The Duke Married A Merchant’s Daughter To Save His Estate, Then Invited His “Uneducated” Wife To Dinner As A Joke — But When Europe’s Sharpest Ambassador Rose To Greet Her, He Realized He’d Married Far Above His Own Understanding
PART 2
She did not cry. Crying was a useless expenditure of energy — a lesson she’d learned at fourteen, when her father’s ship was caught in a squall off the coast of Spain and she’d watched grown sailors weep uselessly while the rigging tore itself apart above them. Panic sank ships. Cold competence kept them afloat.
She went to her private chambers — large, drafty, decorated in the oppressive velvets favored by the previous duchess — and ignored the gilded mirror and the fainting couch entirely. She walked straight to the corner where a battered, brass-bound leather trunk sat. Arthur’s valet had tried to throw it out twice. Beatrice had threatened, quite calmly, to break his fingers if he touched it again.
She knelt and unclasped the heavy brass locks. They sprang open with a satisfying click.
Inside there were no ball gowns, no jewels. The trunk was packed tight with leather-bound journals, rolled maps tied with faded ribbon, stacks of correspondence yellowing at the edges. She pulled out a journal near the top — her own tight, precise handwriting, a ledger of trade routes through the Mediterranean, written entirely in fluent French. Another, detailing the political climate of the German states in a mix of German and Italian, deliberately chosen to keep prying eyes from understanding a merchant’s secrets.
Her father hadn’t raised a lady. He’d raised a successor.
Richard Cromwell had believed that ignorance was the only true poverty. He’d hired tutors in every port they touched. When Beatrice wasn’t learning the volatile arithmetic of supply and demand, she was learning the languages of the people they traded with.
A shark, she murmured to herself, staring at the French ledger, running her hand over the worn leather cover. A strange, cold fire began to burn quietly in her chest.
For months she had tried to shrink herself to fit inside Arthur’s world. She had played the quiet, unassuming wife because she’d believed that was the price of peace. She had let them think her stupid because proving them wrong felt too much like begging for their approval.
But Arthur wasn’t looking for peace. He was looking for blood.
Beatrice stood and walked to the bellpull. She yanked it once, hard.
Five minutes later, her maid Mary hurried in, wide-eyed and nervous.
“Mary.” Beatrice’s voice was brisk, commanding, entirely unlike the flat exhaustion she’d worn at breakfast. “Send for the dressmaker — not the one the Dowager Duchess uses. The one in Cheapside. The one who makes clothes for women who actually walk the streets.”
Mary blinked, visibly scandalized. “Your grace, but the dinner—”
“And, Mary.” Beatrice turned to look out at the sprawling, manicured lawns of the estate, her voice never rising, never wavering. “Tell the kitchen to change the third course. Monsieur Lauron is from Marseille. We are not serving him boiled English beef.”
She paused, a small, private smile touching the corner of her mouth — the first real one in weeks.
“We will serve him bouillabaisse. I’ll write down the recipe myself.”
Mary stood frozen in the doorway, clutching her apron, utterly unsure whether she had just witnessed her mistress plotting a menu — or something considerably more dangerous.