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 7

Angelo lunged forward and snatched the licence off the desk.

His eyes darted over the ink, searching for a forgery, a loophole, a misspelled name, a clerical error — anything. There was nothing. It was ironclad, registered, witnessed, and sealed.

“A father’s affidavit can bind an unmarried daughter,” Beatrice said quietly. “It cannot bind another man’s wife. And a former betrothed has no standing at all to petition for guardianship over a woman who is no longer his to claim.”

Henry’s voice was flat, almost bored, the way he priced wool. “My solicitor filed a counter-motion this morning, contesting the petition on those exact grounds, and requesting the hearing be moved into open court. I understand His Grace is not fond of open court.”

Whatever hearing Angelo had bought himself would now open onto an empty room, and every man in it knew it.

“You married a mechanic.”

Angelo breathed it, stepping back. The parchment trembled in his hand. He looked at Beatrice as though she had grown a second head.

“You threw away a dukedom for a man with grease under his fingernails. You are insane.”

“I am pragmatic.”

She said it coldly, and she did not look away from him for a second.

“I married a man who builds things instead of burning them down. I married a man who respects my mind. And most importantly, Angelo, I married a man you cannot break.”

“I have already broken him.”

Angelo’s shout tore out of him, the carefully maintained boredom of the aristocrat dissolving entirely. His face went mottled and purple.

“I hold the bank notes on his factory. I will foreclose tomorrow. I will leave you both starving in the mud.”

Henry laughed. It was short and sharp, and he leaned back against the desk and crossed his massive arms.

“You bought my debts from the Bank of England. A very aggressive move. But you failed to understand how northern mills operate, Your Grace.” He said the title like a man spitting out a fishbone. “We do not rely solely on London banks. When I opened the canal bypass, I secured advance payments from my buyers in Amsterdam and Calcutta. Gold bullion. Not paper credit.”

He let that sit for a moment.

“I paid off the principal on those factory loans yesterday morning. Your bank notes are void. You spent a fortune on empty paper.”

Angelo stood frozen. He did not answer, because there was no answer. The arithmetic was coming down on him all at once: he had overextended his own credit to buy railway tariffs and factory debts, on the assumption that this would be a short, terrifying siege ending with Beatrice’s surrender.

He had waged a war of attrition against a woman who had already learned how to live on nothing.

“Griggs.”

Henry barked it toward the hallway.

The dragging footsteps returned, and behind them came the sound of twenty more. The library doors swung wide.

Griggs stood there with a rusted iron crowbar resting in the crook of his arm. Behind him, filling the corridor and spilling into the hall, stood two dozen of Tolbert’s mill workers — men who had spent the last month hauling timber out of freezing water. They were massive, filthy, and entirely unimpressed by sable coats.

“Show His Grace to his carriage,” Henry said. “If he or his men resist, throw them in the canal.”

Angelo looked at the wall of men.

He looked at his two hired thugs, who had already lowered their hands and stepped apart — men who did sums for a living and had just finished this one.

He turned back to Beatrice.

There was no rage left in his eyes now. Only a hollow, terrifying emptiness, the look of a man watching a door close that he had believed would never close.

“You will rot here,” he said. His voice trembled, and he heard it, and it made him angrier.

“I will thrive here.”

She promised it softly. She did not raise her voice, because she did not have to.

“Never return to my land.”

For one long second she thought he might say something else — something human. Something that would have made it worse.

He did not. He turned on his heel and walked out.

The sea of mill workers parted just enough to let him pass, and their silent, hostile stares burned into his back the entire way down the hall.

The heavy oak doors slammed shut behind him, and the impact shook dust down from the rafters.

Nobody moved for a moment. Then one of the mill men said something under his breath in a thick Yorkshire accent, and the corridor broke into low, rough laughter, and Griggs went to bolt the door.

In the library, Beatrice sat back down.

Her legs had begun to shake, and she did not want anyone to see it. She put both hands flat on the desk and breathed until her heart came down out of her throat.

Henry did not say anything for a while. He simply walked over and put a glass of water on the desk beside her hand, then sat down in the chair across from her, and waited, the way he waited on a jammed machine — with patience, and an interest in what would happen next.

“It will be in every paper by Friday,” she said at last.

“It will.”

“He will lie about it. He will tell them I was mad.”

“He will try.” Henry turned the glass a quarter-turn on the desk. “He will also have to explain, in print, that he bought a controlling interest in a railway and raised the freight tariff on an entire industry because a woman in Yorkshire would not marry him. Your husband’s foreman is literate, Lady Beatrice. So is Griggs. So are the men who cleared that canal, and there are fifty of them.”

“Beatrice.”

She looked up.

“You called me Mrs. Tolbert on Thursday, in front of the bishop. You have not done it since.”

Henry’s mouth moved, not quite a smile.

“I was being careful.”

“I noticed.” She picked up the glass. “I am going to have to learn what that means. What I have agreed to.”

“So am I.”

He said it plainly, without flinching or dressing it up, and it was the most honest thing anyone had said to her in a year. There had been no courtship and no romance and no declaration. There had been a licence, a chapel at dawn, two witnesses, and a piece of paper obtained for the express purpose of making a duke legally powerless.

That was the whole of it.

They sat in the firelight with the wind working at the windows, and somewhere down the hall Clara was arguing with Griggs about whether a barricade made of furniture would hold against the next peer who came up the drive.

“It is not enough,” Beatrice said, finally.

Henry looked at her.

“He will come at us another way. He always does. He has nothing left to lose now, which makes him worse, not better.”

“No,” Henry agreed. “It is not enough.”

He stood and held out his hand — not to bow over, not to kiss. To shake. The way he would have sealed a shipment.

“Then let us get the spring shearing in first,” he said. “And after that, we will find out exactly how much of England is willing to buy wool from a woman who walked out of St. George’s.”

Beatrice looked at his hand for a moment.

Then she took it, and the grip was hard and warm and completely without ceremony, and outside the sleet turned to snow and went on falling over three thousand acres that were finally, entirely, beyond his reach.