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 4

Rain battered the leaded windows for three days straight, sealing Oak Haven in a cocoon of grey.

Beatrice sat wrapped in a damp wool shawl with her mother’s accounting book open on her knees, and the numbers were not merely bleak. They were catastrophic.

Three thousand acres of rugged moor, and land without capital is only dirt. She dragged a silver fountain pen across the coarse paper, tallying what remained of her pocket money.

Ninety-four pounds and change. Enough for flour and root vegetables and perhaps another month of coal. Not enough to hire shepherds for the spring lambing. Not enough to repair the collapsed eastern roof that was currently dripping into the drawing room in a slow, patient rhythm.

And Angelo’s silence from London was deafening. She had bluffed his solicitor and won the exchange, but she knew the Duke of Westford was not a man who accepted defeat. He would be regrouping, calculating something quieter and more devastating.

She needed an income. That was all. That was everything.

“Griggs.”

The caretaker appeared in the doorway a moment later, wiping grease off his hands with a rag.

“What do we actually own out there?” she asked, nodding at the fog-choked window. “Aside from mud and heather.”

Griggs scratched his jaw. “Sheep, mostly. Few hundred head of Swaledale wandering the high crags. Feral things. Haven’t been properly sheared or counted in five years.”

“Then we shear them.”

Griggs let out a harsh, scraping laugh. “Wool sells. Aye, the mills in Bradford are always buying. And who’s going to catch them, Lady Beatrice? You? The girl? Takes a dozen men and good dogs to bring that flock down off the crags, and men expect wages. Hard coin. Not promises from a crumbling house.”

Beatrice stood and walked to the oak desk. She unlocked the bottom drawer and took out a velvet box. Inside lay a diamond-and-sapphire choker — a gift from her father on her eighteenth birthday, bought on credit he could not afford. It was heavy and cold in her palm.

“Take the carriage into York tomorrow morning,” she said, and held the necklace out to him. “Find a jeweller who does not ask questions. Sell this. Do not accept less than eighty pounds. Use the first ten to hire the men and the dogs. Bring the rest back to me.”

Griggs stared at the jewels. Then at her face.

For the first time since she had arrived, the resentment in his eyes flickered and something else came in behind it. Something careful, and closer to respect.

He took the necklace.

“I’ll leave at dawn,” he grunted.

By the end of the week the courtyard had become a bleating, reeking nightmare. Twelve local men, rough-hewn and smelling of damp wool and pipe tobacco, drove the feral Swaledale down off the moors. The noise was deafening. The smell was an intense compound of wet lanolin, mud, and manure that got into the walls of the house and stayed there.

Beatrice did not hide indoors.

She stood in the middle of the courtyard in her oldest riding habit, boots buried in muck, holding a clipboard, counting fleeces as the men threw them onto the weighing scales.

A stray ewe bolted and knocked her flat.

She went down hard into the mud, and every man in that yard stopped what he was doing and held his breath, waiting for the aristocratic lady to burst into tears and flee to her parlour.

Beatrice lay in the mud for three seconds.

She wiped a smear of manure off her cheek with the back of her wrist and stood up.

“That was fleece one hundred and twelve,” she said, loudly, picking up her clipboard. “Keep moving.”

A low murmur went through the men. She had passed a test she had not known she was taking.

That evening, as Clara worked the dried mud out of her hair with a comb, a post boy arrived at the door.

It was not Angelo’s solicitor. It was a letter with a French stamp and her father’s erratic, panicked handwriting.

Beatrice — Westford has called in the markers. He has bought up every promissory note I held in the City. I am ruined. The Yorkshire estate is gone. The Mayfair house is seized. I have secured passage to Calcutta on a freighter. I have nothing left but the clothes on my back. I hope your pride keeps you warm, because you have doomed us both. — Thomas

She read it until the words blurred.

The garotte had finally snapped shut. Angelo had never touched Oak Haven, because legally he could not. So he had annihilated her father instead, to make a point. He wanted her to feel the weight of her disobedience. He wanted the guilt to crush her into the shape of a wife.

She walked to the fireplace and dropped the letter in.

“I will not break,” she said to the empty room. “I will shear every sheep in Yorkshire before I ever ask that man for a penny.”

The clip yielded forty-two pounds after the men were paid.

Forty-two pounds. Her father used to lose four times that at a card table between the soup and the fish. And yet to Beatrice it felt like an empire, because it was real, and she had earned it.

But having wool and selling wool are two different skills, and the local agents smelled desperation the way dogs smell fear. Every one of them offered her an insult — eleven pence a pound, nine pence, some of them with the courtesy of a shrug.

She refused them all, and wrote instead to the largest textile mill in the Riding, demanding a meeting with its owner.

Three days later a heavy, unadorned black carriage came up the drive.

The man who stepped out was not a gentleman by London’s definition. Henry Tolbert wore a suit of dark, durable worsted, utterly without tailoring. He had broad shoulders, a square jaw, and hands that had plainly operated the looms he now owned. New money. Industry. Ruthless efficiency.

Griggs showed him into the drawing room, where Beatrice had managed to build a respectable fire.

“Lady Beatrice.” His voice was a deep, gravelly baritone. He did not bow. He gave her a curt nod. “I received your letter. You mentioned fifty bales of raw Swaledale.”

“I did, Mr. Tolbert.” She gestured to the chair across from her. “Please.”

He sat. His eyes went around the room — the faded wallpaper, the absence of ornament, the cold damp air that no fire could entirely defeat. He missed nothing.

“I will be blunt, madam.” He leaned forward, resting his big hands on his knees. “I usually deal with agents. I do not make house calls to decaying estates. But the rumour in the village is that the runaway bride of the Duke of Westford is wading through sheep manure in my county, and I confess my curiosity got the better of me.”

“I am glad my misfortunes provide you with entertainment, Mr. Tolbert.”

“But you are here because you need wool, and I have fifty bales of exceptional quality.”

“Swaledale is coarse,” he countered. “It is only good for carpets and heavy overcoats. I can buy it from a dozen farms at sixpence a pound.”

“You can buy dirty, poorly sorted fleece at sixpence a pound.” She did not blink. “Mine has been hand-sorted, cleaned of debris, and graded. I oversaw it myself. It will save your carding machines hours of labour. I want eightpence.”

Henry raised an eyebrow.

He studied her face, plainly searching for the delicate, helpless aristocrat he had ridden out here expecting to find. He found only sharp, calculating resilience.

“Sevenpence,” he said.

“Seven and a half,” she countered. “And you provide the carts to move it from my barns to your mill.”

A slow, genuine smile spread across his face. It changed him completely, softening the hard line of his jaw.

“You negotiate like a dock worker, Lady Beatrice.”

“I will take that as a compliment.”

“It was intended as one.” He stood. “Seven and a half it is. I will send my wagons in the morning.”

He walked to the door, then paused and turned back. The amusement had gone out of his eyes, replaced by something quieter and more serious.

“You should know,” he said, “that Westford has reached even up here. He holds investments in the railways and the shipping lines. If he learns you are doing business with me, he will try to squeeze my supply chains.”

Beatrice’s stomach tightened. She kept her face perfectly still.

“Are you afraid of him, Mr. Tolbert?”

“I am a businessman. I am afraid of unprofitable ventures.” He shrugged into his coat. “But Westford is old money. He fights with lawyers and social pressure. I fight with iron and steam.”

He gave her another curt nod.

“Let him try to squeeze.”