She Thought She Took My Place as the Duchess… But She Only Inherited My Nightmare

Chapter 3

So she kept the secret the way you keep a candle flame cupped in your hands, walking carefully, hiding it from every draft.

In the afternoons she sewed. The elderly seamstress of the estate had taught her the delicate stitches reserved for royal dressmakers, and now Theodosia put them to a more private use. She embroidered tiny flowers onto soft blankets. She stitched a pair of white slippers no larger than the palm of her hand. She made a little gown with sleeves no longer than her finger, and she held it up to the window and laughed, and then cried, and then laughed again.

The old seamstress found her one afternoon, bent over her work in the golden light.

“Your grace,” the woman whispered, her eyes on the tiny garment. “Does his grace know?”

Theodosia looked down at the blanket in her lap and slowly shook her head.

“Will you tell him soon?”

A genuine smile lit her face. “I want to surprise him.”

The seamstress studied her for a long moment — the young duchess who had been carried into this house four years ago like a gift, and slowly ground down into something quiet. For a moment, the old woman allowed herself to believe that happiness had finally found its way into these cold walls.

“I pray this child brings peace into your home,” she said softly.

“So do I,” Theodosia replied.

Peace never came.

It happened on a Tuesday, over soup.

Ambrose returned late from a council meeting with the king, already brittle, already looking for something to break. Dinner had been prepared exactly as he liked. Everything was perfect except one thing: a kitchen servant had fallen ill, delaying the meal by minutes, and by the time the tureen reached the table, the soup was no longer steaming.

Ambrose lifted the silver spoon. He tasted it once. His expression went dark.

“Cold.”

No one dared breathe. Theodosia reached gently for the bowl. “I’ll have them warm it—”

She never finished the sentence.

He seized the heavy silver serving dish and hurled it across the room. It struck her body first, a brutal impact that knocked the air from her lungs, then crashed onto the marble floor with a sound like a church bell breaking. Theodosia gasped and folded, her hands flying to her stomach as pain lanced through her.

The servants rushed forward, then froze when Ambrose turned his glare on them. No one moved. No one dared.

Then a maid screamed.

Blood was spreading across the pale ivory of Theodosia’s gown, a dark red stain blooming like a rose.

The physician was summoned in the middle of the night. He worked through the hours of darkness with the servants gathered in the corridor, praying, their hands clasped, their whispers carrying up and down the stairs like wind through a hollow house. Theodosia drifted in and out of a haze of pain, and at some point she realized she was praying too, bargaining with God the way she had bargained with her husband — take anything, take everything, only let this one thing live.

Just after sunrise, the physician stepped out of the room.

His face said everything before his mouth could.

“I’m deeply sorry, your grace,” he said, lowering his head. “We couldn’t save the baby.”

Theodosia closed her eyes.

No tears came. That was the strangest thing. She had cried so easily in the first years of her marriage, at every unkind word, at every raised hand. Now there was nothing left, only a vast, quiet hollow where the hope had been. She stretched out a trembling hand toward the bedside table, where the old seamstress had placed the tiny embroidered blanket she had spent weeks making. She pulled it against her chest and held it there, her whole body curved around it like a mother sheltering a child from wind.

It was the only thing she would ever have of her baby.

She fell asleep holding it.

When she woke that afternoon, Ambrose was standing at the foot of her bed. For one foolish, blazing second, she believed he had come to comfort her. She saw the shape of him against the window light and thought — he is going to be kind, he is going to say he is sorry, he is going to hold me.

Instead he looked at her with the flat, bored indifference of a man inspecting a broken piece of furniture.

“Perhaps,” he said coldly, “God knew you weren’t worthy of giving me an heir.”

He turned and walked out.

The door closed behind him with a soft click, and Theodosia stared at it for a long, long time.

Something inside her had begun to break that day. Not her heart — her heart had been breaking quietly for years, in pieces so small she barely noticed. No. Something else. Something deeper. Something that had been holding her together against all reason, all evidence, all the nights she had spent on her knees on cold marble.

That something was starting to crack.