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 3

The next morning she was gone before the servants lit the kitchen fire.

Four days north, and the roads got worse with every mile. The carriage rattled over rutted dirt while the sky bruised purple and grey with coming rain. Beatrice’s bones ached. By the third afternoon the bread they had brought was stale and the cold had worked its way through the wool of her cloak and into the small of her back.

She had spent those four days reading her mother’s ledger until she knew it by heart.

It was a record of everything Lady Whitmore had owned in her own name, and Lord Whitmore had spent most of the dowry years ago. But there was one property he had never been able to touch, because it was entailed directly to Beatrice and no living man could sign it away.

Oak Haven. A crumbling manor house on the desolate, windswept moors of North Yorkshire. The roof reportedly leaked. The grounds were feral. It produced nothing and had been empty for a decade.

It was hers. Bricks, mortar, three thousand acres of bad land, and not one soul on earth who could dictate a single inch of it.

The further north they drove, the easier it became to breathe.

They reached Oak Haven in the fading light of a torrential downpour. The manor loomed out of the mist like a forgotten gravestone — dark, rough-hewn stone, half swallowed by aggressive ivy. Several windows on the second floor were boarded. The oak front door looked as though it had not been opened since the turn of the century.

Clara peered out of the carriage window, her breath fogging the glass.

“Miss Beatrice. It looks haunted.”

“Good.” Beatrice pulled her wool cloak tighter. “Ghosts are infinitely better company than dukes.”

She stepped out into the mud. The rain was freezing and went through her clothes instantly. The driver, an old man who had served her mother and had refused to be paid for this journey, forced the rusted lock with a crowbar and a great deal of swearing.

Inside, it was a tomb.

Dust lay a quarter-inch thick on everything. The air tasted of rot and old paper. Sheet-covered furniture sat in the gloom like slumbering animals, and somewhere upstairs a shutter banged against stone with the patience of something that had been doing it for years.

The cold settled into her joints and made a home there.

It was terrible. It was perfect.

For the next two weeks, Beatrice Whitmore did not behave like the daughter of a viscount.

She rolled up her sleeves. With Clara and a sullen local caretaker named Griggs — a man with permanent grease under his nails and the simmering resentment of someone who did not care to take orders from a disgraced twenty-two-year-old woman from London — she set about forcing life back into the house.

They scrubbed decades of grime off the wooden floors until the grain came through. They tore the rotting drapes down and let the pale Yorkshire light bleed in. She learned to build a fire that did not immediately smoke them out of the parlour, a skill acquired through a great deal of coughing. Her hands, which had been soft and manicured her entire life, blistered along the palms and then hardened.

She ruined her remaining good dresses. She ate stews of root vegetables and tough mutton, and they tasted better than any eight-course banquet she had ever sat through in Mayfair.

She was exhausted, aching, and completely isolated. She had never felt more powerful.

The solitude was absolute, broken only by the wind off the moors. In the evenings she sat in the library wrapped in blankets, reading her mother’s old books by candlelight, and she pushed the memory of Angelo, of Genevieve’s triumphant face, of her father’s red cheeks, into a small locked box at the back of her mind.

She should have known better. Men who are denied what they want do not let a woman disappear quietly. That is not in their nature.

It was a Tuesday afternoon in early autumn. She was in the courtyard wrestling with a rose bush that had eaten the entire stone path, wearing thick leather gloves to the elbow, when hoofbeats broke the silence of the moor.

A solitary rider came up the winding drive. As he drew closer she took in the immaculate cut of his riding coat and the polished leather of his boots, and she understood that he did not belong here.

He dismounted a few yards away and bowed. He was perhaps thirty, with sharp, intelligent eyes and a professional smile that had been practised in front of a mirror.

“Lady Beatrice.”

“I am no longer answering to titles from London.” She kept the pruning shears firmly in her right hand. “Who are you?”

“My name is Mr. Charles Hail. I am the chief solicitor to the Duke of Westford.”

Beatrice stared at him.

The audacity of it. Angelo had not even come himself. He had sent a clerk to retrieve his runaway property.

“Mr. Hail,” she said slowly. “You have ridden a very long way for nothing.”

“His Grace is prepared to be extraordinarily generous.” Hail stepped closer, his boots sinking into the mud. He glanced at the crumbling façade of Oak Haven and did not quite manage to hide his disgust. “He understands that you felt slighted. He is willing to offer an increased settlement to your father. Furthermore, the companion who caused the disturbance at the ceremony has been sent to the country. She is no longer in London.”

Beatrice laughed. It was a sharp, barking sound that startled the horse.

“He sent his mistress to the country. And he thinks this is about jealousy. He thinks I care who warms his bed.”

“Lady Beatrice. Please, look around you.” Hail gestured at the moors, the damp stone, the black sky. “You cannot live like this. You are a gentlewoman. Come back to London. Say the vows. Your debts will be cleared and your position restored. The scandal will fade in a month.”

“My position,” Beatrice repeated softly.

She looked down at her mud-caked boots. Then back up at the solicitor.

“Tell the Duke that my position here is standing on my own land. My position in London was kneeling on his.”

Hail’s polished veneer slipped a fraction.

“Lady Beatrice, your father is facing ruin. If you refuse this, His Grace will ensure that the Whitmore family is bankrupt by the end of the quarter. It is not a threat. It is a financial certainty.”

The threat sat in the damp air between them. A cold knot tightened in her stomach. She hated her father — but she did not wish to watch him destroyed, and Angelo knew it. He was tightening the garotte one turn at a time, and he was doing it slowly on purpose.

“You tell Angelo,” she said, dropping her voice into a low register that surprised them both, “that if he moves against my family’s remaining assets, I will not quietly return to London. I will go to Parliament. I will stand in the public gallery and read out the ledgers of his illegal gambling debts that I found in his study during our courtship. I will burn his political standing to the ground.”

Hail’s eyes widened. “You have no such ledgers.”

“Call my bluff, Mr. Hail.” She raised her chin. “I dare you.”

She did not have the ledgers. She had spent enough time in Angelo’s company to know one thing about him: he was more afraid of scandal touching the Crown than of anything else in creation, and he would never risk the test.

Hail stared at her for a long moment. Whatever he had expected to find in the mud of Yorkshire, it was not this.

“I will relay your message,” he said stiffly. He mounted. “Good day, madam.”

She watched him ride away until he was a speck on the grey horizon.

Her hands were shaking inside the leather gloves.

The war was not over. It had only just begun.