Chapter 4 #2
He stopped beside her, close enough that she could see the individual petals of the flowers in his hands, close enough that she caught the scent of horse and leather and something sharper beneath—ink, perhaps, or the remnants of a fire long burned to ash.
“Nicholas,” he said quietly. “I came to pay my respects to Nicholas.”
Maribel’s breath caught.
She thought of what she knew of the bond between them—fragments gleaned from Margaret’s letters, from Oliver’s scattered memories, from the guardianship papers that had bound Thaddeus to a promise made long before tragedy had demanded its fulfilment.
Comrades in arms, he had called them once.
But the word seemed inadequate for whatever had driven this man to rise before dawn, to gather wildflowers with his own hands, to stand in a fog-shrouded churchyard with grief carved into every line of his face.
“You were close.” It was not a question. She could see the truth of it in his eyes—that winter grey softened by a pain he could not quite conceal.
“He was my brother.” The words emerged rough, scraped raw by emotions Thaddeus clearly had no practice expressing.
“Not by blood. By something that ran deeper than blood ever could. We served together in Portugal—two young fools convinced we were immortal, convinced the rules that governed lesser men did not apply to us.” His looked down, avoiding her gaze.
“He saved my life when I was too arrogant to recognise the danger I had placed myself in. Took a bayonet wound that should have killed him, bled half to death in my arms whilst I screamed for a surgeon who took too long to arrive.”
Maribel’s chest constricted. She had not known. Margaret had never spoken of it—had perhaps never known herself, for Nicholas had not been the sort of man to burden others with tales of his own heroism.
“I owed him a debt beyond repaying,” Thaddeus continued, his gaze fixed on the paired headstones before them.
“I swore to him, when he recovered, that if ever he had need of me—if ever there was anything within my power to give—he had only to ask.” A muscle leapt in his cheek.
“And then he married and he asked me to watch over his son, should the worst ever happen. I gave him my word without hesitation. And now...”
He did not finish the sentence. He did not need to.
Maribel watched as he moved past her, crossing the remaining distance to the grave with slow, deliberate steps.
He knelt upon the same patch of earth where she had knelt moments before, heedless of the damp that would stain his riding breeches, and placed the wildflowers at the base of Nicholas’s headstone with a gentleness that stole her breath.
His hands lingered there, pressed flat against the cold ground, and she saw his shoulders bow beneath a weight she had not known he carried.
When he spoke again, his words were not addressed to her.
“I am doing my best, Nicholas.” So quiet she barely caught it. “I know it is not enough. I know I am failing in ways you would never have failed. But I am trying. For Oliver. For—” He stopped. Drew a breath that shuddered visibly through his frame. “For all of it.”
He remained there for what felt like an eternity—head bowed, hands pressed to the earth, the mist curling around him like a shroud. Maribel stood frozen, uncertain whether to speak or to flee, caught between the urge to offer comfort and the certainty that he would reject it.
At last, he rose.
His movements were stiff, his face entirely blank when he turned to face her. But his eyes—those winter-grey eyes that she had thought incapable of warmth—held a rawness that made her throat ache with unexpected sympathy.
“The wedding will take place in two days.” His tone had recovered some of its customary flatness, though the effort it cost him showed in the tension around his mouth.
“I have made the necessary arrangements. It will be a small ceremony—private—with only the essential witnesses present. Lady Eleanor has consented to attend, and Julian will stand for me.”
“Two days,” Maribel repeated. The words felt foreign, unreal, as though they belonged to a language she had not yet learned to speak.
“There is no purpose in delay. The gossip spreads as we stand here, and every hour we wait grants it further purchase.” He clasped his hands behind his back—that familiar gesture of self-containment, of armour donned against the world.
“I will send the carriage for you within the hour. There are practical matters to discuss. Settlements. Arrangements. The particulars of your new position.”
Her new position. As though she were being hired for a post rather than bound in matrimony.
She ought to have bristled at the phrasing. She ought to have offered some sharp retort, some reminder that she was not a servant to be assigned duties at his convenience.
But the image of him kneeling on the cold ground, his hands pressed to Nicholas’s grave, his shoulders bowed beneath the weight of a grief he had no notion how to bear—it would not leave her.
It had cracked open something in her understanding, revealed a fault line in the bedrock of her assumptions, and she could not quite find her way back to solid ground.
“Very well,” she heard herself say. “I shall be ready.”
Thaddeus inclined his head, a gesture of acknowledgement that fell short of gratitude. He turned away, his boots crunching against the frost-stiffened grass, his figure cutting a solitary path through the dissipating mist.
Then he stopped.
Maribel’s heart stuttered in her chest.
He did not turn. His back remained rigid, his shoulders squared, his hands still clasped with white-knuckled precision. But his head bowed slightly, and when he spoke, the words fell into the morning air like stones dropped into still water.
“He was the best of us.”
Maribel drew a sharp breath.
“I ought to have told him that whilst he lived.” The roughness in his voice cut through her like a blade.
“I ought to have said it every day we served together, every letter I wrote, every moment I stood in his presence. Instead I said nothing, because I believed there would always be tomorrow, always another opportunity, always more time.” His hands tightened behind his back.
“And now there is no time left. Only a grave and a child and a debt I can never repay.”
He walked away without waiting for a response.
Maribel stood motionless, watching his figure retreat through the iron gate, listening to the sound of hoofbeats as he mounted his horse and rode into the thinning mist. Her pulse hammered against her ribs.
Her thoughts churned like storm-tossed water, refusing to settle into any pattern she could recognise.
The man she had agreed to marry—the cold, controlling Duke of Blackwood, who treated emotion as weakness and sentiment as liability—had just laid bare a grief so profound it had stripped him of every defence.
She did not know what to do with that knowledge. She was not certain she wished to know.
The mist had nearly lifted now, pale sunlight spilling across the churchyard in golden shafts that illuminated the weathered headstones and the frost-touched grass and the iron fence that marked the boundary of consecrated ground.
Maribel turned to begin her walk back toward the waiting carriage, her mind still reeling, her heart still pounding—
And stopped.
Along the base of the iron fence, growing wild and untended between the rusted bars, a tangle of wildflowers caught the morning light. Purple clover and white yarrow and those delicate cream-coloured blooms she did not recognise.
The same flowers Thaddeus had laid upon Nicholas’s grave.
The same flowers she had seen growing in the overgrown garden at Blackwood—the garden Mrs. Allen had said belonged to the late Duchess, the garden that had been left to ruin since her death.
Maribel stared at them, her breath misting in the cold air, her thoughts spinning into territory she was not prepared to explore.
He had gathered them himself. From his mother’s abandoned garden. He had carried them across the miles to lay them on his brother’s grave, and the tenderness of that gesture—the private, unwitnessed devotion of it—unsettled everything she thought she knew.
Who was Thaddeus Blackwood, truly?
Not the cold autocrat she had dismissed. Not the unfeeling guardian she had condemned. Something else. Something far more complicated, far more wounded, far more dangerously human than she had permitted herself to believe.
In two days, she would bind herself to him for life.
And standing there in the brightening churchyard, the wildflowers swaying gently in the morning breeze, Maribel realized with dawning unease that she no longer had any notion what that life might hold.