work of assessing what a suit might require, even before any formal engagement was made.

And he continued every Tuesday, without fail, to sit across a library table from a woman who did not yet know how thoroughly he had already begun rearranging the whole of his careful, guarded life around the plain, growing certainty that he intended to see her free of it.

Whatever the cost proved to be.