A duke does not beg. He commands. He buys. He turns a blind eye. Theodore Ashdown, the Duke of Westmore, had perfected the art of the blind eye.
Until a freezing Tuesday in November, parading his flawless new betrothed through the biting London wind. That was the day his meticulously curated world violently fractured. Because there, shivering in the mud, wearing threadbare wool, was his discarded ex-wife. And she was heavily, unmistakably pregnant. The frost that morning did not simply settle.
It bit. It clamped down on the cobblestones of Mayfair with teeth of iron. Theodore Ashdown, His Grace the Duke of Westmore, felt nothing of the cold. His greatcoat was lined with heavy wool. His boots were bespoke calfskin, thick enough to march through a battlefield.
Or in this case, a congested stretch of Piccadilly. A coal wagon had thrown a wheel at the intersection, spilling a sea of black rock and soot across the road. The resulting carriage jam stretched for a quarter of a mile. "We shall walk, Beatrice," Theo said, his voice flat.
He did not wait for an answer. He opened the carriage door and stepped out into the biting wind. Lady Beatrice Fairfax hesitated on the velvet-lined step. She was a vision in ivory and fox fur, a porcelain doll bred for drawing rooms and polite, bloodless conversation. She was exactly the sort of woman a duke was supposed to marry.
Uncomplicated, flawless, entirely devoid of the rough, unpredictable edges that could draw blood. "Theo, it is terribly dirty out there," she murmured. Her gloved hand hovered in the air. He took it. He assisted her down.
"It is London, Beatrice. The dirt is part of the architecture." He offered his arm. She took it, leaning her weight against him. They began to navigate the pedestrian walkway, skirting the edges of the frozen sludge. Theo stared straight ahead.
He possessed a striking, angular face, carved from aristocratic boredom and quiet, unrelenting cynicism. He was 32 years old and felt 80. Eight months.
It had been exactly eight months since the ink dried on the ecclesiastical papers dissolving his marriage to Josephine. Josephine. Just the silent thought of her name in his own mind felt like swallowing glass. She had been his rebellion. The daughter of a minor baron, lacking a massive dowry, lacking the perfect pedigree, but possessing a fierce, grounding intelligence that had cut through his world of sycophants.
He had married her against the vehement protests of his mother, the Dowager Duchess. He had loved her. Completely. Foolishly. And then, a year into their marriage, the scandal broke.
Josephine's father was caught embezzling from the Crown's naval funds. Treason. Ruin. The Dowager Duchess had moved with the swift, merciless precision of a guillotine. She presented Josephine with a choice: annul the marriage on the grounds of non-consummation, a blatant, humiliating lie, and quietly disappear.
And in return, the Ashdown wealth would quietly pay off the stolen funds, saving her father from the gallows. If she refused, the Duke of Westmore would publicly denounce her family, and her father would hang. Theo hadn't known the truth not then. He had only seen Josephine walk into his study pale as a ghost and hand him the signed papers. She told him she had never loved him.
She told him she had only wanted the title and now that her family was ruined she could not bear the shame of remaining. She had looked him dead in the eye, her jaw set, and severed his heart from his chest with surgical precision. He had let her go. His pride, wounded and bleeding, had demanded it. Now he was marrying Beatrice.
It was a transaction, an alliance of estates. That man is staring at me, Theo. Beatrice whispered, pressing closer to his arm. Theo blinked, pulled back to the present. They had walked further than he intended, veering off the main thoroughfare to bypass the worst of the carriage jam.
They were nearing Covent Garden. The air here smelled different. Gone was the faint scent of expensive pipe tobacco and hot house flowers. Here, the air was thick with the smell of roasting chestnuts, damp wool, raw Thames water, and desperation. Keep your eyes forward.
Theo advised, his tone detached. They are merely hungry. Fur is a rarity on this street. He wanted to turn back. He hated this part of the city.
It reminded him too much of the reality he spent thousands of pounds a year to ignore. But the street behind them was now blocked by a shouting match between two draymen. They had to push forward through the market square. The noise was a physical weight. Costermongers shouting prices for bruised apples and wilted winter greens.
The scrape of wooden barrows against stone. The cry of a chimney sweep's boy. Theo kept his grip on Beatrice tight, steering her like a ship through a treacherous reef. We will turn up Southampton Street. He said, scanning the crowd.
There is a hackney stand near— He stopped. He didn't slow down. He didn't pause. He froze entirely, like a clockwork mechanism stripped of its mainspring. Theo?
Beatrice tugged at his arm. Theo, what is it? You are hurting my wrist. He didn't hear her. The roar of the market faded into a dull, rushing hum in his ears.
His vision narrowed, tunneling through the throng of gray and brown bodies, locking onto a single figure standing by a cheap vegetable stall 20 yards away. She was haggling over a cabbage. It was a bruised, pathetic thing, half frozen and limp. She held it in hands that were raw, chapped red by the biting wind. She wore no gloves.
She wore a dress of coarse, slate gray cotton hemmed with mud. Over her shoulders was a thin, heavily darned woolen shawl that offered as much protection from the cold as a cobweb. Her dark hair, once curled and pinned with pearls by his own valet, was shoved hastily under a plain working-class bonnet. It was Josephine. Theo's breath hitched in his throat.
A sharp, physical pain slammed into his ribs. It was her. The tilt of her chin, the proud, stubborn line of her neck, the way she shifted her weight when she was arguing. He hadn't seen her in eight months. He had assumed, when he bothered to allow himself to think of her, that she had retreated to some quiet, modest country cottage.
He had sent his solicitor to offer her a pension. The solicitor had returned with the envelope unopened, stamped with a simple return to sender. He thought it was pride. He thought she had funds hidden away. He had never, in his darkest nightmares, imagined her standing in the freezing sludge of Covent Garden fighting over rotting vegetables.
Theo, you are scaring me. Beatrice said. Her voice was shrill, cutting through the static in his head. He ignored her. He took a step forward.
Just as his boot hit the cobblestone, Josephine turned slightly to hand a copper coin to the vendor. The wind caught her thin shawl, blowing it back from her frame. Theo stopped breathing. Beneath the cheap, heavy apron she wore, her stomach was swollen. It was a heavy, undeniable mound.
She was pregnant. The world tilted on its axis. The sky, gray and heavy with snow, seemed to press down on his shoulders. He stared at the curve of her belly. Six months, maybe seven.
Seven months. The arithmetic fired through his brain with the cold, lethal speed of a bullet. Eight months ago, she had signed the papers.