She Was Forced to Wear Black and Sit in Silence… Until the Feared Duke of War Chose Her

Chapter 11

Nobody moved for a long moment. The fire coughed. A log settled into the grate with a sound like a bone breaking.

Rosalind looked at the Duke.

He was standing perfectly still, and his face had gone the color of old paper. She had seen him cold, severe, controlled — but she had never seen this. This was not control. This was a man holding the walls of himself up by main force while something came down inside him like a roof.

“How long,” he said. His voice was quiet. “How long were you outside the door?”

“I don’t know, sir. A quarter of an hour. Twenty minutes. I was too frightened to move and too frightened to go, and I thought—” Margaret Coyle’s voice dropped. “I thought at first it was an argument. Married people argue. But she was crying and calling for help, and then it got quiet. And then he came out.”

“He came out.”

“He came out and saw me.” She began to shake. “And he stopped, and he looked at me, and I thought he was going to kill me right there in the passage. And all he said was, Miss Coyle, you look unwell, you should go and lie down. And then he went down the stairs.”

She was crying in earnest now, the tears falling without any change in her voice, which was somehow worse.

“He came to the kitchen an hour later with the money. And I took it. God forgive me, I took it, because I have a widowed sister and no other family, and because I knew what would happen if I said no.”

The Duke crossed the room and stood in front of her.

Rosalind’s hand came up instinctively — she did not know if she meant to stop him or to steady him.

He did neither. He took the woman’s hand, both of them, in his own, and held them.

“Nobody in this house will harm you for this,” he said. “Not now, not ever. You will stay here tonight, and tomorrow you will say the same words you have said to me in front of a magistrate, and after that you will have a position in this household for as long as you live, if you want it, or an annuity if you do not, and no one will burn your letters again.”

Margaret Coyle started sobbing openly then, and Nell took her away, and the door closed, and Rosalind and the Duke of Ravenmoor were alone in the library with a dead woman’s portrait above the fire.

He did not sit down. He walked to the window and stood with his back to the room, both hands braced against the frame, and said nothing for a long time.

Rosalind did not go to him. She understood, in a way that was not intellectual, that a man like this would not survive being comforted in that moment — that consolation would have cracked him.

So she stayed where she was and said, to the room rather than to him:

“He was with her. He was in that room, and he was in this house, and you were six weeks away in Cumberland, which he knew. He knew the house would be empty of you.”

“Yes.”

“He had the key.”

“Yes.”

“And the physician—”

“Was paid to call it fever.” The Duke’s voice came back from the window, level and dead. “And to burn the letter. And to tell me that my wife’s last words were illness and confusion and were not fit for a husband to read.”

They stood in the silence together.

“Alistair,” Rosalind said at last, and he turned, and his eyes were dry, which was somehow the worst thing she had seen all night. “You must not go to him tonight.”

“Give me one reason.”

“Because he will see it in your face, and he will run, and we will spend the next year chasing him. Because he has the certificate, and the physician, and the letters, and he will use every one of them the moment he understands that you know.” She took a step toward him. “Because I have been the victim of a campaign of lies for three years, and I know exactly how it is done, and how it is done is: you are made to look like the mad one. If you go to him tonight, in this state, he will have a witness who saw the Duke of Ravenmoor come to his brother’s door raving about a dead woman.”

He looked at her.

She had never before had the experience of a man like this looking at her and finding her useful, and it was a strange, cold, exhilarating thing.

“You are right,” he said.

“I know.”

“I hate it.”

“I know,” she said. “But in the morning we send for the magistrate, and for Blackwood, and for the physician in Brighton, and we do this properly. He must be the one who is exposed to the light. Not you.”

He nodded slowly, once.

Then he said, “The physician first. Before the magistrate. I will not have Edgar slip away while we wait on the courts. Blackwood rides for Brighton at dawn.”

“And what do we do until he returns?”

The Duke looked at the crimson letter on the table, and then at the two in Rosalind’s hand.

“We make certain,” he said, “that when we speak, every door in London is already closed to them.”