My Sister-In-Law Hid Me In The Dark — Then The Shunned Duke Crossed The Room

Part 1

I smoothed the worn fabric of my black mourning dress.

The seams were giving way at the waist, just like everything else in my life.

My sister-in-law Brenda pointed a manicured, jewel-heavy finger toward the farthest corner of the drawing room.

She did not even bother to look at me when she spoke.

“Sit at the far end by the window, Megan, and do try not to be seen.”

A widow of two years in unrelieved black was a shadow over a festive card table.

Brenda had gone to such immense trouble with our host Tyler’s evening.

I did not argue with her.

I did not change color at the instruction to make myself completely invisible to the wealthy guests.

I simply rose from my chair without a single word.

I moved past the chattering groups and the clinking crystal glasses.

I walked to the farthest chair in the enormous room.

It sat half behind the heavy velvet curtain where the candlelight scarcely reached.

I sat down in it and became obediently a shadow.

My late husband had died of a sudden fever in the second year of our marriage.

He left me very little in the way of coin.

He left me a great many relations who considered me a profound inconvenience.

I lived with his sister Brenda now under her expansive roof.

I had nowhere else to go.

She never let me forget it for a single hour of the day.

The room buzzed with the clatter of porcelain teacups and the sharp snap of playing cards.

Laughter drifted over the tables, bright and completely foreign to my ears.

I turned my face toward the dark garden beyond the tall glass panes.

The silent, empty garden was far better company than the room.

Then the heavy wooden double doors at the entrance opened.

The ripple of tension went through the assembly first.

Then the stares were quickly hidden behind fans and lifted teacups.

A particular, heavy quality of silence fell over the gilded machine of the polite world.

Craig, the Duke of Somerset, stood alone at the threshold.

His face bore the plain, unhidable evidence of a brutal war the polite world preferred to forget they had asked him to fight.

A jagged scar ran from his left brow down along the cheekbone.

It was the devastating legacy of a French saber.

It had cost him nearly everything his immense rank should have guaranteed.

The formal invitations still came to his estate.

One did not simply cut a duke from the guest list.

But they came with a distinct flinch in the wax seal.

I watched the mothers frantically steer their eligible daughters wide of his path.

I saw women who had once desperately angled for his notice suddenly find urgent reasons to look away.

They called him the Savage of Somerset in their vicious whispers when they thought he could not hear.

He stood entirely at the edges of the room.

He expected nothing of any gathering he entered but the flinch.

I knew that isolation better than anyone.

My own form of isolation just lacked the royal title.

I watched him stand there, completely alone amidst the crowd.

He did not expect me sitting silently in the corner.

My gaze drifted from the dark garden and came slowly around the room.

My eyes reached him exactly where he stood by the grand doors.

The candlelight fell full and merciless on the scarred side of his face.

Every other eye in the room had slid off him like water off oiled cloth.

Mine stopped.

I looked at the deep groove of the scar.

I looked at the ruin of him plainly and without a shred of hurry.

I did not flinch.

I did not look quickly away to spare myself the uncomfortable sight.

I did not arrange my features into the careful, sickly pity that was always worse than the flinching.

I simply looked the way one profound grief looks at another and immediately recognizes it.

I inclined my head to him.

It was a small, grave bow of one shadow to another across a bright, cruel room.

Then I turned my face back to the dark garden.

Craig stood very still by the door.

In four years, no one in any drawing room in the county had looked at the whole of his face without flinching.

He crossed the room directly toward me.

The whist tables completely faltered in their play.

The lively conversations caught in dry throats.

The company watched the Savage of Somerset walk with evident purpose toward the banished widow.

Brenda half rose from her seat with an expression of open, breathless alarm.

She looked as though her invisible relation had committed some fresh embarrassment merely by being approached.

Craig did not spare her a single glance.

He crossed the entire bright length of the room into my dim corner.

He stopped before me in my rusty black dress.

He bowed low.

“I find I would rather stand in this corner than sit at any table in the room.”

He gestured to the empty chair half behind the velvet curtain.

“May I share your exile?”