"You sold me," I said. The words tasted like ash. "I secured your future." Henry's voice cracked, defensive and pathetic. He's a duke, Cecilia.
You'll have a title. You'll have an estate. I'll have a graveyard, Henry. And a corpse for a husband. I stood up.
The sudden movement made him flinch. He actually stepped back, spilling a drop of his precious brandy onto the Persian rug. For a brief, absurd moment, I wanted to scream. I wanted to hurl the crystal decanter at his perfectly styled hair, but looking at him, his weak chin, his trembling hands, the utter cowardice radiating from every pore, the anger curdled into something else. Disgust, cold, absolute disgust.
"When do I leave?" I asked. Henry blinked, clearly caught off guard by my lack of hysterics. "Tomorrow. His carriage is already waiting at the inn.
Cecilia, please understand. "I didn't want—" "Do not speak to me again, Henry." I walked past him toward the heavy oak door. Not now. Not ever.
The journey north took four gruelling days. The roads turned from cobblestone to packed dirt and finally to deep, treacherous mud. The Harwood carriage was an archaic, heavy thing, smelling of damp velvet and disuse. The solitary footman and the driver spoke no words to me, offering only curt nods when we stopped to change horses. I had plenty of time to think.
I didn't cry. Tears were a currency that bought nothing in my world. I had been raised to manage a household, to balance ledgers, to smile through agonizing boredom. Now I was a commodity, traded from a coward to a monster. As the carriage climbed higher into the Yorkshire moors, the landscape stripped itself of color.
The lush greens of the south surrendered to the bruised purples and grays of heather and stone. The sky hung low, pregnant with unfallen rain. It felt like driving to the end of the world. When Harwood Hall finally appeared through the fog, it looked less like a home and more like a fortress holding its breath. One entire wing was charred black.
The stone scarred by the fire from 5 years ago. The windows were dark. No lanterns burned to welcome the new Duchess. The carriage lurched to a halt in the courtyard. The silence that followed was deafening.
I step stepped out into the freezing mud, clutching my small travel trunk. There was no grand entrance, no line of servants, just the biting wind, the dark stone, and the stark realization that I was utterly, entirely alone. The heavy wooden door cracked open, operated by a woman who looked as though she had been carved directly from the Yorkshire stone. She was tall, impossibly thin, wearing a severe black dress and holding a single candle. "Miss Cecilia," she rasped, her voice like dry leaves.
"I am Mrs. Gable, the housekeeper. It's your grace, actually." The words slipped out before I could stop them. I wasn't demanding respect out of vanity. I was establishing a boundary.