They Mocked Her When Her Groom Arrived In A Farmer's Cart — He Was The Duke In Disguise
Chapter 2
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Matilda understood this early. She understood it the way a child understands rain: without needing to be told, simply by standing beneath it long enough. Lady Vivian never struck her; she never needed to. Neglect could cut just as deep as cruelty, and Vivian had perfected the art of looking straight through her stepdaughter, as though she were a piece of furniture that had outlived its usefulness.Violet learned the lesson quickly and improved upon it. Where her mother ignored, Violet mocked—gently at first, then without any gentleness left at all."Matilda still reads to the vicar's poor children," Violet would say at dinner, wrinkling her nose as though the words themselves smelled of soil. "One might think we could not afford a governess of our own, the way she plays at charity."Lord Benedict never defended her. He had grown so consumed by the family's collapsing fortune—a string of disastrous railway investments that had bled Belgrave House of nearly everything but its name—that his daughter's happiness had become a luxury he could no longer spare a thought for.And so Matilda found her own reasons to keep living gently in a house that had stopped being gentle to her.She rose before dawn most mornings, before the house stirred, before Vivian's maid began pinning up Violet's hair for whatever engagement filled that day's calendar. She walked the mile down to the village of Ashford Green with a basket over her arm, filled with bread she had saved from her own plate, ointments she had learned to mix from the old apothecary's widow, and books she read aloud to children who could not afford a single lesson.She had taught herself to read a fever by the flush along a child's cheekbone, to know a cough that would pass from one that would linger and grow dangerous. She also had learned to set a small bone, to stitch a shallow wound, to sit beside a dying grandmother's bed through the long hours of a winter night so the family might sleep an hour or two before morning chores began again.None of it had been taught to her. She had simply gone looking for a use for her own two hands since Belgrave House had never found one.The villagers called her "the quiet one from the big house," and they said it with more affection than anyone at Belgrave House had ever managed."You've a gentler hand than any physician who's come through Ashford Green in 20 years," old Mrs. Fenwick told her one gray morning, watching Matilda wrap a poultice around a farmhand's swollen wrist with quick, careful fingers. "It's a wonder your own family never noticed what they had beneath their roof.""They noticed Violet," Matilda said simply, tying off the linen. "There is only room in that house for one daughter to be noticed at a time."She did not say it with bitterness; by then, it had become simple fact to her, stated the way one might remark that winter follows autumn.