Alexander, standing rigid at her side, said nothing, but the muscle in his jaw flickered.
The dancing began. Margaret moved through the figures with a quiet precision that drew nods from matrons who had expected her to trip over her own feet. She conversed about art with Sir Brandon, politics with Lord Holloway, and breeding programs with an elderly baron who was so charmed he called her "my dear" three times.
The dowager, watching from a gilt chair, looked as though she had swallowed a lemon. But a ballroom is a web, and every web has its spider.
It was during a pause for refreshment that Margaret, seeking a moment's respite in the conservatory, heard voices through a screen of potted palms. The first was the dowager's, unmistakable in its clipped precision. The second belonged to Lady Penelope Vale, the same woman who had sneered at her before the hunt.
"Really was a stroke of genius, tying the horse contract to the marriage. Bernard Thornwood's bloodlines are irreplaceable, and now Ashford has them locked in perpetuity. The girl herself is a tiresome complication, but she'll learn her place once she's with child."
"If she can conceive," Lady Penelope said with a dry laugh. "She seems more interested in horses than heirs. Perhaps Alexander should have married the bay."
"Do not be vulgar, Penelope. The point is the stables are secure. The rest is mere housekeeping."
Margaret stood frozen behind the palms. The words were not a surprise, precisely. She had always known the marriage had practical roots, but to hear it confirmed so carelessly, as though she were a broodmare purchased at auction, undid something inside her.
She turned and walked, not hurriedly, but with the measured step of someone who has decided the direction of her own life.
She found Alexander on the terrace staring up at the stars. He turned at her approach and something in her expression made his face tighten. "What has happened?"
"Tell me truthfully," Margaret said, and her voice was calm, far too calm. "When you agreed to marry me, was it solely for my father's horses?"
The pause that followed was no longer than a second, but it was everything. Alexander's throat worked. "Your father's stable was a condition of the settlement, yes. I cannot deny that, but it was not the only reason."
"Name another."
He opened his mouth and found nothing. Because at the time, there had been nothing. He had seen a transaction, a necessary exchange to restore his stables after disease and secure his line's reputation. He had not even met her before the contracts were signed. That he had since discovered her to be remarkable, that he had lain awake the last three nights reciting the exact shade of her eyes, was a truth he had not yet earned the right to speak.
Margaret read his silence and nodded once, as though she had been expecting it. "I will not be a clause in a contract, Alexander. I will not spend my life as a footnote in someone's ledger."
She unpinned the Ashford emerald brooch from her gown—the one he had given her the morning after the wedding, a cold gesture of duty—and pressed it into his palm.
Then she walked down the terrace steps into the garden and the night swallowed her.
Part Six
The journey to Shropshire took two days, but Margaret felt no fatigue. She traveled in a hired post-chaise with a single trunk, and when the familiar hills of her childhood rose into view, something tight in her chest began to ease.
The Thornwick Farm was a modest sprawl of paddocks and limestone buildings, smelling of hay and healthy animals. Her father's head groom, a grizzled man named Hoskins, saw her coming and dropped his pitchfork.
"Miss Margaret—beg pardon, Your Grace. Whatever's amiss?"
"Everything and nothing, Hoskins. Is the bay mare in foal yet?"
She threw herself into work. For 3 days, she rose before dawn and fell into bed exhausted, her hands busy with liniments and foaling ropes, her mind blessedly empty of dukes and dowagers.
On the fourth day, a rider appeared on the lane. Alexander had ridden his own horse into the ground getting there. He dismounted stiffly, his face gaunt with sleeplessness, and handed the reins to a staring stable boy.
"Where is she?"
Margaret was in the south paddock rubbing down a yearling with a burlap cloth. She saw him coming across the grass and straightened, the cloth still in her hand. "You are a long way from London, Your Grace."
"I have been a fool," he said, stopping a few feet away. "A blind, arrogant fool who confused a contract for a courtship and a title for a heart. I let my mother poison your standing. I let the ton mock you, and I offered you less than nothing when you deserved everything. I am here to beg, not for your forgiveness—that is yours to grant or withhold—but for the chance to explain."
She folded the cloth. "Explain then."
"Your father's horses were the excuse, yes. I needed them in the settlement tied our families, but I could have found another way. I could have bought horses at auction at ruinous cost and preserved my precious independence. I did not. I chose to marry you because I wanted—" He stopped, and his voice cracked. "A duke with his dignity in tatters. Because I had seen you once, two years ago at the Shrewsbury Fair. You were arguing with a trader over the price of a colt, and you were so fierce, so clear-eyed that I could not look away. I told myself I was being practical. I have never been less practical in my life."