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

Chapter 5

Hyde Park shimmered under a pale, watery sun, the kind that gives light without heat. Carriages lined the paths. Ladies strolled with parasols tilted just so. Gentlemen rode at an easy pace along Rotten Row, showing off their horses and their posture. Everyone was there to be seen. Everyone was performing.

Rosalind walked toward the Serpentine in her black dress, and she had never in her life felt so visible.

Eyes followed her. Whispers stirred behind her, small and constant, like insects in a field. She kept her chin level and her pace even. She had learned to walk through whispers the way one learns to walk through rain — without hurrying, without pretending not to notice.

He was standing at the water’s edge with his hands clasped behind his back, looking down at the rippling surface as though it might give him an answer he had not yet thought to ask for.

He turned as she approached.

“You came,” he said.

“You said you expected me.” She lifted her chin. “That was not a command.”

“It sounded like one.”

For the briefest moment, something crossed his face that was almost — almost — amusement. It was gone before she could be certain it had been there at all.

“Walk with me.”

They moved along the water’s edge in silence. Ducks cut across the surface, leaving thin silver wakes. Somewhere behind them a child laughed, high and bright and entirely untouched by anything that had ever happened in a ballroom.

“I will ask you a direct question,” the Duke said at last. “I expect an honest answer.”

She nodded.

“Did you do what they accused you of three years ago?”

Rosalind stopped walking.

It was not the question that stopped her. It was the fact that he had asked it at all. In three years, not one person had asked her. Not her mother. Not her father. Not the friends who had melted away. The whole of London had simply decided, and the deciding had taken less than a day.

“No,” she said clearly. “I did not.”

He studied her face with unsettling focus, as though he were reading a page in poor light.

“Then why did you accept the punishment?”

“Because innocence requires proof,” she said, “and guilt requires only rumor. And I was told there is no proof to be had.”

The Duke exhaled slowly, and something in him settled, like a heavy door closing at last after a long struggle with the wind.

“I require a wife,” he said.

Rosalind blinked. “Your Grace—”

“My father’s will demands an heir. Time is no longer generous with me.” He spoke calmly, coldly, as though he were reading a contract aloud. “I will not marry a woman who expects romance. I will not marry a woman who wants to be adored, or who will weep when she is not. I have no heart to offer and no patience for pretending otherwise.”

She felt the words land like stones dropped one by one into still water.

“You want someone who is already broken,” she said.

“No.” He turned to face her fully. “I want someone who has already been tested.”

Wind moved across the Serpentine, ruffling the water into a thousand small blades of light.

“I offer a marriage of purpose,” he said. “Protection. Position. A house that no one will dare whisper about. Freedom from that corner you have been standing in for three years. In return, you will bear my heir, and you will ask nothing of my heart.”

Rosalind’s hands curled into fists inside her gloves. Her ears rang faintly.

“And if I refuse?”

“Then you return to the life you know.”

He said it without cruelty. That was somehow worse. He was not threatening her. He was simply describing the world.

“You have three days,” he said. “I will call on your father on the fourth morning for your answer.”

He bowed — a short, correct inclination of the head — and walked away along the water’s edge, and did not look back.

Rosalind stood by the Serpentine for a long time after he had gone. A duck paddled past, unimpressed. The sun slid behind a bank of cloud, and the water went from silver to iron.

Ask nothing of my heart.

She thought of three years of black. She thought of her father’s hands flat on the desk. She thought of the corner at Halstead House, which had been built for her, which would be waiting for her tonight and tomorrow and every night until she died.

Then she went home.

And that night, the letter came.