The Duke Was Forced to Marry the “Ugliest” Somerset Sister, a Woman Hidden Behind Black Crepe for Ten Years — But When He Removed Her Veil Before the Entire Court, Everyone Finally Learned Why She Had Been Hidden
PART 7
Henrietta squeezed her eyes shut. A single tear broke free, scalding a track down the unscarred side of her face. She forced her chin up, bracing for the shrieks, the wave of revulsion she had spent a decade dreading.
Arthur’s fingers didn’t shake. He pulled the first pin, then the second, gathering the heavy fabric in his fists. He did not yank it away. He lifted it slowly — reverently, like a man uncovering something sacred, not something shameful — and draped the shroud over her shoulders as the light of a thousand candles struck her bare skin.
Henrietta opened her eyes.
The silence that followed was not a gasp of horror. It was stunned, vibrating shock. The right side of her face lay entirely exposed — the deep puckered ridges of white and violet scar tissue twisting from jaw to temple, the missing lashes, the tight shining skin. All of it, undeniable, brutally visible under the chandeliers.
Lady Harrington raised a fan to her mouth. Lord Danver simply stared, dumbfounded.
Arthur looked at none of them. He looked only at Henrietta, resting his gloved hand against her face, his thumb tracing directly over the worst of the scarring with the same gentle familiarity a man might use to brush back a loose curl.
“Look at them,” he said quietly.
She forced herself to turn her head and face the room.
They were staring — yes — but the anticipated jeers never came. The sheer, unbothered confidence of his touch had short-circuited their practiced cruelty. Society thrived on finding the weak spot and pressing it. Arthur was treating her scars not as a weakness to exploit, but as a badge of honor. He had rewritten the rules of the room without raising his voice.
He turned his head slowly, sweeping his dark gaze over the assembled peers. Men who met his eyes looked down. Women snapped their fans shut.
“My wife,” he said, his voice carrying effortlessly to the back of the hall. “Her grace, the Duchess of Westford. Does anyone require a closer inspection?”
No one moved. No one breathed.
He turned back to the dais. Cumberland’s mouth hung slightly open, his cruel joke having misfired entirely — the humiliation meant for Arthur had instead painted him as a petty bully, while the brute of Yorkshire rose in every eye as something dangerously close to untouchable.
“The pen, Cumberland.”
Cumberland’s ruddy face flushed a deeper, angrier red, but the wind had gone entirely from his sails. He snatched a quill, dipped it aggressively, and scrawled his signature across the bottom of the Westford deed, shoving the parchment across the table.
Arthur rolled it into a tight cylinder. He did not thank the Duke. He did not bow. He turned back to Henrietta and offered his elbow.
She did not pull the veil back up. She left it draped over her shoulders like a discarded skin and set her trembling hand into the crook of his arm, feeling the solid, living warmth of him beneath the heavy uniform.
They walked back down the center aisle, and this time the sea of aristocrats parted faster — stepping back, clearing a wide path. There were no whispers now. Henrietta kept her chin level, her bad leg still dragging, the rhythmic scrape echoing off the marble pillars. It no longer sounded like defeat. It sounded like a metronome, ticking away the final seconds of ten years’ imprisonment.
They stepped out into the freezing Yorkshire night and left the glittering, suffocating world behind them.
The carriage ride back was pitch black, sleet battering the struggling lamps outside. Henrietta shivered beneath the furs as the adrenaline finally left her body in violent waves. She was entirely exposed — her face cold, her scars tight against the icy air. Arthur sat beside her this time, not across, and reached beneath the furs to find her hand, his warm bare fingers threading through hers.
“You didn’t put the veil back on,” he said, thumb tracing slow circles against her knuckles.
“I couldn’t.” She whispered it into the dark. “It felt heavy.”
“Good.”
He shifted closer, his hand finding her face in the gloom, tracing the hard ridge of tissue along her jaw without hesitation, without flinching.
“It is just skin, Henrietta. It’s just the shell that carried you through the fire. I don’t care about the shell. I care about the woman who survived it.”
He leaned in, the scent of rain and leather surrounding her, and pressed his mouth to her scarred cheek — a simple, grounding touch, devoid of pity, anchoring her to the reality that for the first time in a decade, she had been truly seen, and the world had not ended for it.
The carriage crunched onto the gravel of Westford Manor’s drive long past midnight, the storm already broken, leaving a biting, crystal-clear cold in its wake — and as the footman pulled the door open, Henrietta braced herself for an old instinct that, for the first time, refused to come.