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 6

He did not wait to be announced.

The library doors were thrown open. Angelo Jimenez, Duke of Westford, stood in the doorway in a bespoke sable-lined overcoat and boots so obviously new to the countryside that they still held their shop polish. Behind him stood two enormous men with the battered faces of hired muscle.

His gaze swept the room, passed over the faded wallpaper and the worn rugs, and landed on Beatrice.

Then it slid to Henry Tolbert, who was rising slowly from his chair, unfolding like a bear woken early from hibernation.

“Angelo,” Beatrice said.

Her voice was terrifyingly steady. She did not stand. She stayed seated behind her desk, anchoring herself to the solid weight of the wood.

“Beatrice.”

He stepped into the room and removed his kid-leather gloves one finger at a time.

“I must say, the sheer squalor of this place exceeds even my direst imaginings. And I see you have taken up entertaining local tradesmen. How quaint.”

Henry said nothing. He simply stepped slightly to the side, putting himself nearer to Beatrice’s desk. His silence was heavier than any insult, and infinitely more menacing.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“I came to collect my property.”

He walked to the fireplace and held his hands out to the warmth as though the hearth belonged to him.

“Your little canal trick was clever. Very spirited. It ends today.” He turned his head. “I have purchased the debt on Mr. Tolbert’s factory machinery from the Bank of England. A transit bypass is irrelevant if the looms are repossessed.”

He looked at Henry and smiled.

“You are out of your depth, Mr. Tolbert. Go back to your soot and leave the affairs of the nobility to your betters.”

Henry’s jaw worked, the muscles ticking. He took a step forward, and Beatrice shot her arm out and pressed her hand flat against his rigid forearm.

The contact stopped him. His skin was hot through the wool.

“Oak Haven is entailed to me,” Beatrice said, keeping her eyes on Angelo. “You have no legal right to be in this house. Get out.”

“Ah. The entailment.”

Angelo sighed, looking genuinely bored. He reached into his overcoat and drew out a thick folded document, and tossed it onto her desk. It landed with a heavy, ominous thud.

“Your father, in his desperation before fleeing to Calcutta, signed a rather interesting affidavit.”

His voice went silky.

“He swore under oath that you were not of sound mind when you fled London. He claimed you suffered a violent hysterical break from reality. Given your current living conditions, it is not a difficult claim to substantiate.”

Beatrice stared at the document. Her lungs would not expand.

Her own father.

He had sold her sanity for a few final scraps of Angelo’s money.

“As your former betrothed and a peer of the realm,” Angelo continued, savouring every syllable, “I have filed an emergency guardianship petition on your estate, on the strength of your father’s affidavit. A magistrate has agreed to hear it this week — and no magistrate in England is eager to deny a peer his temporary authority pending a medical board’s evaluation. In an asylum. In London.”

He walked back to the desk and leaned over it, bringing his face inches from hers. He smelled of the same expensive cologne and stale cigar smoke that had hung over the altar at St. George’s.

“I told you, Beatrice.” His eyes were flat and dead. “You do not walk away from me. You are coming back to London. You are going to wear the white dress. You are going to say the vows, and you are going to smile — or I will have these men drag you out of here in a straitjacket, and I will tear this house down brick by miserable brick.”

The silence in the library was absolute. The fire cracked like a pistol shot.

Beatrice looked at the affidavit. She looked at the two men by the door, who had not blinked. She looked at Angelo’s smug, triumphant face, and she understood the shape of the thing he had built: the law, her family, and his limitless money, fitted together into an inescapable cage.

The old panic rose in her throat, familiar and suffocating — the weight of expectation, preparing to crush her flat.

Then she felt the rough, calloused warmth of Henry Tolbert’s arm beneath her hand.

She remembered the freezing mud of the canal. The smell of damp wool. The bitter, exhausting taste of a freedom she had paid for with her own palms.

Beatrice picked up the affidavit. She did not read it. She did not tear it.

She stood.

“Angelo,” she said softly, barely above a whisper. “You have made a catastrophic miscalculation.”

He laughed. He actually laughed — a short, easy sound, and his shoulders came down half an inch, because he had mistaken her stillness for surrender. That was the whole of the mistake. He had spent years reading her as a thing rather than a person, and so when she finally stopped moving, he assumed she had stopped.

“An emergency guardianship petition,” she said, tasting the words, turning the parchment over in her hands. “Filed on the grounds of hysteria and familial abandonment, with a hearing already arranged. It is a very thorough piece of paper, Angelo. I imagine it cost you a fortune in bribes.”

“Efficiency is expensive.”

“Yes. I imagine it is.” She set the document down gently on the desk and smoothed it flat with two fingers, the way one handles something that is about to become evidence. “Clara can pack a small trunk for me. The carriage is heated. Is that what you were going to say?”

“Clara can pack a small trunk for you.” He was buttoning his coat. “We leave within the hour.”

“No.”

The word landed in the room like a dropped glass.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You hold a piece of paper,” Beatrice said, “signed by a coward who ran to Calcutta. And I hold something better.”

She lifted her chin.

“Your petition rests on my father’s affidavit as my nearest legal protector, and on your own claim as my former betrothed. Both of those foundations crumbled three days ago.”

The silence that followed was suffocating. The crackle of the hearth suddenly sounded like artillery. Angelo’s pale eyes narrowed into tight, confused slits, and the two hired men shifted on their feet, sensing the pressure in the room change without understanding why.

“You are bluffing,” Angelo whispered.

The cultured veneer cracked, and underneath it was something ugly and frightened.

Henry Tolbert reached into the breast pocket of his heavy worsted coat. He brought out a document far plainer than Angelo’s elaborate court order — a single folded page, unadorned, and carrying infinitely more power.

He laid it on the desk and smoothed it open.

“Special licence,” he said, conversationally. “Signed by the Bishop of York three days ago. Witnessed by Griggs and my foreman.”

Angelo did not move.

“We were married in the village chapel at dawn on Thursday.”