The Duke brought his mistress home and ordered his wife to move to a cottage at the edge of his estate. He expected her to fade quietly into obscurity. Instead, while his mistress bankrupted his household, the woman he discarded quietly became the heart of his entire estate — and he only discovered it when he returned to find his estate had chosen her over him.

PART 7

The letter announcing Edward’s return arrived at Camden Hall on a bright morning in early April, carried by a rider who had traveled hard from the capital to ensure the household had proper notice. Nearly seven months had passed since the autumn evening he had walked past his wife into his own house without a word.

Isabelle read the letter with a mixture of relief and rising panic. She spent the following days in a frantic effort to disguise the worst of the damage — fresh flowers in every room, an elaborate homecoming meal prepared by a kitchen staff reduced in number after several winter departures, a new gown ordered from the capital at a cost that made Mr. Colton wince.

But no amount of flowers could fully hide what months of neglect had done to the estate grounds. The formal gardens had suffered through a winter of inadequate pruning, and a section of the once elegant rose garden had clearly not received the protective winter care necessary to ensure a healthy spring blooming.

Charlotte, by contrast, received the news of Edward’s imminent return with far less anxiety than might have been expected.

“He returns within the week,” Agnes said carefully.

Charlotte, kneeling in her garden with soil-stained hands, continued her work without pausing. “Then I suppose we shall see what he makes of everything that has changed since he left.”

“You are not worried?”

“I have spent the last several months building something I am genuinely proud of,” Charlotte said, finally sitting back on her heels. “Whatever Edward thinks of it, whatever he decides to do about it, that pride belongs entirely to me now. It is not his to take away simply by returning home.”

Edward’s carriage arrived at Camden Hall on a mild spring afternoon, and Isabelle stood ready at the entrance in her new gown. But Edward seemed distracted from the very first moment, his eyes drifting past Isabelle’s carefully arranged welcome to take in the state of the grounds around the main house.

“The gardens look poorly kept,” he said before Isabelle had even finished her prepared greeting.

“The new gardener has struggled somewhat with the transition,” Isabelle said quickly. “But come inside, Edward. Surely you are tired from your journey.”

His mood remained noticeably unsettled throughout the elaborate welcome dinner. He noticed familiar faces among the staff were absent, replaced by newer servants whose names he did not yet know. He noticed the new furniture in the drawing room — expensive, but somehow not quite as well-made as the pieces it had replaced.

And when he requested to review the household accounts the following morning, expecting the same steady reports Mr. Colton had always provided, he found instead a ledger that told a far more troubling story.

“This cannot be accurate,” he said, staring at the figures with genuine alarm. “We are considerably behind where we should be for this point in the year. I recall Colton’s letters assuring me matters here were proceeding smoothly.”

Mr. Colton, called in to provide a more complete account, hesitated for the first time in the entire conversation. He set down a small bundle of papers — the private copies he had kept since February — and laid them on the desk beside the ledger.

“Your Grace,” he said carefully, “I wrote to you a great deal more than what apparently reached you. These are copies of what I sent. I cannot account for why the versions that arrived in the capital said rather less than I intended them to say.”

Edward looked from the ledger to the papers and back again, a cold understanding beginning to settle over his features. He turned to Isabelle. “You reviewed Colton’s letters before they were sent to me.”

“I thought it best you not be troubled with every small matter while you were occupied with the shipping contracts,” Isabelle said, her composure beginning, for the first time, to genuinely crack. “I never meant —”

“You decided what I was permitted to know about my own household,” Edward said, his voice quiet in a way that was somehow worse than shouting. “For seven months.”

He did not raise his voice further. He simply gathered Colton’s papers, thanked him with unusual formality, and asked to be left alone.

“And the tenant farms?” he asked before Colton withdrew, almost dreading the answer. “How have they fared through the winter?”

Here, Mr. Colton allowed himself a slight but meaningful pause. “The tenant farms have fared reasonably well, Your Grace. Though I confess the credit for this belongs less to the main house’s management than to arrangements made independently through the cottage.”

Edward’s expression shifted from anger to genuine confusion. “The cottage? You mean Charlotte has been managing tenant affairs?”

“Not officially, Your Grace,” Mr. Colton clarified carefully. “But tenants have increasingly brought their concerns to her directly, and she has ensured, through correspondence with myself, that legitimate needs received appropriate attention. Without her involvement, I fear several families would have faced considerable hardship this winter.”

Edward said nothing further that morning, but something in his expression suggested the seeds of a very different understanding had just been planted — one that would grow, in the days that followed, into something closer to reckoning.