Chapter 3
“Say that again.” Mary stared at the Duke.
The words he had spoken hung in the air between them, strange and sharp-edged, and she waited for him to take them back. Men did not propose marriage to women they had met twenty minutes ago. Men did not propose marriage to women they had spent those twenty minutes arguing with.
She had misheard him. She must have misheard him.
“We will marry,” he said again. His voice carried no warmth, no hesitation.
He spoke the way a man might announce a change in the household accounts.
“Your family needs protection. This child needs a mother. I need an heir and a means of containing the scandal before it destroys both our names. A marriage between us solves every problem in this room.”
Lord Langham shot to his feet. Color flooded his cheeks for the first time all morning, and his eyes went wide like a man who has spotted land after weeks at sea. “Your Grace, we accept. Of course, we accept. This is—this is the most generous, the most—”
“Papa.” Mary turned to her father. “Stop.”
Lord Langham blinked at her as though he didn’t quite recognize her.
Mary faced the Duke. Her heart hammered beneath the seed pearls of a wedding gown she had already worn for one failed ceremony this morning. “You cannot be serious.”
“I am always serious.”
“We do not know each other.”
“Irrelevant.”
“We have done nothing but argue since I walked through that door.”
“Also irrelevant.” He held her gaze. Something shifted behind his eyes, a flicker of impatience or something closer to it.
“Our families are entangled beyond repair, Lady Mary. Your sister and my brother have been missing for four months. A child bearing both their marks has appeared on my doorstep. Every drawing room in London is dissecting the scandal as we speak.” He clasped his hands behind his back.
“We need stability. I will acquire the special license, and we will wed within the week.”
Lord Langham exhaled as though he had been holding his breath for six months. “Perfectly reasonable. The only secure solution. Mary, this is a gift.”
A gift. Mary looked at her father, then at the Duke.
Two men in a room, negotiating her future as though she were a clause in a contract.
She had woken this morning and dressed for a wedding she did not want, and now she stood in a stranger’s parlor being handed to another groom like a parcel that had been misdelivered.
The Duke turned to her. “I asked you, Lady Mary. Not your father.”
His eyes found hers, and something in the directness of his gaze made her breath catch in her throat.
He was not asking for permission. He was asking for her answer. There was a difference, and Mary felt it.
She thought of Charlotte. Of Tommy, sleeping upstairs in a borrowed crib. Of her father’s face on the vestibule floor, gray and crumbling. Of the whispers that would follow her through every ballroom and morning call for the rest of her life if she walked away.
She thought of the baby’s weight in her arms and how right it had felt.
Mary exhaled. “Yes.”
The Duke nodded once. He turned to Lord Langham. “I will handle the license and arrangements. The ceremony will take place here, five days from now. Small. Private with only a handful of guests.”
Lord Langham seized the Duke’s hand and pumped it with both of his own. “Your Grace, I cannot express—you have saved us! Truly.”
The Duke extracted his hand. “You should go, Langham. There is much to arrange.” He looked at Mary. “Take your daughter home.”
Mary stiffened. “I would like to see my nephew one more time before I leave.”
Lord Langham gripped her arm. “Mary. Lower your voice.” He glanced at the door. “The walls have ears. The child is under His Grace’s protection. That is enough.”
The dismissal landed harder than anything Grentport had said to her that morning. Mary looked at her father and saw the same thing she always saw: a man who chose safety over feeling, every time. He would not fight for a glimpse of his grandchild. He would not risk another scene.
She turned to the Duke and curtsied. The silk of her gown rustled against the floor.
“Your Grace.”
The Duke studied her for a moment. “Throw that gown away,” he said. “I will provide a new one.”
Mary held his gaze for a beat longer than was necessary. Then she turned and followed her father out of the parlor, through the entrance hall, and into the daylight, where the carriage waited, and the rest of her life had rearranged itself without her consent.
“You look beautiful.” Isabella squeezed Mary’s hands and held her at arm’s length, her dark eyes bright intensely; Isabella had always been a woman determined to find joy in an impossible situation.
The chapel was small, tucked into a side room of Blackholm House, and the pews held fewer than a dozen people. Lord Langham sat in the front row, clutching his hat. Beside him, Isabella’s parents and younger brother occupied the second pew. Three days’ notice had not left much time for enthusiasm.
Mary smoothed the front of her new gown.
It was simpler than the one Grentport’s money had bought.
Cream silk, fitted at the bodice, with a lace overlay on the sleeves.
No seed pearls. No train that required two hands to manage.
She could breathe in this dress, which felt like a small mercy on a morning when everything else was suffocating.
The ceremony was brief. The rector opened his prayer book and addressed the Duke first.
“Wilt thou have this woman to thy wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of matrimony? Wilt thou love her, comfort her, honor, and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all other, keep thee only unto her, so long as ye both shall live?”
“I will.” The Duke’s voice did not waver. His eyes found Mary’s and held them.
The rector turned to her. “Wilt thou have this man to thy wedded husband, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy estate of Matrimony?
Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honor, and keep him, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all other, keep thee only unto him, so long as ye both shall live? ”
The words settled over Mary.
Love. Honor. Keep. Forsaking all other.
Vows written for couples who had chosen each other, spoken now by two people who had not. She looked at the Duke, steady and unreadable before her, and the weight of what she was promising pressed against her chest.
“I will,” she said.
The Duke took her hand and slid the ring onto her finger. His grip was warm and sure. “With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”
Mary searched his face as he spoke the words, “With my body I thee worship.”
A vow made by a man who had not touched her, to a woman he had married out of necessity. She looked for a crack in the composure, some sign that the words meant more than ceremony required.
She found nothing.
They signed the register. It was done.
A man with auburn hair and an amiable smile approached them the moment they turned from the altar. He clapped the Duke on the shoulder with the familiarity of someone who had earned the right to touch him.
“Blackholm.” He grinned. “I never thought I’d see the day.”
“Quentin.” The Duke’s voice carried the faintest edge of warmth Mary had yet heard from him. “Try not to make a spectacle of yourself.”
“Too late.” Quentin turned to Mary and bowed with a flourish that was half charm, half theater. “Your Grace. Lord Quentin Hale, Marquess of Suntley. I have known this man since Eton, and I can assure you he is marginally less terrifying than he appears.”
Mary smiled despite everything. “Only marginally?”
“I would not wish to oversell him.” Quentin’s eyes sparkled. “Welcome to the family, such as it is.”
The Duke steered Quentin away with a hand on his elbow, and Isabella appeared at Mary’s side. She looped her arm through Mary’s and pulled her toward the window, away from the other guests.
“Tell me the truth,” Isabella said, keeping her voice low. “How are you?”
Mary looked out the window. The gardens of Blackholm House stretched below, green and manicured and unfamiliar.
Five days ago, she had been standing in a vestibule in a different wedding dress, preparing to marry a different man. Now she wore a ring that belonged to a duke she had met once, and somewhere upstairs, a baby slept in a crib that had not existed in her life a week ago.
“I am married,” Mary said. “Beyond that, I have not the faintest idea.”
“Mary…”
“I am frightened.” The words left her before she could catch them. She pressed her lips together. “Not of him. He is cold, but I do not think he is cruel. I am frightened because everything has happened so fast, and I have not had a single moment to feel any of it.”
Isabella tightened her grip on Mary’s arm. “Then feel it now. Right here. I am not going anywhere.”
Mary leaned into her friend’s shoulder for one breath. Two. Then she straightened because the Duke was crossing the room toward her, and she was a duchess now, and duchesses did not lean.
“It is time to go,” the Duke said. “There will be no wedding breakfast. We will go directly to the house.”
Mary nodded. She embraced Isabella, crossed to her father, and stood before him.
Lord Langham looked at her with an expression caught between relief and guilt. “At least one of my daughters is not ruined,” he said.
He meant it as comfort. It landed as something else, something which made her wince.
“Find Charlotte, Papa.” Mary kissed his cheek. “Please.”
Lord Langham’s jaw tightened. “I do not need you to tell me that.”
The Duke appeared at her side. He offered Lord Langham a nod that served as both greeting and dismissal. “Langham.”
“Your Grace.” Her father bowed. “Take care of her.”
The Duke said nothing to that. He placed his hand at the small of Mary’s back, a touch so light she might have imagined it, and guided her toward the door.
“This is Tommy’s nursemaid. Mrs. Bridwell.”