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 8

Winter finally broke its grip on the moors.

The biting frost melted into a soft, persistent rain, and the crags came up a shocking, vibrant green. The Oak Haven canal ran heavy and dark, carrying barges of wool and finished cloth efficiently east toward the ports, entirely bypassing the crippled Northern Line.

Three hundred miles south, the London season ended in a quiet implosion.

Angelo Jimenez sat in his shadowed drawing room in Mayfair with the curtains drawn against the spring sunlight. The house was painfully silent. His reckless financial manoeuvring against Henry Tolbert had frightened his own creditors worse than it had frightened anyone else; the Duke of Westford was not bankrupt, because dukes rarely are, but he was mortgaged to the hilt. He had leased his country estates. He had sold his grandfather’s art collection. He had done it to keep the townhouse open and the name intact and the story from getting out, and the story had got out anyway.

He poured another glass of brandy. His hands were not steady.

The door opened.

Genevieve Luron stood on the threshold.

She was not wearing the bruised plum velvet. She wore a travelling suit of sharply tailored navy wool, and her hair was pinned up severely under a practical hat.

“Tell the servants I am not receiving callers.”

“The servants have mostly quit, Angelo. You have not paid them in two months.”

She walked in and set a heavy leather reticule on the side table.

He looked up, and only then registered the suit, the hat, the reticule.

“Where are you going?”

“Paris.” She reached into her pocket and took out a velvet box, and tossed it down beside his glass. It landed with a thud. Inside was the diamond necklace he had given her for the first year they had been together. “I am returning this. It should cover the butcher’s bill.”

He stared at the box. A fresh wave of humiliation went through him, and it was worse than the others because there was no one to blame.

“You are leaving me now. When I am consolidating my assets.”

“I am leaving you because you are a fool.”

Her voice had no pity in it and no affection either. It was cold, clinical truth, delivered by a woman who had spent three years studying him at close range and had drawn her conclusions.

“For three years I let you dress me and parade me because it served me. But you did not bring me to that church because you loved me, Angelo. You brought me because you wanted to break Beatrice Whitmore before you had even married her. You wanted to prove you owned her.”

She pulled on her leather gloves and smoothed the fabric over her knuckles.

“She broke you instead.” She said it without a flicker. “She walked away, and you have spent every month since destroying your own life trying to make her look back. You are obsessed with a woman who does not think about you at all.”

Angelo opened his mouth to shout, to order her out, to say any of the dozen things that would have restored the shape of the world.

The words died in his throat. The accuracy of her cruelty had paralysed him, because he could not find a single crack in it.

“Goodbye, Angelo.”

She turned and walked out of the townhouse, and left the door standing wide open behind her. The sounds of London drifted in through it — carriages, hawkers, other people’s lives moving forward — and none of it was for him.

Angelo Jimenez sat alone in the dark, holding his glass, and began to understand the cost of his pride. It was not his fortune, and it was not his title. It was that he had spent a year trying to make one woman look at him, and she had simply gone on with her life, and would keep going on with it, and there was nothing he could do to be in it.

Three hundred miles north, Beatrice Tolbert stood on the crest of a high moor.

The wind whipped her heavy woollen skirt around her boots. Below her the valley stretched out like a green canvas, and she could see the dark ribbon of the canal, and the smoke rising from the chimneys of Henry’s mill, and the long, patched slate roof of Oak Haven.

It was not a fairy tale. The manor still drafted terribly in the eastern wing. The sheep still smelled appalling. She spent hours every evening buried in ledgers, fighting the brutal arithmetic of running a rural estate and a shipping operation at the same time, and some nights the sums did not work and she went to bed with her jaw aching from clenching it.

The Bradford buyers had agreed to eightpence a pound for the spring clip, and had begun to ask about an exclusive contract. The eastern roof had been fixed properly. There was a new shepherd, and dogs, and the flock had been counted twice and would be counted a third time before anyone in this family took a number on trust.

But it was hers, in the only way that mattered. Every brick, every fleece, every drop of water in the canal stood beyond the reach of any man who had ever tried to claim it from her.

Footfalls sounded behind her, heavy and steady on the damp earth. She did not turn. She had known the rhythm for months.

Henry stepped up beside her and stood there, saying nothing, looking out at the same valley. He smelled of machine oil, strong tea, and cold clean air.

“The Bradford buyers agreed,” he said eventually. “Eightpence, and they are requesting an exclusive contract for the next three years.”

“Tell them eight and a half, and they cover the offloading fees at the docks.”

Henry laughed, a deep resonant sound, and the wind took most of it.

“You negotiate like a dock worker, Mrs. Tolbert.”

“I am a survivor, Mr. Tolbert.” She looked up at him, and her eyes were bright and fierce and entirely her own. “And survivors always get their price.”

He reached out and brushed a strand of hair back from her cheek, and his hand was rough and enormous and absurdly gentle, and she leaned into it without thinking about it first.

There had been no romance at the beginning. There had been a licensed marriage obtained for tactical reasons, a shared office, two separate beds, and a great many arguments about shipping schedules. But somewhere between the rusted canal locks and the winter ledgers, a thing had taken root between them that neither of them would have known how to name out loud — the particular, unshakeable respect of two people who had looked at a rigged game, understood exactly what it was, and decided together to flip the board.

She turned back to the valley.

She had walked out of St. George’s with nothing but the silk on her back and a cold anger in her chest. She had traded a gilded cage for a crumbling stone house, and in the doing of it she had found the only thing that had ever actually mattered.

Ground of her own to stand on.

Behind her, Henry picked up the day’s post from the wall by the gate and shuffled through it. He stopped on the third envelope.

“This one’s for you,” he said. “London postmark.”

Beatrice took it. She turned it over once, and did not open it. She looked at the handwriting on the front — thin, shaking, and unmistakable, though she had not seen it in a year.

Then she folded the letter in half without reading it, and put it in her pocket, and walked back down the hill toward her house.

THE END