The Duke Brought His Mistress to Their Wedding Before Three Hundred Guests—So Beatrice Tossed Her Veil onto the Marble and Walked Away, Never Knowing Her Father Had Already Signed Away the One Thing That Could Destroy Her Freedom
PART 2
The carriage ride back to Mayfair was not silent, though Beatrice wished it were.
Her father sat across from her, vibrating with a rage that bordered on the medical. He slammed his silver-tipped cane against the floorboard hard enough to split the varnish.
“You have destroyed us.”
Beatrice watched the city roll past. Grey, indifferent, entirely uninterested in her.
“A little embarrassment. That is all it was. A minor embarrassment, and you could have weathered it. But no. No, you had to make a mockery of this family.”
“He brought his mistress to the altar, Father.”
“He is a duke.” Her father roared it. “Dukes do as they please. Do you imagine your mother enjoyed my indiscretions? She had the good grace to look the other way, and we had thirty-one years of it. And now what do we have? Debts. Ruinous, insurmountable debts.”
“Sell the Yorkshire estate.”
“It has been in the family for three hundred years.”
“Then go to debtors’ prison with your pride intact.”
She turned to face him then, and for the first time in twenty-two years she did not bother to make her eyes kind.
“I will not tie myself to a man who treats me like a dog to be kicked for his amusement. I was a bride, Father. Not a martyr.”
At the townhouse she stepped down before the footman had finished lowering the steps. The staff had already heard; gossip travelled faster than cholera and did not need a horse. She walked through the front doors and up the stairs and into her bedroom, and she rang for Clara with a violence that made the bell cord shudder.
“Get this off me.”
Clara’s hands were trembling. The laces came apart one by one, and the silk fell away like a shed skin. When the corset finally unhooked, Beatrice took a breath so deep it hurt. Her ribs ached. She stepped out of the crinoline and stood in her shift by the mahogany side table.
She did not weep. She waited for the urge to throw herself on the bed and sob into the pillows, and it did not come. What she had instead was a cold, jagged anger and a gnawing anxiety about tomorrow, and not one grain of regret.
She poured two fingers of her father’s worst scotch and drank it neat. It burned a clean path down her throat and grounded her back inside her own body.
By nightfall the house was under siege. Notes arrived in droves — society matrons fishing for details under the flag of sympathy, creditors who had caught the smell of a collapsed merger in the water. Her father locked himself in his study and did not come out for supper.
At midnight, a heavy knock.
Clara appeared with a silver tray bearing a single envelope, sealed in red wax with the Westford crest.
Beatrice broke the seal. The handwriting inside was sharp and aggressive, full of forward slants.
Beatrice. Your theatrics this afternoon were profoundly tedious. I am willing to overlook this bout of feminine hysteria. I will return to the church with you on Tuesday. A private ceremony. No guests. You have made your point. Now cease this foolishness before your father loses his shirt. — Westford
She read it twice.
He believed he was being generous. He believed she would come crawling back, because the alternative was ruin, and ruin was unthinkable to a woman of her station.
He had never once considered that she might prefer to be ruined on her own terms than kept on his.
She carried the letter to the fireplace and dropped it into the dying embers. She watched the wax melt and the paper curl to black.
Then she walked past her father’s study and stopped. The door was ajar. In the grate, a mound of fresh ash still held the ghost of its shape. She could smell sealing wax and burnt paper, and something else — the sour wine smell of fear.
Her father had been burning his correspondence. At midnight, on the day of his ruin.
She did not go in. She went to her desk and opened her mother’s leather-bound ledger instead.