The Lonely Duke Waited Months for His Bride — Then She Arrived With His Missing Son
Chapter 2
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"I understand my arrival is rather less graceful than I had intended." She glanced down at her torn glove. "The hired carriage could go no farther along the damaged lane, and the innkeeper trusted me with this horse. I was trying to find the house when I heard the pony.""You have come," he said, and despised how much the words revealed."I did say I would." Her expression softened. "Though I suppose after all this time, you had every reason to doubt it."He had doubted his own capacity to be wanted. Instead of explaining, he removed his coat and offered it. "I had begun to fear you would never come."Marian accepted the coat because she was shivering too badly to refuse it. "And I had begun to fear, Your Grace, that you no longer wished me to."Harrowmere's doors stood open. Benedict felt hope and terror together. Nothing within would remain quite the same.That evening, after Oliver had been examined and pronounced bruised, but otherwise well, Benedict went into his study and opened the drawer he had been avoiding for a month. A dozen letters lay bound with blue ribbon. He knew the shape of each page as intimately as the familiar paths across his land.The first had arrived in February, after Lady Honoria Wickliffe had grown tired of watching him refuse every introduction she offered."You are not being asked to forget Celia," his aunt had said, setting her teacup down with deliberate precision. "You are being asked whether you intend to live the rest of your life as though you are forbidden to be happy.""I have Oliver.""Yes, and he has a father who loves him and a house in which nobody quite knows how to laugh."After three sleepless nights, he agreed to write to Marian Whitlock, the educated but impoverished daughter of a late cavalry officer. Honoria promised no ideal duchess, only a woman with a mind of her own.Benedict's first letter had been a masterpiece of caution. He described his age, his widowhood, his responsibilities, and his son. He said that he sought companionship and hoped any future wife might be kind to Oliver. He offered neither passionate language nor dishonest certainty.Marian replied in a hand both neat and vigorous:"Your Grace, I appreciate an honest description more than a flattering one. But you have explained what your household requires without telling me who lives inside it. Do you dislike rain? Do you read poetry? Are you impatient with those who disagree with you? I should prefer to know these things before considering whether we could share a life."He had laughed aloud, startling the footman who entered with the morning post.The second letter had told her about Oliver's fear of thunder and the way the child still expected his mother to sing when storms came over the hills.Marian had not offered a cure. "Perhaps he needs you to tell him that you are frightened, too, sometimes," she wrote. "Children know when sorrow is in a room. Silence teaches them only that sorrow must be hidden."Benedict sat with that sentence for a long time. His wife, Celia, had died in 1814 when Oliver was three. Illness had taken her quickly, and Benedict had spent the years since trying to protect their boy from every further hurt. His protection had begun to resemble a silence neither of them knew how to break.