The apothecary’s daughter was bought to be a dying duke’s widow — but she smelled the poison in his wedding wine and knocked the cup from his hand before sixty guests. They locked her in her rooms. The wasps on the terrace died overnight, and no one counted them but her.

PART 2

In the morning it was the housekeeper who brought the breakfast tray herself, and stood taking her measure, top to toe, missing nothing.

“Mrs. Bracken,” the woman said. “I keep this house. I carried his Grace on my hip before I kept anything.” She was sixty, broad, with forearms that had wrung forty years of laundry. “You’ll get no cruelty from me, and no welcome either, until I know what you are. There’s some downstairs saying you tried to murder that man at his own table.”

“If I had wanted him dead,” Verity said, “I had only to let him drink.”

Mrs. Bracken considered that in silence for a long moment.

“Eat your eggs,” she said at last, and left — but she left the door unlocked behind her, which, in the language of housekeepers, is a whole letter.

The duke came at four o’clock. He came alone, on his own feet — which she would learn to recognize for the expenditure it was — and he sat where she asked him to sit.

“My cousin believes the marriage should be set aside,” he said, without preamble. “He has a physician’s opinion that you are disturbed in your senses, and an attorney’s opinion that grounds could be found. I am asked to sign things.”

“And instead you are here.”

“Instead I am here.” He looked at her a steady beat too long. “Why did you marry me, Miss Holt — you will pardon me, Duchess. I was told you were willing. I have since wondered what the word was made to cover.”

“Your cousin bought the bond I signed to keep my father’s shop out of the creditors’ hands through the trial. He offered me a choice between a husband and a debtors’ cell, and gave me a day to make it. I chose the husband. I would choose him again this morning, so you may spare us both your pity.”

“I never pity anyone with a spine,” the duke said. “It seems a waste of the material. You are owed the same honesty. I agreed because a dying man’s wife should be a stranger. A stranger’s grief costs her nothing. I had no wish to be mourned by anyone who would mean it.”

The room was very quiet. Downstairs, faint, a door; the house going about its afternoon.

“Then hear a stranger’s opinion, freely given,” Verity said. “You are not cursed, your Grace. You are being poisoned. Yesterday it was cherry-laurel water in the marriage cup — I know the smell the way you know your own hounds. And I think there has been something else, slower, for a great deal longer. Wasting men do not need finishing. Someone grew impatient of you yesterday.”

For three full seconds she thought he had heard her. Then he said, gently — and the gentleness was the cruelest part:

“My father died of this same wasting at four-and-forty. My physician calls it a constitutional decline; the result is indifferent to the name. You have lost your father to ruin and gained a dying man by purchase, all inside a year. Grief looks for an author, madam. I know. I spent a year looking for one.”

She did not argue. She had grown up in a shop; you cannot sell a remedy to a man mid-refusal.

“Then give me something smaller,” she said. “The old still-room, below the east stair. It is locked and it is wasted, and I am an apothecary’s daughter with my father’s forty years in my hands and nothing to do with them. Let the county say the mad duchess makes rosemary-water.”

He studied her — the assessment went over her like a draught off flagstones — and inclined his head.

“The still-room is yours. Bracken has the key.”

He rose, paid for it, and covered the cost with straight shoulders. At the door he paused.

That evening she watched, from the gallery, as the ritual played out below in the library: the tray, the glass, the dark bottle out of Dr. Croft’s own bag. The strengthening tonic, taken nightly these two years, mixed by the physician’s own hands because — as Croft said, with a smile of beautiful modesty — he trusted no apothecary in the county to compound it properly.

The Duke of Halewick drank his death like a gentleman, and thanked the man who poured it.

And at the foot of the stairs, under the lamp, she heard Croft say to Gates that his Grace’s decline was entering a graver stage.

From tonight, the dose would be doubled.