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

Chapter 21

The months after the wedding reshaped them both, though neither of them said so out loud.

Edgar Marsh never returned to society. After his signed confession and the magistrate’s examination, he remained in custody while the authorities determined what charges could be sustained. His family disowned him, cut off his access to the Ravenmoor name and estates, and made clear that no private influence would be used to shield him from the consequences. The Duke signed the necessary papers in one evening and did not read them again.

Rosalind had expected to feel something when she heard it.

She felt nothing, which she decided later was its own kind of answer.

Seraphina Harrow vanished from society. That was the phrase everyone used — vanished — as though she had gone up in smoke. In truth she was in Bath with an aunt, and then in Devon, and then, one heard, in a small house in Weymouth with a companion and a lawn. The Harrows’ London house was closed. Lionel Harrow, who had come back from abroad in the middle of all of it looking older and quieter than his reputation had ever suggested, had called at Ravenmoor House once and had been received.

Rosalind had agreed to see him.

He sat in her drawing room for a quarter of an hour and he was unable to look directly at her for more than a few seconds at a time, and in the end he said, in a low voice, that he had believed the letter because he had wanted to, because believing it had meant that the failure was hers and not his, because it had been easier to walk away from a ruined woman than to ask her a question he might not have liked the answer to.

“I should have asked you,” he said. “Once. That was all it would have taken.”

“Yes,” Rosalind said. “That was all.”

She did not tell him she forgave him. She did not tell him she did not. She let him sit with his own fifteen minutes and then she rang the bell, and he went away, and to her considerable surprise she thought about him almost never again.

The Duchess’s room at Ravenmoor House was opened properly for the first time.

Rosalind had it stripped and washed and aired, and the fire lit, on a bright cold morning in the first week of the marriage, and then she sent word to the Duke that he might come up, and he came, and she stood aside.

He walked into the room slowly, like a man walking into water. He looked at the wash set with the crack in the pitcher. He looked at the chair by the window. He looked at the book of poetry still face down on the windowsill with a place held in the middle of it.

He picked the book up, and closed it, and looked at the spine.

Then he sat down in the chair and looked out of the window at the dead garden, and Rosalind went away and left him there for an hour, and when he came down he had the book in his hand and his face was quiet in a way it had not been.

“We will plant it out,” he said. “The garden. It has gone to ruin.”

“Yes.”

“She would have wanted roses. She always said she was too impatient for anything that took more than a year.”

“Then we will plant roses,” Rosalind said, “and we will be impatient, and I am told that is how roses are.”

He looked at her for a moment. Then he said, “Thank you,” and it was for the hour, and for the room, and for the fact that she had not followed him up the stairs.

Celia’s memory was honored after that — spoken of, not whispered. Her portrait stayed above the library fire. Her name was said aloud at dinner. There was a new stone put up over her grave, replacing the false account with words chosen by the family to honor her honestly, and the Duke took Rosalind to see it on a Tuesday in November, and they stood there a while, and the wind smelled of wet earth and dead leaves, and he cried that time, and she held his arm, and they went home.

Rosalind replaced black with color.

It started small — an emerald pin, then a green walking dress, then a shawl in gold. Then one day she came down to breakfast in a dress of deep copper that the whole household stared at, and Nell cried again, and the Duke of Ravenmoor looked up from his paper and said, without lowering it, “I believe I have seen that color before, on a cannon, at Badajoz,” which was the closest thing to a joke anyone had heard from him in three years.

By spring, she wore what she liked.