“The Duke Is Gay and Impotent,” Her Stepsister Mocked When Clara Was Forced to Marry Him—But His Wedding-Night Confession Revealed Why She Had Really Been Chosen

PART 8

The nightmares came a week after the storm — Clara woke gasping twice in the same night, the memory of the pistol’s small black eye finding her again in the dark long after the danger itself had passed.

The first time, Anthony was awake before she was, already sitting up, already watching her with the careful stillness of a man who had learned, finally, the difference between protecting someone and hovering over them. He didn’t reach for her. He simply stayed, a warm, silent presence at the edge of the candlelight, until her breathing slowed on its own.

“You can hold me,” Clara said eventually, when she trusted her voice again. “I would like you to. But I wanted to be the one to ask this time.”

“Then ask,” he said, and did not move until she did.

She turned into him, and he gathered her close, and neither of them said anything more about it — not that night, and not the second night either, when the same fear woke her and the same quiet, unclaimed patience was waiting beside her in the dark.

Silas Hastings stood trial six weeks later in the county assizes. He was convicted on the forgery and the theft outright, and though the charge tied to his brother’s death proved harder to prove beyond doubt — Dr. Whitfield had died two winters past, and a fee on a ledger was not, on its own, quite enough to hang a man for murder — the confession he’d given in Ravencliffe’s great hall, witnessed by four members of the magistrate’s own office, weighed heavily enough that the judge saw no cause for leniency regardless. Silas Hastings would not see the outside of a prison wall again in what remained of his life.

Jane, once the trust was formally released from his control, used the first of the recovered funds not on herself, but on repairs to the tenant cottages along the eastern boundary — roofs that had leaked since before Clara had arrived, and that no one, in three years of Silas’s careful theft, had ever had the money to properly fix. Clara, watching her direct the workmen with a steadiness that hadn’t been there a season ago, found she recognized the look on Jane’s face entirely. It was the look of someone discovering, for the first time, that the thing she’d survived did not have to be the only thing that defined her.

Clara made a use of her own settlement not long after — quietly, without asking Anthony’s leave, because that had always been the point of it. A widow in the village, turned out of her cottage by a landlord with no patience for a woman behind on her rent, found the debt settled and the cottage secured in her own name within the week, with no explanation offered beyond a note that read only: someone once did the same for me, in a manner of speaking. Pass it on when you’re able.

Anthony found out from Mrs. Gable, not from Clara, and said nothing about it for two full days — until she found him in the library one evening and he simply looked at her for a long moment, something unguarded moving behind his eyes.

“I chose you,” he said finally, “because I thought you would ask nothing of me. A quiet bride. No questions, no complications, nothing that could unravel in my hands.” He crossed the room and took her face gently in both of his. “I love you, Clara, because you taught me that being asked for the truth is not the same as being threatened by it. I did not know the difference until you made me learn it.”

“That’s a very fine thing to say to a woman who once threw a marriage contract’s signatures at you like an accusation,” Clara said, though her voice had gone unsteady.

“It’s the truest thing I know,” Anthony said. “I intend to go on proving it, if you’ll let me. For a good deal longer than eight weeks.”

That evening, seated by the library fire, the ledgers long since surrendered to the magistrate’s care and the false panel finally, properly repaired, Clara turned the settlement papers over in her hands — the deed, the independent income, still unopened in her writing desk after all this time — and understood, at last, exactly what she wanted to do with them.

“I’ve decided something,” she said.

“Should I be concerned?”

“Only mildly.” She met his eyes. “I’m not going to tear these up, or sign them back over to you, or make some grand gesture out of refusing them. I intend to keep them exactly as they are, for exactly as long as we’re married. Not because I plan to use them. Because I like knowing that I could, and choosing not to, every single day, is worth a great deal more to me than a promise I was never given the chance to make freely in the first place.”

Something in Anthony’s face eased, all the way down.

“Then I hope,” he said quietly, “you’ll allow me one evening to ask you something I never properly asked the first time. Not the terms of a marriage built to hide a secret. Something rather more foolish than that.”

“Foolish,” Clara repeated, amused despite herself.

“Extremely,” Anthony said. “Tomorrow. If the weather holds.”