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 8

Edward rode out that same afternoon to inspect the tenant farms, drawn by a curiosity he could not fully explain even to himself.

He visited the Fletcher farm first. Margaret greeted him with polite but reserved courtesy, and he noticed, with some surprise, the well-maintained barn roof and the healthy state of the family’s livestock — despite what should have been a difficult winter.

“The estate has treated you well this winter, I trust,” he said, expecting the usual polite affirmations.

Margaret hesitated only briefly before answering with careful honesty. “The Duchess has treated us well, Your Grace. I am not certain the main house would have addressed our needs so promptly without her involvement.”

Edward absorbed this in silence, hearing the same underlying pattern repeated at farm after farm as the afternoon went on. By the time he turned his horse toward the eastern edge of the grounds, he found himself approaching the cottage with a mixture of curiosity and something that felt uncomfortably close to shame. He had not visited the cottage even once since the autumn he had assigned it to Charlotte almost as an afterthought.

What he found along the familiar lane stopped him entirely in his tracks.

The cottage garden stretched before him in vibrant, orderly rows, early spring vegetables already pushing green shoots through dark, well-tended soil. The old apple tree, which he vaguely remembered as a tangled, neglected thing, stood now covered in delicate white blossoms, its branches pruned with obvious care. Smoke curled gently from the chimney, and through the window he could see Charlotte seated at her table, several tenant children gathered around her, their heads bent together over some shared task, laughter drifting faintly through the open window.

He sat astride his horse for several long minutes, unable to reconcile the vibrant, purposeful life he witnessed before him with the humiliated, discarded woman he had left behind the previous autumn.

He did not approach the cottage that evening. But the image remained with him through a restless night, tangled together with the knowledge of what Isabelle had done with Colton’s letters — a betrayal he understood now was as much his own failure as hers. He had left instructions to be written to only “when a matter genuinely required his attention,” and had trusted that judgment to a woman he had chosen for reasons that had nothing to do with judgment at all. He had made it easy for the truth to be filtered away from him, because he had never once made clear that he wanted to hear it, however inconvenient.

By morning, he had resolved to confront the truth of his situation directly.

He summoned Isabelle to the study first. She arrived expecting perhaps a discussion of how to address the financial concerns together. What she found instead was a man whose earlier fondness had curdled into something far colder.

“I have spent the night considering exactly what you did with Colton’s letters,” Edward began without preamble. “And I have spent it considering, too, what it says about me that I never once asked why his letters had grown so thin.”

“The winter was difficult,” Isabelle said, falling back on the explanation she had rehearsed. “Managing an estate of this size requires time to learn properly, Edward.”

“Learning is not the same as deciding I did not need to know the truth,” Edward replied, his voice hardening. “You did not merely fail to manage this household well. You made certain I would not learn of it until I could see the damage with my own eyes.”

Isabelle’s composure finally began to crack. “That is hardly entirely my doing. If tenants chose to bypass proper channels and appeal to a woman with no official authority, that reflects poorly on their judgment, not on my management.”

“Or does it reflect,” Edward said quietly, “the fact that when they brought their concerns to you, nothing was done — while when they brought the same concerns to my wife, their problems were solved?”

“Your wife,” Isabelle spat, the word carrying more bitterness than she likely intended to reveal, “has always had certain advantages. I was never given the chance to develop.”

“She was raised to arrange flowers and plan dinner parties,” Edward said, and something in his voice suggested he was working through this realization even as he spoke it aloud. “No one taught her to manage tenant disputes. She learned that herself this winter — in a cottage, without resources, and without my letters reaching her either, I imagine, though she never once thought to hide that fact from anyone.”

Isabelle had no adequate response.

“What will you do?” she finally asked, her voice smaller than Edward had ever heard it.

“I do not yet know everything I intend to do,” he admitted. “But your time managing this household has ended. I will arrange a reasonable settlement for you to establish yourself elsewhere. I would ask that you be gone within the week.”

Isabelle did not argue extensively, seeming to recognize on some level that her time at Camden Hall had reached its natural conclusion. She departed within the week, her carriage rolling away down the same long drive that had once carried her toward what she believed would be a life of grand authority and comfortable indulgence.

With Isabelle’s departure settled, Edward rode out to the cottage that same afternoon, this time without hesitation, though with considerably less certainty about what he intended to say than he usually allowed himself to feel before any difficult conversation.

He found Charlotte in her garden, tying young pea plants to a row of wooden stakes. She looked up at his approach with an expression that held no fear — and no particular eagerness either. The calm, assessing look of a woman who had grown genuinely comfortable in her own circumstances.

“Edward,” she said simply, rising to face him.

“Charlotte.” He found himself momentarily uncertain how to continue — an unfamiliar sensation for a man accustomed to speaking with unquestioned authority. “I know now what Isabelle did with Colton’s letters. I know what the tenants told me today. And I know, more than either of those things, that I left this house seven months ago and never once thought to ask how you were faring in a cottage I assigned you almost as an afterthought.”

“You did not,” Charlotte agreed, without cruelty, but without softening the truth either.

“I made a mistake,” he said, the admission clearly costing him considerable pride — more, perhaps, than it ever had before. “Not only in believing Isabelle capable of managing this house. In believing you would need nothing from me at all once I had decided where you would live. I did not check whether the cottage roof still leaked. I did not ask whether you had enough to eat through the winter. I simply assumed the matter was settled the moment I gave the order, and I did not think of you again until I saw your garden yesterday and felt, for the first time in longer than I care to admit, genuinely ashamed of myself.”

Charlotte studied him for a long moment. “That is closer to an honest accounting than I expected from you, Edward.”

“I would like to restore you to your proper place,” he said. “You belong in the main house, managing this estate as my wife should.”

“Perhaps I do, eventually,” Charlotte said slowly. “But I will not simply return because your earlier arrangement has proven inconvenient, or because Isabelle’s departure has left you needing someone competent again. If I return to the main house, it will be because we have genuinely discussed what our marriage should actually look like going forward — and because you have shown me, over time, not just told me, that my judgment will be genuinely valued rather than merely useful when it happens to suit you.”

“What would you require, then?”

“Time,” Charlotte said simply. “Time for you to understand what happened here this winter, and why — including the part you played in it yourself, by never once asking whether the arrangement you had made was actually working. I will not rush back into a role simply because it has become convenient for you to have me there again.”

Edward left the cottage that afternoon with far more to consider than he had arrived with — and, for the first time since his return, without any illusion that the matter could be resolved with a single decision or a single conversation.