7. CHAPTER 7
T he next morning, Dalton walked the narrow lane toward Dr. Harrison's cottage, feeling each curtain twitch along the way.
Word traveled fast on an island this size.
By now, every soul in the parish knew that the stranger who burst into their church, mud-caked and half-wild, had claimed their beloved Grace as his wife.
He could imagine how gossips would have embellished the story by teatime.
Not that it needed much embellishment. It was crazy enough as it was.
She had lived here for seven years. While he had paced the corridors of Penrose Castle, while he had stood at the edge of the cliffs watching the sea that had swallowed her, while he had drunk himself insensible on three consecutive anniversaries before Venus dragged him back from the brink — Vivienne had been here.
Walking these lanes. Breathing this air.
Building a life so small and so complete that she had almost married another man inside it.
He stopped at the gate to Harrison's cottage. A solid dwelling — not grand, but well-kept. The garden was orderly: herbs in neat rows, a climbing rose trained along the south-facing wall, a wooden bench positioned to catch the afternoon sun. A doctor's garden. Practical and considered.
He could picture her here. Sitting on that bench with a cup of tea, the light in her hair, Harrison emerging from the house with his shirtsleeves rolled and sharing a quiet, intimate moment with her.
His chest tightened. He pushed open the gate and knocked .
An old maid, her face mapped with wrinkles, opened the door, her eyes widening when she saw him.
"You are the duke, are you not? The man who came to take our Grace from us on her wedding day."
Our Grace. As if Vivienne belonged to the island itself.
"I'm here to speak to Dr. Harrison," he said, not in the mood to discuss his own life with yet another impertinent servant.
"Hmph." She backed away, leaving the door open. "Come in, then. I will go notify the doctor."
Dalton entered and surveyed the house, a twenty-year habit from his intelligence career he could not break. The hallway was narrow, the flagstones worn smooth. A coat stand held one jacket and one hat. A single pair of muddy boots stood by the door.
A bachelor's house.
The parlor was small and clean. A bookshelf filled one wall, and Dalton's gaze swept the spines.
Medical texts, mostly. Abernethy's Surgical Observations.
Todd's Cyclopaedia of Anatomy and Physiology.
A well-thumbed copy of Bucknill and Tuke's Manual of Psychological Medicine that stopped him.
Harrison had been reading about Vivienne's condition, then. Studying it.
On the desk beneath the window: a microscope, not new but well-maintained, surrounded by glass slides and a stack of handwritten case notes.
A stethoscope hung from a hook beside a framed certificate from the University of Edinburgh.
The furniture was sparse. Two chairs by the fireplace, a writing desk, a sideboard bearing a bottle of whisky and two glasses.
Few ornaments. No portraits. No evidence of inherited wealth or family connections. Everything in this room had been earned. Harrison was what he appeared to be — a country doctor who had given his life to a small community that needed him.
A good man. Dalton didn't want to think it, but that was the story this room told .
He had spent the hours since yesterday telling himself the doctor was an opportunist, a man who had taken advantage of a woman's lost memory to claim a wife above his station.
It would have been easier if that were true.
But this room — the worn texts, the microscope, the case notes — did not belong to a man scheming for advancement.
Harrison had not been trying to possess Vivienne. He had been trying to look after her.
Dalton still wanted to hate him for it, but that said more about Dalton than it did about Harrison.
Not a full minute passed before the doctor walked in, and his state was worse than Dalton had expected. Haggard, undone, no jacket, shirt open at the neck and left hanging loose. His eyes were red, as if he had been drinking all night.
"What do you want, Your Grace?" The bitterness was unmistakable. "I thought everything was already decided. You get to take the bride home."
Dalton didn't rise to it. He was not here to fight. He had fought enough already — the sea, the church, the appalling impulse to gather Vivienne in his arms and carry her from this island. He needed this man's cooperation. More than that, he needed his expertise.
"There is much to discuss. Things to clarify."
Harrison went to the sideboard and poured himself a generous measure. He lifted the bottle toward Dalton. "Care for a drink?"
"No, thank you. Let me get to the point, and then I will leave you to your endeavors."
Harrison took a long swallow and looked at him. Waiting.
"I'm not here to quarrel with you," Dalton said.
He kept his voice even — the tone he used in diplomatic negotiations, when composure was the only weapon left.
"I owe you a debt of gratitude. From what I have gathered, you were the one who tended to her when she arrived on these shores, injured and lost. And since then, you have shown my wife nothing but kindness during the years when I could not. "
Harrison stiffened. His knuckles went white around the glass .
"I don't need your gratitude. I did it for her, not for you." His voice was hoarse but steady. "And whether she is your wife remains to be seen. I married Grace Harper in this parish yesterday."
"That is what I need to set straight." Dalton held the other man's gaze.
He did not enjoy this. But pretending served no one — least of all Vivienne.
"I don't question your feelings for her.
I will not even question how much you knew about her past. But the law is clear.
The woman you married yesterday was already married.
We were joined before God and country eight years before you ever set eyes on her.
The law calls your marriage void. Not voidable — void. From the instant the vows were spoken."
"She remembers nothing of such a marriage."
"I know. And I hold her blameless. She could not have known she was not free to marry. But the law does not bend because the truth is inconvenient."
"You have come to take her from me." Harrison's voice dropped. "To tear her away from the only life she knows."
"I have come to give her the chance to remember who she is.
" Dalton heard the heat rising in his own voice and checked it.
"I am not dragging her away. She has agreed to come of her own free will.
She cannot remain here under a false name, married to a man who is not her husband.
However comfortable the lie, it is still a lie. "
Harrison opened his mouth. Dalton stayed him with a raised hand.
"I understand this is not your fault. But her name is not Grace. It is Vivienne. And she is the Duchess of Dalton."
The doctor sank into the chair by the fireplace. The glass hung from his fingers, forgotten. So much grief on his face that Dalton felt it in his own chest. Because he knew. He had lived seven years inside the same loss. He would not wish it on any man. Not even his rival.
"She has made a life here," Harrison said. "She is content. She has friends. Patients who depend on her charity visits. A routine, a purpose. What will become of all that if you drag her back to a world she cannot recollect?"
"She will have my protection. I won't demand more than she can give.
" Dalton measured each word. "She may bring companions — yourself among them, if you wish it.
I have already agreed to that. She will stay for a trial of seven weeks, and after that, decide for herself whether she wishes to remain.
But we must proceed in truth. Not in shadows. "
"And if her heart chooses this quiet life over yours?"
There it was. The one question he had no defense against. Not that Vivienne did not remember him. He could bear that. Be patient. Earn her trust. But that she would come to know him and choose to leave anyway. That the woman she had become would weigh the life he offered and find it wanting.
"Then I will bear it." He had never spoken words that cost him more. "But I will not abandon her again without giving her the chance to know who she truly is."
A silence settled. Harrison drank. Dalton stood.
"Do you love her?" Harrison asked.
Dalton went still. The question was so direct, so stripped of courtesy, that it caught him unprepared. Which, he suspected, was the point.
"My feelings for my wife are my concern alone, Doctor. I don't have to explain myself to you or to anyone."
He meant it. He also knew the answer was yes — so completely, so ruinously, yes that the word felt like something he could not afford to let out of his mouth. Not here. Not to this man.
Harrison watched him. Those pale blue eyes were too sharp for a man three drinks deep. A physician's habit, trained to read what people preferred to keep hidden.
Dalton held the look. He had faced down foreign ministers and men who would have had him killed over a handshake. He was not going to flinch before a country doctor.
"I can't stop you from taking her," Harrison said at last. "Much less if she wishes to go. But I know something you do not. Something even she does not understand."
"What is that?"
"Even if she is your wife, she is not the person you knew.
The woman you married, your duchess, is gone.
In her place is Grace. A woman made by seven years on this island, who built herself from nothing, who learned to go on without a past. Grace is quiet and humble.
She can't walk back into a life she does not remember and become the woman that life requires. "
Harrison leaned forward. His gaze was fixed, and none of what burned in it came from the whisky.
"She won't know the rules of your society or the names of your friends.
Your world will bewilder her. Your castle will dwarf her.
She will be miserable trying to become someone she is not.
Eventually, she will want to come back to the life she knows.
The life she remembers. See that you honor your word when that day comes. "
Dalton wanted to believe this was the desperate argument of a man who could not accept what he had lost. Part of him dismissed it.
But another part — the part that had watched Vivienne faint in the church, that had seen the blank terror when she looked at him without recognition — could not ignore the warning.
Was it possible? Could she look at the life they had shared and choose this island instead? The quiet, the modesty, the small rhythms of a place where everyone called her Grace and no one asked her to be anything more?
No, he wouldn't think about it. She had loved him once.
Loved him with a force that matched his own.
He needed only to remind her. To show her the life she had lost. Their love had been real, and some trace of it must live in her still.
The way she said his name in the vestry, as if her mouth had never forgotten it, was not nothing. He could work with that.
He unclenched his fists. Steadied his breathing.
"I will do what is best for her. And I will always protect her with my life."
He turned to leave.
"One more thing," Harrison said.
Dalton stopped. Did not turn.
"You will be tempted to fill her head with everything she has forgotten. Portraits, letters, places, stories. To tell her every detail of the life she lost, hoping to bring her memory back. I would advise against it."
Now Dalton turned. "Go on. "
Harrison set down his glass and sat straighter. The bitterness was gone from his face. What replaced it, Dalton recognized, was professional authority.
"You saw what happened in the church. She collapsed. The mind that has sealed away its memories has done so for a reason. Whether from injury or shock, the mechanism is protective. To force against that seal is to risk destroying the faculties you hope to restore."
He reached behind him and pulled a slim volume from the shelf, its spine cracked from use.
"There is a case described by Dr. Russell Reynolds, published in his System of Medicine last year.
A soldier at Sebastopol who lost all memory after a head wound.
His wife surrounded him with familiar objects, stories and anecdotes.
Read him his own letters, took him to the places they had courted.
Within a month, the man could not sleep, could not stop shaking.
He had fits of terror and did not recognize even the wife who had been trying to help him.
Reynolds concluded that the memories, when forced, did not return as recollections.
They returned as attacks. The mind could not tell the difference between remembering and living through them again. "
Harrison met his eyes. "She is more fragile than she appears, Your Grace.
Let her memories come in their own time, if they will.
Resist the urge to narrate her past to her.
Do not tell her what she should feel. Let her body find its way back.
The mind will follow when it is ready. Or it will not.
But forcing the matter could break her."
Dalton's first instinct was to dismiss it. The man was staking a claim to knowing Vivienne better than her own husband did. And there was self-interest in that, no question. Harrison could be using medical authority to keep Dalton at a distance.
But the man was a doctor. He had been caring for her health for seven years.
He had studied her condition — the books on the shelf proved as much.
And the case he cited was not vague counsel, but a documented outcome, concrete and grim.
Dalton could see how the same might happen here.
How the weight of his own need to have her back could become the thing that drove her further away .
He thought of Vivienne crumpling in the church. Her eyes rolling back. The terror he had felt holding her listless body in his arms.
He would consult other doctors. He would find the best minds in London — specialists in disorders of the brain and memory. But until then, Harrison's advice was all he had. And the man had earned the right to give it.
He nodded once.
"You have my word."
He didn't wait for a response. He walked through the narrow hallway, past the single coat and the muddy boots, and let himself out.
Next stop was the harbor. He still needed to arrange passage for four.