He was a man who had entirely given up on the world, rotting away in a drafty, dying estate. She was a desperate woman with muddy boots, nowhere to go, and half a stolen cabbage in her satchel.
When she stood in his neglected kitchen and offered to make it a home, he laughed until his chest ached. It was a cruel, hollow sound. But that was before he tasted the stew: a single steaming bowl of broth that forced a dead man to remember what it felt like to be alive.
The rain didn't fall; it spat. It drove sideways across the moors, carrying the bitter chill of late November, turning the roads into thick, sucking trenches of mud.
Beatrice Kent dragged her feet through it. Her hem was ruined. Her boots were ruined. Her life, for all intents and purposes, was ruined. But she kept walking.
Ahead, looming like a rotted tooth against the bruised sky, was Harrow Gate. It was a sprawling stone monstrosity. Once the proud seat of the Dukes of Ashborne, it now looked entirely abandoned. Half the windows on the east wing were boarded up. The ivy crawling up the stonework had died, clinging to the walls like blackened veins.
Beatrice didn't care. It had a roof. It had walls. Right now, that was the only currency that mattered.
She bypassed the main entrance. People like her—women with no chaperone, no carriage, and no coin—did not knock on front doors. She slipped around the side, fighting through overgrown briars that tore at her wet wool coat, and found the servant's entrance. The heavy oak door was slightly ajar. She pushed her way inside.
The air in the scullery was dead. It smelled of dust, old ash, and neglect. Beatrice leaned against the stone wall, chest heaving, water pooling around her boots. She was freezing. Her fingers were numb, white at the knuckles where she gripped her small leather satchel. She needed a fire.
She walked past empty pantries and unlit hearths. The kitchen was massive, built to feed a hundred people, but it felt like a tomb. Copper pots hung from the ceiling, dull and tarnished. A single pathetic fire smoldered in the massive hearth, fighting a losing battle against the damp draft coming down the chimney.
Beatrice dropped her satchel on a heavy wooden prep table. She was alone, or so she thought.
"If you're here to steal the silver, you're about four years too late."
The voice was a low, dry rasp. It came from the shadows near the back stairwell. Beatrice jumped, spinning around, her hand instinctively dropping to the small paring knife she kept in her pocket.
A man stepped into the dim light of the dying fire. He was tall; that was the first thing she noticed. The second was the sheer state of disrepair he was in. He wore a linen shirt that might have been crisp a week ago, now unbuttoned at the collar and rumpled. His dark hair was overgrown, falling into eyes the color of chipped flint. He held a half-empty bottle of cheap brandy in one hand. He looked like a vagrant, but the cut of his trousers and the heavy gold signet ring on his finger betrayed him.
This was Arthur Pendleton, the Duke of Ashborne, the man the village whispered about: the recluse, the drunk, the madman who let his inheritance turn to dust.