Easy DIY Hacks

"She Hid Just to Watch the Royal Ceremony—Then the Duke Saw Her and Ordered Everyone to Stop

Cecily Ashdown had promised herself one look, and the promise was already failing.

The stone pillar was cold through her sleeves. The air in the upper gallery was thick with beeswax and hothouse roses, and below her a hundred of the most powerful people in England were holding the same breath she was. She had no invitation and no right to be here. A parcel of books was still clutched against her ribs, tied with the blue string she used for every order that ever left her father's shop. Across a floor of pale marble, the Duke of Aldermere stood a few moments from binding his life to another woman.

And he was looking straight up at her.

It had begun as an errand. That was the part she kept turning over, even now, with her pulse beating in her teeth. At dawn she had carried a parcel of books to the gates of Wexcombe Palace, because old Lord Penhallow's household was lodging within and had ordered reading for the long ceremony day. The steward who met her at the iron gates was harried, half-deaf, and bent on one thing only. He took one look at the wrapped bundle in her arms, announced, ""Alterations, thank God, the Lady's hem again,"" and waved her toward the service entrance with a flap of his hand.

She could have corrected him. She had opened her mouth to do it. Then she saw the long corridor beyond the gate, hung with ribbons, bright as the inside of a jewel box, and the words had simply gone out of her. She told herself she would hand over the parcel and leave. Instead she kept walking, behind a file of seamstresses with their pincushions strapped to their wrists, her eyes low and her steps steady, until a turning in a corridor opened like a door in a dream and let her out into the upper gallery of the great hall.

Behind her pillar, she had understood that she was never going to leave until she had looked.

The city of Eastbridge had dressed itself for celebration since dawn. Garlands hung from every lamppost along the river road. Street vendors sold little paper crests stamped with the Aldermere seal, a stag within a ring of oak leaves, and children ran through the cobbles waving pennants at something they were far too young to understand. To them it was a festival. To Cecily it had been a funeral, and she had walked through it with a parcel and a straight back, past the bunting, as though she were merely a woman on her way to work.

She had spent three years knowing him. That was the foolish part. Not dreaming of him, as the ladies of the drawing rooms dreamed, over engravings and newspaper paragraphs, but knowing him. The newspapers knew a cold, broad-shouldered duke who never smiled in portraits and never gave interviews, who appeared at no gathering without looking as if he would rather be elsewhere. Cecily knew the other one. He sat at the very back of her father's shop on Quill Lane every Thursday afternoon, in the chair beside the stove that nobody else used, turning pages with careful hands. Sometimes he read aloud without realizing he was doing it, in a low voice that made the whole shop seem to lean in.

Once, only once, she had made a joke about a Gothic novel. A villain so badly written that he announced his own wickedness before every dinner, like a man reading out a menu. And the Duke of Aldermere had looked up from his page and *laughed*, quietly, startled, as though the sound had escaped him. For exactly three seconds he had been an ordinary man in an ordinary chair, with warmth moving behind his eyes.

She had counted those three seconds. She had never stopped counting them. That was the trouble.

The last time he came, eight months ago, he carried a leather-bound volume to the counter that he had already read twice. She had teased him, as she teased everyone. *Why do you keep buying books you've finished?* He had looked at her for a long moment, long enough for the stove to tick and a draft to lift the pages on the nearest shelf, and said, quietly, ""Some things want returning to.""

He had not come back after that. She had waited three Thursdays before she understood. Then she had put the chair beside the stove back where the customers could reach it, and gone on with her life.

Now she stood in the gallery of a palace with her heart beating against the stone.

The hall below was enormous. A thousand candles burned along gilded fixtures that ran the length of the ceiling, and their light lay in long gold sheets across the marble. The great lords of the realm sat in rows, silk and velvet and orders on their chests, their faces arranged in expressions of solemn happiness. On a raised platform draped in ceremonial blue stood the officiant in his formal robes. And before him, hands clasped behind his back, stood Gideon Aldermere.

He was dressed in black and silver, with a sash across his chest. His dark hair was cut close and neat. He had the same height, the same shoulders, and the same stillness, but every line of him was harder than she remembered. He stood like a man who had been told exactly where to place his feet and had obeyed without a murmur. His jaw was set. His eyes were fixed on some middle point in the empty air. He looked, she thought, like a soldier on the last day of a war he had already lost.

She noticed one odd thing, and could not afterward say why it troubled her so. A thread trailed from his left cuff, thin and bright, barely the width of a hair. It stirred in the draft of the candles. It was blue.

*You have seen him,* she told herself. *You have had your look. It is enough. It has to be enough.*

She did not move.

The ceremony opened with a procession of minor officials reading declarations. The language was dense with legal terms and precedent, but she understood the shape of it, as one understands the shape of a storm from the color of the sky. Then the doors on the far side of the hall opened and the bride entered.

Lady Cordelia Thornbury was everything the newspapers had promised: tall, pale, poised, walking with the confidence of a woman who had spent her life being told she was exactly where she belonged. Her family had served the crown for four generations. The match made every kind of sense that mattered in this world. Cecily felt something go very still inside her chest, like a candle in a closed room.

The officiant lifted his voice for the binding words. The hall went silent, with the particular silence that exists only when hundreds of people breathe in at once. Cecily gripped the pillar in both hands and stared down at the man she had spent three years persuading herself she did not love.

And Gideon's eyes moved.

It was not a dramatic sweep. It was slow and almost involuntary, like a compass needle dragged off its heading by something it could not explain. His gaze slid sideways, past the officiant, past the front rows, past every person and duty that was supposed to hold it. It rose toward the gallery, and it found her.

The shock knocked the air out of her lungs. She was half hidden. She was dressed in plain wool, ink on her fingers, nobody at all in that room, a ghost wandered in from the wrong story. There was no reason his eyes should have found her. No reason in the world.

They stayed.

Five seconds passed. Then ten. The Duke of Aldermere stood at his own betrothal before the highest lords of the kingdom and did not look away from the bookseller's daughter behind the pillar. Her hands went cold. His face did not change, not truly, but something shifted behind his eyes, too fast for her to name. It was the look of a man who has held his breath so long that he has forgotten breathing, and has suddenly remembered how.

The officiant went on speaking. Gideon raised his right hand.

""Stop the ceremony.""

He did not shout. He did not need to. His voice, deep and utterly certain, swallowed every other sound in the hall, and for one full second nothing in that gilded room moved at all.

Then everything moved at once, and Cecily's world cracked straight down the middle. ....................................
Say 'suggestion' - Part 2 will be updated below 👇"

"The Duke Banished Her to His Dead Northern Estate as Punishment — Then He Arrived to Find It Blooming

Nobody warns you that being forgotten has a smell. Mine was lavender water and warm carriage leather, and it clung to my gloves for three hundred miles. I kept my hands folded in my lap so the coachman could not see them shaking. Behind me, in a tall house in Mayfair, my family had already begun to speak of me in the past tense. Ahead, beyond the last milestone, waited a cottage my stepmother had called a retreat. Folded inside my left glove was a scrap of paper I had not yet dared to read. My father had pressed it there at the door, and it was still faintly warm from his hand.

Three days earlier, I had stood in our hallway with my palm flat against a chipped porcelain vase, and the cold of it had seeped through my skin.

The library door was not quite closed. Oak and distance blurred most of the words, but my stepmother's voice cut through anything. Lady Octavia spoke the way a seamstress cuts silk, cleanly and without apology.

""Seraphina must come first, Edmund. Tamsin is a sensible girl. She will see the necessity.""

""She is my daughter, Octavia.""

""She is also the only person in this house who can disappear without anyone asking where she went.""

I did not breathe. Something in my chest went very small and very still.

""Maldon's patience,"" my stepmother went on, ""will not outlast Michaelmas. You know what he holds.""

""I know what he holds,"" my father said, in the voice of a man reading his own sentence aloud.

I thought then that I understood. I thought I had simply been found inconvenient. It would be a long time before I learned how much was packed into that single sentence, and how little of it was what it seemed.

They explained it to me that afternoon, in the library, with the curtains drawn against a bright, indifferent spring. My half-sister Seraphina, golden-haired, sapphire-eyed, effervescent as ch*****ne, had tangled herself in a flirtation with Viscount Maldon. He was a man whose reputation was as threadbare as his fortune, and he had taken her laughter for a promise. Seraphina had since come to her senses, and Maldon had not. Lady Octavia had a far better match waiting, an earl's heir with a rent roll like a small kingdom. What stood between her daughter and that future was a spurned viscount with a grievance and, it seemed, a great deal of leverage over our family.

""A distraction is wanted,"" my stepmother said, arranging her skirts. ""A season in which Seraphina is seen to be entirely free of entanglements, and Maldon is given time to find other consolations.""

""And I am the distraction,"" I said.

""You are the *solution*, darling. Don't be vulgar about it.""

The place she had chosen was a cottage on the far northern edge of the Duke of Ravenscar's estate, leased by my father at a rent that made him wince whenever he said the figure aloud. It was a fortnight's journey from anyone who knew my name. The story would be that I had gone to nurse a failing relation. By the time the season ended and the accounts were settled in my sister's favor, I could be quietly returned, or not.

I looked at my father. He stood by the shelves with his hands clasped behind his back, staring at a volume of Virgil as though the Latin might offer him an exit. His fingers were trembling. He thought I could not see it.

""A temporary measure, Tam,"" he told the bookcase. ""A matter of prudence.""

""Think of it as a rustic holiday,"" said my stepmother, and smiled at me with her whole painted face. ""The air will do you good.""

I was the plain one. I say it without bitterness; I had made my peace with it years ago. Seraphina was oil paint, gold leaf and cobalt and a flush of rose, and I was the watercolor that had been left out in the rain. I was too clever for the drawing room and too serious for the gaiety it demanded. I could not flatter. I could not pretend not to have read the book under discussion. My use to that family, I understood, had never been in my presence. It lay in how easily I could be taken away.

I did not weep. Weeping would only have given her something to be gracious about.

On the morning of my departure the house was gray and hushed. Seraphina clung to me on the front steps, smelling of orange blossom, and whispered into my collar that it was only for a little while, that she would write every week, that she did not understand it any more than I did. She may even have meant it. Behind her my stepmother checked her watch.

My father came last. He took my hand in both of his and held it a beat too long, and I felt something small and stiff slip beneath the cuff of my glove. His eyes met mine for exactly one second. They were wet. Then he stepped back and became a man who had never done anything at all.

The journey north took six days. I had never in my life been farther than Bath. The soft green country of the south wore thin, field by field, until it gave way to something harder and wilder, moorland the color of old bruises, stone walls running over the hills like stitches, a sky so wide and pale it made me feel I might fall upward into it. I did not read the paper in my glove. I told myself I was waiting for privacy, but the truth was that I was afraid. As long as I did not know what it said, it might say anything.

The cottage appeared at dusk on the sixth day.

It stood alone on a headland, hunched against the wind like an animal that had learned not to expect kindness. Behind it the land fell away to a vast gray sea, and the noise of the waves came up the cliff in long, heavy breaths. The coachman unloaded my two trunks onto the doorstep with unsmiling speed and was gone before the light failed. I stood watching his lantern shrink along the cliff road until the dark swallowed it.

The door was unlocked. Inside, the air tasted of damp and a long, patient emptiness. Dust lay over every surface like a pelt. A table, two chairs, a hearth choked with old ash, and a narrow stair leading to a room under the eaves. In the kitchen, the oilskin over the window had split, and the sea wind came whistling through the gap.

My stepmother had called it a retreat. It felt like a tomb.

I found a stub of candle in my trunk and lit it with fingers that would not quite obey me. Then I sat down at the bare table, drew off my left glove, and unfolded the paper at last.

My father's hand, cramped and hurried, ran uphill across the page.

*Tam. Forgive me. Burn this once you have read it. Do not believe everything you are told about why you were sent, and do not trust any letter that reaches you in Octavia's hand until you have heard from me. The debts are not what she says they are. I am trying to mend it. —E.H.*

The candle guttered in the draft. I read it three times. Then I sat very still in that cold, dead kitchen with the sea breathing below me, and understood for the first time that I had not been sent here to be hidden.

I had been sent here to be *kept*. ....................................
Say 'suggestion' - Part 2 will be updated below 👇"

"She Fell Into the Duke’s Fountain in Front of Everyone — By Winter, He Was Begging Her Not to Leave

The water was colder than any water had a right to be in June.

That was Imogen Pryce's first coherent thought, and it arrived a full second after the splash, after the sharp slap of stone against her heel, after the shocking, silken weight of wet muslin closing around her shins. Her second thought was that her right arm was still held high above her head. At the end of it, perfectly dry, perfectly upright, was a pink rose.

She had not meant to save the rose. It was simply the one thing in the whole disaster that had not moved.

Around her, the garden party at Stainmoor Park had gone quiet in the particular way a crowd does when it cannot decide between horror and delight. A parasol lowered somewhere. A footman holding a tray of strawberries became a statue. Water ran down her back, and the stone figure at the centre of the fountain, some unsmiling nymph with a pitcher, stared down at her from above with what she could only describe as smug indifference.

*It was not here.*

The thought rose through the shock and settled in her chest like a stone dropped in a pond. She had walked through these gardens twice before, once as a girl with her father, once last summer with her aunt. She knew where this fountain stood. It had stood a clear dozen feet to the left, at the end of the lavender walk, where a person reading a letter might walk straight on without a care. She had been reading. She had been walking. And the fountain, which had no business doing so, had been somewhere else entirely.

She was not a fanciful woman. She kept ledgers of her own thoughts the way her father kept parish registers, and every entry in this one said the same thing. *Twelve feet. To the left.*

""Are you injured?""

The voice was low and unhurried, and it came from very close. She turned her head.

He had crossed the lawn without her noticing, and he stood at the basin's edge with the sun behind him, a tall man in a plain dark coat, his hands loosely at his sides. He wore no flourish, no signet, nothing that said what he was. But she had seen the guests' faces as he came, the quick sideways glances, the sudden fascination with the roses. People did not look at him. They looked carefully near him.

He did not look like a man who laughed often. He looked like a man who had been holding a very full cup for a very long time.

""Not physically,"" said Imogen.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth and was gone. ""The basin has a submerged step on the western approach. I have been meaning to have it marked.""

She glanced down at the water swirling about her ankles, then at the ruined hem of her second-best muslin, and conducted a short, honest review of the afternoon. ""Is that the official explanation, or the charitable one?""

He considered her, and she had the odd sensation of being weighed by someone who was not accustomed to giving the scale a chance. ""Both, I think.""

""I was reading a letter,"" she said. It was the truth, and she offered it without decoration, as she offered most things. ""It was not much of an excuse. But it is what happened.""

""While walking.""

""While walking."" She looked up at the nymph, who had not moved. ""It was an important letter.""

Something large and low and deeply unhurried had arrived at the edge of the basin. It was a basset hound of advanced years, with ears like a pair of damp gloves and eyes that held the weary wisdom of a minor philosopher. It looked at the fountain. It looked at Imogen. It looked at the tall man, and arrived at some conclusion it had no intention of sharing. Then it sat down with a heavy sigh, directly in the best position to watch.

""Spinoza,"" said the man, in the tone of a person explaining a family eccentricity. ""He does not usually take such an interest.""

""He seems very discreet.""

""He is professionally neutral.""

Behind the man, a thin, silver-haired gentleman had materialised with a folded linen towel and the expression of a person who had mopped up stranger messes than this one and never mentioned any of them. He did not speak. He did not need to. The tall man stepped back to make room, and Imogen realised with a faint, mortifying jolt that she was still holding the rose in the air like a very small flag.

""I am Alaric Wyndham,"" the man said. ""This is my fountain.""

*The Duke of Stainmoor.* The name fell into place with an almost audible click. She had heard it three times at breakfast, in three different tones. He was the neighbour who declined every invitation, who had not entered a drawing room in the county for seven years, who lived like a monk in a house with forty rooms. She had pictured someone older. Someone with a longer nose.

""Imogen Pryce,"" she said. ""I am so sorry about your fountain.""

""You are being very kind about it.""

""It was the step.""

""It was the step,"" he agreed gravely.

He offered his hand to help her out of the basin. She took it briefly, practically, the way one takes a rail on a ship, and stepped up onto the gravel path with water streaming from her hem. His glove was dry and warm. He let go the instant she was steady, which she noticed, and which she liked. She was three or four inches shorter than he was, and she gave him her whole attention. He seemed unused to that, and he held very still under it.

""The rose survived,"" she added, and handed it to the silver-haired gentleman, who received it as though it were a state document.

""That is something,"" said the Duke.

A brisk, kindly woman with a plume in her hat swept up, a Lady Harrowgate, who had arranged the afternoon and was plainly determined to rescue the remainder. She spoke of dry clothes and a warm room. Imogen let herself be steered toward the house. At the corner of the terrace she looked back, once, and found the Duke still standing where she had left him, watching her go with a face she could not read. It might have been amusement. It might have been something more careful.

Then the crowd closed and she lost him.

---

He did not go back to the party. It had not truly been a party for him in any case, only a favour he had been persuaded to pay in public, and Tilbury, his steward of twenty-two years, had known better than to say *I told you so.* They went back to the east wing and the drainage plans, and for twenty minutes Alaric nodded at what Tilbury said about the second culvert and heard none of it.

At last he said, ""I am going to look at the fountain.""

""Yes, your grace,"" said Tilbury, who had not blinked.

The afternoon had begun to turn gold. The basin lay quiet and flat, the stone nymph undisturbed, the water settling back into its old self. The only sign of the incident was a small dark smear on the western step. Alaric stood and looked at it for some time. Spinoza had come with him and sat down like a bailiff.

On the bench beside the path, where Tilbury had left it, was the pink rose. It had already begun to droop.

And in the shallows of the basin, trapped against the base of the stone, something pale was moving gently in the current. Alaric knelt, which he did not do, and drew it out. It was a sheet of letter paper, heavily folded and soaked through, the ink spreading in slow blue clouds across it.

He was a gentleman, and he did not read other people's letters. He turned it to spare the writing, and he tried not to look.

But the water had lifted one line clear of the rest, as if on purpose, in a strong, plain, anxious hand, and it said:

*…and I will not ask again, Imogen. You must be home before the first frost.*

Alaric knelt there with the wet page in his hands and the dog's heavy breath against his boot. For seven years nothing had surprised him. He found, rather to his dismay, that he was no longer certain. ....................................
Say 'suggestion' - Part 2 will be updated below 👇"

"The Duke Was Given Seven Days to Live—Then His New Bride Revealed She Came From the Future

Nora Whitlock had been in the nineteenth century for less than a minute when she understood that she was going to hate it.

The candles were the first offence. There were hundreds of them, real flames on real wicks, and the air above the altar had gone thick and yellow with wax smoke. Under the smoke lay older smells: damp stone, mothballed velvet, lavender water, and a sweetness like a flower shop after closing. She could not have said how she had arrived. One heartbeat she had been standing in the cool climate-controlled hush of the Halvorsen Museum with a conservator's gloves on her hands, smoothing the silver embroidery of a wedding veil for a friend who could not lift it herself. The next, a white flash had wiped the room away. Now the veil hung over her face, a gown of stiff cream silk squeezed her ribs, and a hundred strangers in powdered hair and tailcoats stared at her as if she had crawled out of the floor.

*Hallucination,* she thought. *Stroke. Gas leak. Someone drugged my coffee.*

Then the groom fell down.

She saw it happen at the edge of her vision. A tall man in a midnight coat, standing rigid at the altar with one hand clamped on the rail, swayed once like a felled tree and went to the flagstones with a sound she knew far too well. It was the flat, boneless thud of a body that had stopped bothering to protect itself.

Eleven years of emergency medicine woke up in her spine.

The church noise rose around her, gasps and rustling silk and a lady's high shriek, but nobody moved toward him. They *watched.* A few faces even wore the bright, greedy look of people at the theatre. That was what finally cut through her panic. Nora had worked night shifts in a city hospital for a decade. She knew what a crowd looked like when it was afraid, and she knew what it looked like when it was enjoying itself.

""Move back,"" she said, and her voice came out in the clipped register she used in trauma bays. ""Give him air. Somebody bring clean water. Not that, it's full of rose petals.""

Somebody gasped. A thin woman in pearls clutched her throat. ""The bride speaks like a stable boy!""

""Great,"" Nora muttered, dropping to her knees on the stone. ""The stable boy is in charge.""

Up close, he was worse than she had feared. He was young, perhaps thirty, with a face built for portraits: sharp cheekbones, a straight nose, black hair damp at the temples. His lips had gone blue. His skin under her fingers felt like cold candle wax. She pressed two fingers into the hollow of his throat and found a pulse so faint and thready it might have been her own imagination. His breath came in shallow sips. And when she bent close to check his airway, a smell brushed her face, sour and faintly sweet, like crushed bitter almonds.

Her stomach dropped through the floor.

*Not a faint. Not a fit. This man is being poisoned.*

""What has she done to him?"" A big man with a florid face had shoved forward. ""She has touched him and now he is worse!""

Nora looked up. ""He was on the floor before I got here. Unless my reputation travels faster than I do, blame somebody else.""

Several people made noises of shock. In the second pew, an ancient lady with a silver cane snorted, then disguised it as a cough.

The man's eyes cracked open. They were grey, unfocused, and furious. He dragged in a breath and rasped, ""Who are you?""

Nora leaned close. ""Apparently, your bride. Try not to die before we're introduced. It'll make the reception awkward.""

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Pain, maybe. Or amusement. Then his eyes rolled up and he went slack.

""Should I..."" The vicar hovered at the altar, wringing a prayer book. ""Should the ceremony continue?""

Nora stared at him. ""With whom? His co**se?""

The old lady in the pew snorted again, louder.

A man in a dark coat cut through the crowd. He was broad in the shoulder, dark of hair, with a face arranged very carefully into concern. ""I am Lord Roderick Sewell, His Grace's cousin. The Duke has been unwell for months. He is stubborn about rest. He should be taken upstairs at once.""

Nora didn't like the way he said *unwell.* He said it the way a man says the name of a horse he has bought. ""He should be taken somewhere with heat and light and fewer people breathing judgement on him,"" she said. ""You, the tall footman. Help me lift him. Support his head. Not by the arms. If anyone else feels faint, please do it quietly against a wall.""

To her mild astonishment, the footmen obeyed.

They bore the Duke through a side door into the vestry. Lord Roderick followed. So did the woman in pearls, who introduced herself between sniffs as Lady Philippa Drayton, the Duke's aunt. ""You cannot give orders in this household,"" she said.

""Wonderful. Then order them to wash their hands.""

Lady Philippa blinked. ""Their *what?* The things at the ends of one's sleeves?""

The old lady with the cane had followed with surprising speed. She laughed out loud. ""I like this bride.""

""Mother, please.""

""Do not *mother* me, Philippa. I have been Lady Cordelia longer than you have been unpleasant.""

Nora filed the names away as she worked. Duke, aunt, cousin, grandmother. A red-faced cousin with too-helpful eyes. She laid the patient on a hard oak bench, loosened his cravat, and stripped the tight collar from his throat. His pulse skipped under her fingers.

*Airway, breathing, circulation.* The old mantra steadied her. *And figure out how to do it with no monitor, no oxygen, no IV, and no idea what year it is.*

She had a horrible feeling she knew the year. The display card in the museum had said the lost duchess appeared at Harrowgate Abbey in 1818.

A hand closed weakly around her wrist. The Duke's eyes were open again, and this time they held on to her with terrible effort.

""You are not Lavinia,"" he whispered. ....................................
Say 'suggestion' - Part 2 will be updated below 👇"

"His Bride Mocked the Comatose Duke’s Handsome Face — Then His Eyes Suddenly Opened

The bride was the only person in the room who was not performing.

Lady Beatrix Harcourt stood at the foot of a four-poster bed in a gown that had been turned twice and mended once, and she watched her husband not breathe quite convincingly enough. Around him, the relatives hovered like crows on a fence. A cousin dabbed at dry eyes with a handkerchief, technique flawless, moisture absent. An aunt prayed in a voice pitched to rattle the plasterwork, with the confidence of a woman who believed heaven owed her rent. A physician held two fingers to the Duke's wrist and counted slowly, the way a man counts when he is paid by the minute. Which he was.

The room smelled of lavender, tincture and lies. Beatrix had expected the first two.

She had been married for approximately forty minutes. She had married a man who had not opened his eyes to see her, had not spoken to promise anything, and had not, so far as the vicar could determine, consented to any of it. His aunt had done that part. *His soul consents,* Lady Honoria had announced in the tone of a cannon being aimed, and the vicar, a nervous man with a cold, had looked at the bed, then at the aunt, then at the door, and continued.

Now Beatrix studied the groom.

The Duke of Blackmere lay against white linen with his black hair combed back from a forehead of remarkable nobility. His cheekbones could have been used to slice bread. His nose was straight, his jaw clean, and his mouth was far too beautiful for a man who was doing nothing whatsoever with it. She felt an unreasonable flash of indignation on behalf of the unused face.

*What a waste,* she thought. *All that architecture, and nobody home.*

Then his left eyebrow moved.

It was a very small movement, a tremor of a quarter inch, gone almost before it began. Beatrix blinked. The eyebrow lay perfectly flat. She leaned closer, ostensibly to smooth the counterpane, and studied the beautiful, motionless, faintly guilty face.

*Interesting.*

Nobody else had noticed. The cousin was still dabbing. The aunt was still praying. The physician was still counting to a number that seemed to be growing.

Her father had delivered her to Blackmere Castle that morning with a marriage contract in one hand and a headache in the other. The contract had been signed months before the Duke's sudden collapse. It was a simple, savage document. The Duke of Blackmere required a wife before his thirty-fifth birthday, or a very disagreeable clause would send half his estate to his cousin. Beatrix required a marriage before her father's creditors discovered that Harcourt House contained more unpaid bills than furniture. Neither party had been consulted about the details, and neither party had been in a position to refuse.

It was not romantic. It was practical, and Beatrix trusted practical things. Practical things rarely wrote poetry and then ran away.

By the end of the ceremony, the guests had scattered like startled pigeons. Her father had vanished with a relief so indecent that she had almost admired it. Now the bedchamber held only the bride, the unconscious groom, a young footman, and Mrs. Grimsby, the housekeeper, who watched Beatrix as though she might make off with the curtains.

""Your Grace."" Mrs. Grimsby's keys shifted at her waist. ""You will want to rest.""

""I was admiring the wainscoting.""

The footman coughed.

""His Grace is gravely afflicted,"" Mrs. Grimsby went on, mouth tightening. ""The physicians say he hears nothing.""

Beatrix looked at the Duke's mouth. ""How very convenient for everyone.""

The footman coughed again, harder. Mrs. Grimsby stiffened and moved toward the door. ""I shall send up tea.""

""Please do. Strong. This marriage has been more active than my husband.""

The footman made a strangled noise and fled first. Mrs. Grimsby followed with the wounded dignity of a woman whose castle had been insulted by daylight. The door closed.

Beatrix sat in the chair beside the bed. For three full minutes, she said nothing. The Duke did not move. The fire hissed. Rain tapped the leaded windows, and somewhere in the grounds a peacock screamed with the confidence of an opera singer being murdered.

She folded her hands.

""Your Grace, if you are truly unconscious, you will not mind what I say next. If you are pretending, this is your chance to reveal yourself before I begin saying rude things about your family.""

Nothing.

""Very well. Your cousin grieves like a man waiting for soup to cool. Your physician smells of expensive secrets. Your aunt prays as if heaven owes her rent. Your housekeeper dislikes me because my gloves are mended. Your valet has tied your cravat better than any unconscious man deserves. And you, sir, have the face of a tragic statue and the pulse of a liar.""

His fingers twitched against the sheet.

Beatrix smiled slowly.

""There you are.""

His eyes opened. They were grey, and not a soft grey. They were storm grey, awake and intelligent and absolutely furious, and the first thing the Duke of Blackmere did as a married man was to glare at his wife.

She leaned back. ""Good afternoon, husband.""

His voice came out rough with disuse. ""You talked too much.""

""You listened too secretly.""

""Who are you?""

""Your bride. We met during the vows. You were quiet, but legally persuasive.""

He shut his eyes, then opened them again. ""They went through with it.""

""The vicar asked if you consented. Your aunt said your soul did.""

""Damn Aunt Honoria.""

""She was very commanding. I nearly consented on your behalf myself.""

He tried to sit. Pain crossed his face, sharp and quick, and Beatrix rose at once and laid a hand on his shoulder. He froze beneath it. ""Do not be foolish,"" she said. ""You have been lying down for six weeks. Heroic gestures can wait until after tea.""

He stared at her hand. ""Remove it.""

She removed it. ""Gladly. Your shoulder is alarmingly warm for a co**se.""

A reluctant flicker touched his mouth, and vanished. ""Gideon Vance,"" he rasped. ""Duke of Blackmere.""

She gave a small curtsy from her chair. ""Beatrix Harcourt. Duchess by accident, necessity and possibly fraud.""

""Not fraud.""

""You pretended to be unconscious through your own wedding. I would call that fraud-adjacent.""

His gaze went to the door. ""Who knows I am awake?""

""Me. Possibly your left eyebrow. I shall not testify against it."" She tilted her head. ""No one else. If anyone else knew, your cousin would be weeping with less optimism.""

Gideon breathed out slowly, and the effort seemed to cost him. Beatrix noticed the tremor in his hand, the hollows beneath his cheekbones. The coma was false, but the weakness was not.

""Why are you pretending?""

""Why did you marry a comatose stranger?""

""Debt. Duty. A father with the financial instincts of a moth near a candle. Your turn.""

He studied her as though she were a document written in code. ""Someone tried to kill me.""

Her breath caught, but her face held steady. ""That is an inconvenient wedding complication.""

""Poison in my evening cordial. A riding accident arranged afterward, in case the poison failed. I survived both. My cousin believes I am dying. I intend to let him go on believing it until he exposes himself.""

""Lord Percival.""

The smallest nod. ""Among others.""

She lowered her voice. ""Your physician.""

""Doctor Crane is either a fool or bought.""

""Or both.""

""Nature is generous.""

She looked at him with new appreciation. ""You are less dull awake.""

""You are less timid than I expected.""

She smoothed her mended glove. ""That was never expected by anyone who knew me.""

He watched her. ""Do you understand what danger you are in?""

She counted on her fingers. ""I have married into a castle where an unconscious duke eavesdrops and somebody dislikes him enough to use poison. I am forming an impression.""

""You should leave.""

""I have only just arrived.""

""Then leave efficiently.""

""Impossible. If I flee on my wedding day, they will say I was rejected by a co**se. My pride could not survive it."" She rose, fetched the tea tray that had arrived outside the door, and carried it in herself. ""Also, if your cousin inherits, my marriage settlement vanishes. Harcourt House falls to the creditors. My younger brothers are pulled from school. My father solves it by apologising to everyone while signing worse papers. So no, Your Grace. I shall not leave efficiently. I shall stay inconveniently.""

She poured. He watched the cup.

""Do not drink anything sent into this room.""

The cup stopped halfway to her lips. ""Ah. How cheering. My first married tea may be murder.""

""The kettle is probably safe. The leaves may not be.""

""Marriage has fewer comforts than advertised."" She set the cup down, untouched.

His gaze moved over her face. ""You believe me?""

""You woke from a false coma in order to complain that I talk too much. That suggests urgency.""

""Most women would scream.""

""I considered it. Then I remembered Mrs. Grimsby dislikes me and might enjoy the noise.""

This time he very nearly smiled.

The bedchamber door opened without a knock.

Gideon dropped back onto the pillows, eyes closed, body limp. The speed was impressive. The result was theatrical. A plump maid came in with fresh towels, looked at Beatrix, at the bed, at the untouched tea. ""Your Grace,"" she whispered. ""Mrs. Grimsby sent me.""

Beatrix stood in front of the bed like a curtain with opinions. ""Your name?""

""Nell Pratt, Your Grace.""

""Do you always enter bedrooms without knocking, Nell?"" ....................................
Say 'suggestion' - Part 2 will be updated below 👇"