They Forced The Princess To Marry A Beggar… Then He Walked Back Into The Palace As Britain’s……

Chapter 5

Beyond the palace walls, Duke Sebastian Ashford was learning the full weight of his own decision.

He had returned to Ashbourne Castle to find his father’s condition worsening. The old duke, who had seemed indestructible through Sebastian’s entire childhood, now lay in a bed that seemed too large for his diminished frame, his breath coming in shallow rasps that filled the silent room like a broken bellows.

“I heard about the ceremony,” his father said on the second night, his voice barely audible. “The entire kingdom is talking about it. The princess who chose a beggar.”

Sebastian sat beside the bed, his hands clasped between his knees. “I was that beggar.”

His father’s eyes widened, then narrowed, then closed. For a long moment, the only sound was the crackling of the fire and the old man’s labored breathing.

“Then you have your answer,” the duke said. “She chose you when you had nothing. That is more than your mother ever had from me.”

Sebastian’s mother had died when he was seven, and his father had never remarried. He had never spoken of her with warmth, only with a kind of distant respect that Sebastian had always assumed was love, attenuated by time. Now, hearing the regret in his father’s voice, he wondered if he had been wrong.

The old duke died three days later, just before dawn, with Sebastian holding his hand. The title passed to him in that moment, fully and irrevocably, and Sebastian Ashford became the Duke of Ashbourne in truth — with lands, soldiers, and a seat at the king’s council, though no one in the capital yet connected him to the ragged stranger who had caught Elara’s garland.

He did not return to the palace immediately. He could not. There were arrangements to be made, estates to be managed, tenants to be addressed. But he sent his men ahead of him — loyal retainers who had served his family for generations, men who knew how to move through a palace without being noticed.

“Watch her,” he told them. “Watch everything. What she eats, what she wears, how she speaks to the servants. Report everything back to me.”

They did.

And every report that arrived at Ashbourne Castle brought Sebastian closer to a truth he had not expected to find.

She scrubs floors now. The court calls her the beggar’s bride.

Her gowns were taken from her. She sleeps in a servant’s room near the kitchen.

She does not complain. She does not cry. She helped the youngest kitchen girl carry water yesterday, even though the girl was too small to lift the bucket alone.

Victoria has taken her place at court. She receives suitors daily. The king has not spoken to Princess Elara in three weeks.

She mended the head cook’s apron this morning. The cook did not thank her.

Sebastian read each report in his study, alone, by candlelight. And with each one, the image of Elara grew clearer in his mind — not the composed princess on the dais, but the woman who knelt beside a kitchen girl to share the weight of a water bucket, the woman who mended aprons without being asked, the woman who absorbed cruelty without becoming cruel in return.

He had set out to find a woman who would choose a man over a title. He had not expected to find one who would choose kindness over revenge.

One evening, a report arrived that he read three times before setting it down.

She went to the chapel tonight. She prayed for nearly an hour. We could not hear the words, but she wept when she thought no one was watching. Then she wiped her face and returned to her room without speaking to anyone.

Sebastian folded the letter and placed it in the drawer where he kept the others. He sat in the darkness of his study, watching the fire burn low, and he made his decision.

It was time to return.