The Duke Thought He Was Marrying an Ugly Girl to Save His Crumbling Estate—Until the Veil Lifted, Revealing a Beautiful Bride Trembling Beneath a Hand-Shaped Bruise, Certain Her New Husband Would Hurt Her Just as Her Father Had

PART 2

Martha P. · 3 hrs

I was the scullery maid at Hemsley Manor for six years, so let me tell you that everything London “knows” about Miss Brunwin is a lie built on a lie. There was never any pox. There was never any scarring, and there was never a physician called to attend her in all my time in that house.

What there was: a girl confined to the east wing, who learned the floorboards of that corridor the way sailors learn the stars, because the sound of one particular step meant run. What there was: a ring of keys for her rooms, tagged with her name, kept on the master’s own watch chain. What there was: the night her mother died.

“Of a fever,” the master told the household, in the flat voice he used for everything he had done. I know what it cost, because I kept the kitchen accounts myself. Twelve guineas went to a physician from Maidstone, who arrived after the burial and left before dawn with something heavier than he came with. And every quarter afterward, for two years, the master sent a sealed packet to Maidstone that I was told to enter as “medicines.” We had no one in that house who took any.

I heard Miss Brunwin scream through two floors of stone that night. Afterward she never spoke her mother’s name again, not to me, not to anyone.

And she was the kindest creature I have ever known. She used to mend my apron cuffs when I split them on the scullery stairs, and never once mentioned it. A girl that gentle does not wrap her own knuckles raw on locked doors for nothing.

As for how she came by her bruises on the days she was seen at all, the answer was always the same, in the same flat voice: she is clumsy. We scrubbed her blood off the flagstones week after week. Our master was the clumsiest man in Kent. He managed it with his rings on.

I left that house the week before the wedding. The housekeeper told us the master had “settled” his daughter with a duke, and that we were to say nothing, and I have not slept properly since. I kept thinking of that girl in her gray veil, walking up an aisle with her father’s hand on her arm, and nobody in that church knowing what the hand had done. If any of you know the servants at Alderly, tell them to be gentle with her. I only pray she has found one kind soul in that great cold house.

So here is my wager for your gentlemen’s clubs. Everyone in London is asking whether the Duke of Alderly can stomach his gargoyle bride. Everyone is asking whether he will send her back once he sees her in daylight.

Not one soul is asking the only question that matters: what does a baron do when the man who holds his daughter learns exactly what the last woman locked in that east wing died of?