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 4

Philip Waverly did not knock. He rode up three weeks later, tossed his reins to a startled stable boy, and strode into the echoing foyer with his gloves already off. Gifford was in his study going over masonry estimates with Mr. Pryce when his cousin threw the door open.

“You have been ignoring my letters.”

“I have been busy. Stonemasons are remarkably expensive.”

“I came to see whether you had murdered the gargoyle yet.” Philip helped himself to the crystal decanter, newly bought, newly filled. “Or whether she had murdered you in your sleep. The clubs are taking wagers.”

“Leave, Philip.”

The words came out dangerously quiet.

Philip paused, the decanter hovering. “Gifford. It was a joke.”

“I said, leave.”

Gifford stood and planted both hands flat on the desk. Mr. Pryce found an urgent reason to be elsewhere and slipped out, leaving the door ajar behind him.

“You will not speak of my wife in that manner. Not here. Not in London. Not ever.”

Philip set the crystal down slowly. The facetiousness drained out of his face. “Very well. I apologize. I merely worry for your sanity, locked in this crumbling ruin with a woman who wore widow’s weeds to her own wedding —”

Soft, hesitant footsteps stopped him.

The door swung fully open. Brunwin stood on the threshold with a small stack of leatherbound poetry she had meant to return to the shelves. She did not know they had a visitor. She froze, one hand on the doorframe.

Philip’s glass slipped from his fingers and shattered on the stone hearth.

She wore a simple dress of lavender wool. Her dark hair, unbound by nets or veils, fell over her shoulders in heavy waves. The bruise was entirely gone. She looked like a masterpiece stolen from a grand gallery, and when she saw Philip’s face, she shrank back and pulled the books against her chest like a shield. The old panic flared. A strange man. A closed room. A crash of glass.

Gifford was around the desk before the last shard stopped spinning. He moved into the space between them, his shoulders cutting off his cousin’s view of her entirely.

“Brunwin.”

Low. Steady. He did not turn around.

“This is my cousin, Lord Waverly. He was just leaving.”

“I — I will return these later.” Her voice shook and steadied. “Forgive the intrusion.”

She fled. The rustle of her skirts hurried away toward the stairs, and then the house was quiet.

Philip stared at the empty doorway. Then, slowly, he looked back at Gifford. Every ounce of cynicism had been wiped from his face.

“He told everyone in Parliament she was a monster.”

“Hemsley is a liar.”

“Why?” Philip’s boot crunched on glass. “Why would a father hide a girl who looks like that? She could have had her pick of the entire peerage.”

“Because if he paraded her in front of the peerage” — Gifford stared blankly at the ledger — “someone might notice the bruises. Someone might ask why she flinches when a man lifts his hand to adjust his cravat. Or why she is afraid of closed doors and raised voices.”

Philip stood among the shattered crystal, and the gossip of London went out of him like air. Something ugly and tragic took its place.

“Seventy thousand pounds,” he said softly. “He did not buy a husband for his daughter. He bought a warden.”

“Yes.” Gifford closed the ledger with a heavy thud. “But he misjudged the warden.”

Philip stayed for supper and said almost nothing. When he left the next morning, he clasped his cousin’s hand a moment longer than manners required. Then he did what he could, which was the only kind of war a Waverly knew how to fight: gossip. Back in London he mounted a campaign of strategic misinformation. When the clubs pressed him about the new Duchess of Alderly, he adopted an expression of weary pity and spoke of a woman whose mind was tragically fractured, who wept at the sight of a looking glass, whose frailty required absolute seclusion. Society, always hungry for a Gothic tragedy, swallowed the lie whole. The wagers died. The invitations never came. The wall around her grew a little higher and a great deal safer.

Inside Alderly, the atmosphere shifted in increments too small to name.

It began in the library. She slipped through the heavy doors one afternoon while Gifford buried himself in plans for the tenant cottages. She hesitated at the threshold for a long time. Then she chose the winged leather chair in the far corner, the one that swallowed her small frame entirely, and opened a book of botany. For three hours the only sounds were the scratch of his quill, the crackle of the fire and the soft rustle of turning pages.

Neither of them spoke. Neither of them mentioned it afterward.

She came back the next day. By January she came every day.

They rarely talked. They existed like two solitary animals who had discovered the same warm patch of ground and agreed, without a word, not to disturb one another. And Gifford found himself terribly aware of her. He knew the exact moment she stopped reading and stared into the flames. He knew the slight hitch in her breathing when a gust rattled the mullioned windows. He noticed, without meaning to, that she turned her pages more slowly when she was thinking of something sad.

He adjusted his habits without deciding to. He wore soft-soled slippers that muted his footsteps. He never approached her from behind. He closed doors slowly so the latch clicked instead of slammed, and he learned to cough gently in the corridor before he turned a corner.

He was treating her like a frightened colt, and she knew it.

One evening she looked up from her book and said, without preamble, “You cough before you enter rooms.”

He set down his pen. “Do I?”

“Every time.” She turned a page she had not read. “No one has ever done that.”

She said nothing more. But she did not look back down at the book for a long time, and neither of them pretended to be working.