She moved her hand on the counterpane, her fingers tracing over the softly worked, pristine linen to her stomach, tender and swollen and vacant. A tear spilled, racing down her temple, leaving a trail of loneliness as it slipped into her hair and disappeared. She imagined that it carried the last shred of her happiness.
Beyond the window, bright blue sky shimmered, clouded by nothing but the heavy glass panes. A bare tree branch in the distance appeared malformed, great black blotches upon it.
Not malformation. Crows.
One for sorrow. Two for mirth.
Her breath hitched in her throat.
“Tears won’t bring it back.”
Sera turned toward the voice, dreading what she would find there. Not her husband, but her mother-in-law, who seemed to make a practice of inhabiting rooms in which she was not welcome. Indeed, the Dowager Duchess of Haven was regularly present in the worst of rooms. The ones that destroyed dreams. The woman was a harbinger of sorrow. Even if Sera hadn’t known in her soul that the child was gone, the presence of the dowager proved it.
Sera looked away to the window, to the sky beyond, bright and full of stolen promise. To the crows.
Three for a wedding. Four for a birth.
She did not speak. She could not find the words, and even if she could, she was not interested in sharing them with the other woman.
The dowager found enough words for both of them, however, drawing closer, speaking as though about the weather. “You might not like me, Seraphina, but you would do well to listen.”
Sera did not move.
“We are not that different, you and I,” the older woman said. “We both made a mistake trapping a man in marriage. The difference is that my child survived.” She paused, and Sera willed her to leave the room, suddenly exhausted by the dowager’s very presence. “If he hadn’t, I would have run.”
Running was a glorious thought.
Could she outrun it? The sorrow? The pain? Could she outrun him?
“There was no love lost in our marriage. Just as there is none lost in yours.”
She was wrong, of course. Sera’s marriage was all love lost. And now, as she lay alone in this blindingly white bed in this blindingly white room in this oppressively daunting home, she knew that her marriage would never be love regained.
Because there would never be love again. Not for Malcolm. Not for their child. Not for herself. She was alone in this room and in this life.
If only she could run. But he’d stolen her freedom just as well as he’d stolen her heart. And her happiness. And her future.
“You are barren.”
Sera felt nothing at the words, which held no meaning in the moment. She did not care for the news of future, fantasy children, only for that of the child she’d lost. The child they had lost.
“He will need an heir.”
He did not wish one. Hadn’t he made it clear?
His mother either did not know, or did not care. “You cannot give it to him. Someone else can.”
Sera looked away.
“If you wished it, I could help you.”
She looked to her mother-in-law, into grey-blue eyes cold as the woman’s soul. Sera did not pretend to misunderstand. She knew that her disappearance was all this hateful woman had ever wanted. The dowager had loathed Sera from the start—hated the circumstances of her birth, her father a commoner who had bought his way into the aristocracy and her mother, willing to do anything to climb, who had clawed her way up, crowing to all who would hear that her eldest had captured a duke.
Of course, Sera had believed him caught. Believed him hers. Wished it beyond measure.
But this woman—this cold, aging woman—had made sure that was never to be. In spite of the promise of a child. Because of it.
Until this moment, Sera had planned to stay. To win her husband’s forgiveness. To defy the dowager’s fury. But that was before. That was when she thought they might one day be a family.
When she had still harbored dreams of happiness.
Now, she knew better.
Thick skirts rustled as the other woman drew nearer. “You could run. Begin anew. Let him do the same.”
It was madness. And still, she could not stop herself from saying, “What of our marriage?”
A muscle twitched at the edge of the dowager’s lips. She sensed triumph. “Money buys everything. Including annulment.”
Sera looked to the crows outside. Five for silver. Six for gold.
The dowager continued. “The absence of children will ease the way.”
The words were a cold, quiet torture.
The absence of their child would never be easy.
“Name your price,” the dowager whispered.
Sera was silent, watching the door behind the older woman, willing it to open. Willing her husband to return, filled with the aching sadness that consumed her. Desperate to mourn their child. Their past. Their future.
Willing to forgive her.
Willing to ask for forgiveness.
The mahogany door remained firmly shut.
He didn’t wish it, and so why should she? Why shouldn’t she close a door herself? Why shouldn’t she choose a new path?
How much to do it? How much for a future? How much to run? How much for a life, alone, pale in comparison to the one she’d been promised?
Alone, but hers.
She whispered the exorbitant number. Enough to leave. Never enough to forget.
Seven for a secret never to be told.
Chapter 3
Difficult Duchess Demands Divorce!
August 19, 1836
House of Lords, Parliament
He was as handsome as he’d ever been. She didn’t know why she’d expected him to be otherwise—it had been three years, not thirty—but she had. Or perhaps not expected, but hoped. She’d harbored some small, secret dream that he’d be less perfect. Less handsome. Less, full stop.
But he wasn’t less. If anything, he was more.
His face more angular, his gaze more consuming, he was even taller than she remembered. And so handsome, even as he came toward her, dressed in ancient parliamentary robes and the inane powdered wig that should have made him look like a child playing at fancy dress and instead made him look a man with a purpose.
Namely, removing her from the floor of the House of Lords.
He parted the similarly garishly appointed members of Parliament like a red velvet sea, encouraged by the hoots and jeers of those assembled aristocrats whose disdain she knew all too well from her former life. Men who could ruin a woman in a heartbeat. Destroy a family and a future. And do it all without thinking twice.
She’d loathed them all, and him the most.
But not for long.
She planned to put the loathing behind her now that she’d returned, ready to forget him. She’d imagined this moment for months, since before she’d returned to Britain, the entire plan designed to infuriate him to the point of agreeing to the dissolution of their marriage. For, if there was anything Haven loathed in the world, it was being played the fool.
Had that not been their demise at the start?
He approached, the massive chamber falling away along with the years. She’d been haunted by his eyes. Somehow not brown, not green, not gold, not grey, and somehow all of them at once. Fascinating and full of secrets. The kind of eyes that might steal a woman’s wits if she wasn’t careful.