Chapter 4
“Ihave made such a mess of things, Margaret.”
The words hung in the grey morning air, dissolving into the mist that clung to the churchyard like gauze wrapped around old wounds.
Maribel knelt upon the cold earth before her sister’s grave, the damp seeping through her worn wool cloak, her gloved fingers pressed flat against the carved letters of the name she could no longer speak without her throat closing and tears welling up.
Margaret Elizabeth Talbot, Beloved Wife and Mother.
The inscription told the world nothing of consequence.
Nothing of the way Margaret had laughed—that full, unguarded sound that had scandalised their mother and delighted their father in the years before disgrace had hollowed him into a stranger.
Nothing of the fierce light in her eyes when she had announced her intention to marry Nicholas Talbot, of her desperation to protect her husband from the stench of her father’s name.
Nothing of the tender way she had held Oliver in those first hours after his birth, tears streaming down her cheeks as she whispered promises Maribel had thought would last forever.
Forever. What a fool’s word that had proven to be.
“I am to become the Duchess of Blackwood.” Maribel heard the tremor in her own speech and pressed her lips together until it steadied.
“Can you imagine? Your stubborn, sharp-tongued little sister, married to a duke. Mother would have been beside herself with triumph—though I suspect even she might have baulked at the circumstances.”
“He proposed in a library,” she continued, her breath misting in the cold air.
“After a scandal. After Lady Forsythe and her coven of gossips discovered us alone together, standing too close, arguing too fiercely about matters that were none of their concern. He did not ask, Margaret. He informed. As though my consent were a mere formality to be dispensed with before moving on to more pressing business.”
She thought of the expression on Thaddeus’s face in that moment—the hard set of his jaw, the determination in his eyes, the absolute certainty with which he had delivered his verdict. We will marry. Tomorrow, if it can be arranged.
Not a question. Not a request. A statement of fact, as immutable as the stone beneath her fingers.
“The infuriating thing,” Maribel said quietly, “is that he was right. There was no other choice—not if I wished to remain in Oliver’s life, not if I wished to protect him from the cruelty of a society that delights in punishing children for the sins of their elders.
” Her jaw tightened. “And so I said yes. What else could I say? What else could I do, when the alternative was watching your son become fodder for drawing-room whispers and ballroom sneers?”
The mist had begun to thin, pale shafts of morning light piercing through the grey to illuminate the weathered headstones scattered across the churchyard grounds.
Maribel watched the patterns shift and change, light chasing shadow across the carved names of the dead, and thought of all the mornings she would never share with her sister again.
“I do not trust him.” The admission tasted bitter on her tongue.
“I have tried, Margaret. I have watched him with Oliver—watched him attempt to offer comfort and falter at the last moment, watched him retreat into schedules and rules when what that child needs is a pair of arms around him and a promise that he is not alone. He is not cruel. I will grant him that much. But he is...”
She searched for the word and found only inadequate substitutes. Closed. Guarded. Armoured against the world in ways I cannot fathom.
“He is a man who has forgotten how to feel,” she said at last. “Or perhaps he never learned. And now I am to bind myself to him for the rest of my days, share his name and his home and his life, and I cannot shake the fear that I am making the most catastrophic mistake of my existence.”
A gust of wind stirred the branches overhead, sending a shower of yellowed leaves drifting down around her. One landed on the grave, bright against the grey stone, and Maribel reached out to brush it gently aside.
“Do you remember what you told me, the night before your wedding?” Her throat constricted around the memory.
“You said that love was worth any price. That you would rather have one year of true happiness with Nicholas than fifty years of comfortable emptiness with any other man.” She laughed, though the sound held no warmth.
“I thought you were being dramatic. I thought you were young and foolish and drunk on romance. But you were right, were you not? You had four years of genuine joy, and I...”
The tears came without warning, hot and silent, sliding down her cheeks to drip onto the cold ground below. Maribel did not wipe them away. Here, in this quiet place where no living soul could witness, she permitted herself the grief she had held at bay for three long months.
“I have nothing,” she whispered. “No family left save Oliver. No prospects save this arrangement. No future save the one being dictated to me by a man who sees marriage as a solution to a problem rather than a beginning of any kind.” She pressed her palm harder against the stone, as though she might somehow reach through it to clasp her sister’s hand one final time.
“I feel as though I am betraying everything you believed in. Everything you fought for. You chose love over duty, and I am choosing duty over... over everything else.”
The wind stirred again, gentler this time, and Maribel imagined she could hear Margaret’s voice in its whisper. You are not betraying me, you ridiculous creature. You are protecting my son. What could be more important than that?
“I would do anything for him,” she said, her speech hoarse with weeping.
“Anything. Even this. Even marrying a man who looks at me as though I am an inconvenience he cannot quite manage to dismiss.” She drew a shuddering breath.
“I only pray that when Oliver is grown, he will understand. That he will know I did this not out of ambition or desperation, but because I love him. Because I could not bear to lose the last piece of you that remains in this world.”
She remained kneeling for a long while, her tears gradually slowing, the ache in her chest settling into the familiar hollow that had become her constant companion.
The churchyard held its peace around her—the ancient stones standing sentinel, the mist curling between them like the ghosts of all who had come before, the distant call of birds marking the passage of time she could not bring herself to track.
At last, she reached up to wipe her eyes with the back of her glove, the wool rough against her tender skin. Her knees protested as she shifted her weight, cramped from the cold and the damp, and she pressed one final kiss to her fingertips before touching them to her sister’s name.
“I must go,” she murmured. “They will notice my absence, and I have no wish to explain where I have been, much less explain why I took a horse without permission. But I will return, Margaret. I will always return. And I will bring Oliver, when he is ready. I will tell him stories of his mother—of how brave she was, how fierce, how utterly unwilling to let the world tell her what she could not have.”
She rose slowly, brushing the grass from her cloak, and turned to face the path that led back to the churchyard gate.
Then she stopped.
Her heart seized in her chest, her breath catching sharply, every muscle in her body going rigid with shock.
Thaddeus Blackwood stood perhaps thirty paces distant, near the iron gate that marked the boundary between the living and the dead.
He wore riding clothes rather than his customary immaculate attire—his dark hair windswept and disordered, his jaw shadowed with stubble, his bearing stripped of its usual rigid formality.
In his hands, held with a carefulness that seemed utterly at odds with the man she knew him to be, he clutched a spray of wildflowers.
Purple clover and white yarrow. Delicate stems of something she did not recognise, their petals pale as cream. All of it bound together with simple twine, gathered roughly, as though he had picked them himself rather than sending a servant to procure them.
For a suspended moment, neither of them moved.
Maribel became acutely aware of her own dishevelment—her tear-stained cheeks, her mud-dampened cloak, the strands of hair that had escaped their pins and now clung to her temples in wild disarray.
She looked precisely like what she was: a woman who had fled before dawn to weep over a grave.
And he had witnessed it. He had seen her at her most vulnerable, her most broken, her most raw.
The humiliation of it burned through her, hot and sharp.
“Your Grace.” She forced the words past the tightness in her throat, forced her chin to lift in something approximating dignity. “I had not... I did not anticipate your presence here.”
Thaddeus remained where he stood, his grey eyes unreadable in the thin morning light. The mist curled around his boots, softening the hard lines of his figure, lending him an almost spectral quality.
“Nor I yours.” His tone held none of its usual clipped authority. “Though perhaps I ought to have considered the possibility.”
“I came to visit my sister.”
“Yes.”
The single syllable hung between them, heavy with all the things neither of them knew how to say. Maribel watched him, waiting for the dismissal, the cool instruction to compose herself, the reminder that displays of emotion were unseemly and served no practical purpose.
It did not come.
Instead, Thaddeus took a step forward. Then another. His boots crunched softly against the frost-stiffened grass as he approached, and Maribel found herself rooted to the spot, unable to retreat, unable to advance, caught in the strange pull of a moment she did not understand.