They Mocked Her When Her Groom Arrived In A Farmer's Cart — He Was The Duke In Disguise
Chapter 6
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The man who climbed down from the cart wore a plain brown coat, worn soft at the elbows, and boots dusted gray with the road. His hair was dark and a little too long for fashion, pushed back from a face that might have been called handsome in any drawing room in London had it not been standing beside a farmer's cart on the worst-dressed morning of the year.He did not flinch at the laughter. He did not flush, or stammer, or look for somewhere to hide his humiliation. He simply stood, straight-backed, and let the mockery wash over him the way a stone lets rain fall past it.Matilda watched him from the top of the steps, and something in her chest went very still. There was nothing of shame in the way he stood, nothing of a man caught out of his depth or embarrassed by his own poverty. His shoulders were set with a quiet, unhurried confidence, as though the laughter of 200 aristocrats was a sound too small to reach him at all.She had seen shame before; she had worn it herself more mornings than she could count. This was not that. This was something else entirely, and she could not yet name it."Come along, then!" Lady Vivian called out, her voice bright with cruelty dressed as good humor. "Don't keep your bride waiting in her farmer's cart, sir. I'm sure the horses are eager to return to their proper work!"More laughter—Violet's among the loudest, high and bright and merciless.The man—Callum Robinson, Matilda reminded herself, though the name felt strangely small for him—climbed the marble steps without hurry. He stopped before her, close enough that she could see the dust on his collar, the calluses on the hand he extended toward her, and his eyes.For only a moment, as their gazes met, something passed through them that Matilda could not have described to save her own life: not pride, though there was a quiet strength in it; not arrogance, though there was certainty. It was simply dignity, whole and untouched, the kind that did not need an audience's approval to exist.He said nothing. He only waited, hand outstretched, while 200 voices laughed around them both.Matilda thought of Belgrave House, of the shawl in her trunk that still smelled faintly of her mother, of every dinner she had eaten in silence while Violet's laughter filled the room meant for her, too. She thought of the villagers who called her gentle as though it were worth something, when her own family called it worthless. She thought, quite suddenly and with great clarity, that she would rather ride away in mud and mockery beside a man who did not flinch than remain one more day in a house that had never once looked at her with anything resembling respect.She took his hand.