My Arrogant Rival Mocked My Trade — Then He Showed Up Begging For Salvation
Part 1
The music in the assembly hall stopped the very moment the Duke suggested I take up knitting.
He didn’t yell.
Men with that much inherited wealth never actually need to raise their voices to humiliate you.
He simply stood by the punch bowl in a perfectly tailored evening coat, looking down at me with an amused, condescending curve to his mouth.
“I confess I hadn’t expected a lecture on marine insurance,” Arthur Pendelton said, pitching his voice loud enough for half of the harbor town to hear.
“Shouldn’t you be home with your needlework, Miss Carter, rather than minding men’s business?”
George Barrett, the rival merchant who had been trying to buy my family’s firm for months, laughed immediately.
The rest of the room followed suit, eager to please a man whose title commanded the entire county.
I didn’t flush, and I certainly didn’t cry.
I simply held his gaze across the crowded room.
“I don’t knit,” I said evenly.
“I find it a poor use of an evening that might be spent being right about something.”
I set my glass down and walked out, leaving a very specific kind of silence in my wake.
My brother Robert caught up with me on the carriage ride home.
He begged me to sell the Carter firm the next morning.
Father had built our shipping firm from nothing, and since his death six years ago, I had been the one keeping the ledgers balanced.
Robert hated the stain of trade on our family name.
He desperately wanted the respectable, quiet life George Barrett’s eleven thousand pounds could buy us.
I told him the name on the door meant something to me.
I refused to let it go just because polite society wrinkled their noses at us actually working for a living.
Two months passed, and the leaves began to turn along the harbor district.
The assembly hall incident became a favorite piece of local gossip, repeated in every drawing room.
I buried myself in my work, rising before dawn every day to check the shipping manifests.
Then came a Tuesday morning soaked in a relentless, freezing autumn rain.
I was alone in the counting house when the heavy front door opened.
Arthur Pendelton stood on the threshold, the water dripping off his expensive charcoal greatcoat.
He looked utterly hollowed out.
He didn’t wait for my junior clerk to announce him.
He walked straight to my desk and stood there in a heavy silence.
“I require advice,” he finally forced out.
The words clearly tasted like ash in his mouth.
“I’m surprised to find you minding men’s business in a house run by a woman who knits,” I replied without looking up from my inkwell.
A muscle jumped in his jaw.
“I deserved that,” he said.
He took the narrow, uncomfortable chair opposite my desk.
Slowly, the humiliating truth spilled out.
His trusted steward, Edward Higgins, had advised him disastrously on a series of maritime investments.
The great Duke was forty thousand pounds in debt.
His entire estate, save the entailed lands, was about to be mortgaged against a plummeting market.
His only remaining hope was a massive cargo ship currently at sea.
If it didn’t clear customs by the twentieth of October, penalty rates would ruin him permanently.
“And you came to me?” I asked.
“My solicitor told me there is only one person in this county who truly understands shipping risks,” he said, staring intently at the floorboards.
Pride is a slow thing to spend, but he had run entirely out of it.
I opened a fresh ledger and dipped my quill.
For the next three weeks, the Duke spent nearly every evening in my counting house.
We went through six years of correspondence and painstakingly checked every figure his steward had touched.
He stopped being an arrogant lord and became a man desperate to learn.
He actually listened to my arithmetic without questioning my gender.
The town noticed his carriage parked outside our doors, of course.
Rumors started flying that he was making me his mistress.
My best friend Mary Dawson warned me that society was building a cathedral of gossip on our nightly meetings.
Robert stormed in with George’s offer again, demanding I sell before my reputation was completely destroyed by scandal.
Even Higgins paid me a visit, smiling thinly as he threatened me to step away.
He warned me that a tradeswoman shouldn’t mistake a nobleman’s desperation for genuine affection.
I ignored them all, focusing solely on the numbers.
The ship was due in four days.
Then the gales started.
The wind howled off the coast for three days straight, tearing shingles from the roofs in town.
Word arrived that two ships had limped into the southern port for repairs, but there was no news of his precious cargo.
The deadline was rapidly slipping away.
On the evening of the sixteenth, he came to the counting house long after the clerks had gone home.
The storm was rattling the windowpanes.
He looked exhausted, entirely stripped of all the armor his title usually provided.
He placed his hands flat on my father’s oak desk and asked the one question a duke is never supposed to ask a tradeswoman.
