My Aunt Burned My Dead Father’s Books — So The Duke Next Door Bought Me A Library
Part 2
The use of my first name jarred me.
It wasn’t intimate; it was direct and stripped of all pretense.
For a second, an overwhelming urge to laugh bubbled in my throat.
What did I burn?
I whispered, my voice dropping to a harsh rasp.
Nothing of consequence to a duke.
My aunt merely burned my sanity and my father’s legacy.
I pushed off the wall, refusing to wait for his dismissal.
I pardoned myself abruptly, claiming the refreshments were turning my stomach.
I turned and walked away, my back rigid and the pain in my right hand pulsing in time with my heart.
I felt his iron-gray eyes on my back until I disappeared into the suffocating crowd.
It rained for six straight days after the assembly.
The estate grounds turned into a sprawling bog of brown mud.
I spent my days staring at the peeling wallpaper in my bedroom.
The silence of the house without my father’s library was deafening.
On the seventh morning, the sound of heavy hooves and grinding iron wheels woke me.
I hurried down the stairs, the cold drafts biting at my ankles.
When I reached the open front doors, the rich, earthy scent of cured calfskin and old ink hit me like a physical blow.
A line of four heavy freight wagons sat in the mud, tearing deep trenches into the driveway.
A burly driver pulled a massive wooden crate from the back of the first wagon.
Delivery for a Miss Megan, he grunted.
Aunt Brenda was already on the front steps, her face purple with rage.
We cannot pay for this rubbish! she shrieked.
The driver ignored her and handed me a thick envelope sealed with a snarling wolf—the crest of the Duke of Ashford.
I broke the wax with shaking hands.
There was no poetry inside, only a stack of legal documents and a single piece of crisp stationery.
‘Miss Megan, a house without books is a barn, and as we discussed, some barns are better off burned,’ the sharp handwriting read.
‘I have purchased the entire inventory of the late lord’s estate library.
The deed of ownership is in your name alone.’
He had bought me an arsenal.
I stepped back, pulling the letter out of my aunt’s reach.
Tell the maids to clear the east drawing room, I told her, my voice shaking with sudden adrenaline.
We have a library to unpack.
For three days, I did nothing but pry open crates and haul heavy leather-bound bricks across the floor.
But on the third evening, I sat surrounded by towering columns of books, completely overwhelmed.
Craig had replaced my loss with something ten times its size, strapping a massive moral debt to my back.
As I stared at the towering stacks of leather-bound volumes, a terrifying thought settled in my stomach: how exactly does a penniless orphan repay a man who just bought her an entire universe?
Part 3
How exactly does a penniless orphan repay a man who just bought her an entire universe?
Megan would eventually learn that you don’t repay him with money, but by standing your ground.
But long before the forty crates of leather-bound books arrived in the rain, there was only the fire.
Acurid smoke hit her instantly.
Not romanticized autumn leaves, but a chemical choke of melting glue and curing leather.
Paper doesn’t just burn, it screams.
Pages curl inward, turning black at outer edges before yielding completely.
Reaching her aunt’s drawing room, Megan breathed in air heavy with soot from a hundred lifetimes.
She didn’t scream.
She didn’t fight.
She merely watched her father’s legacy transform into gray flakes, settling across polished hardwood like dirty snow.
The heat radiating from the hearth was sickeningly intense.
It was a Tuesday.
It was raining outside, a relentless drumming drizzle that turned the estate’s grounds into a sprawling bog.
Inside the drawing room was a furnace.
Megan stopped in the doorway.
Her breath hitched, catching on a lung full of smoke that tasted metallic and old.
Aunt Brenda stood by the fireplace, her back straight, an iron poker in her gloved hand.
She was wearing her morning black.
She always wore morning black, though her husband had been dead for a decade.
It was practical, she claimed, hiding stains.
It also hid any trace of warmth.
They were a fire hazard, Megan, Brenda said.
She didn’t turn around.
Her voice was flat, the tone of a woman discussing the weather or the price of oats.
She gave the coals a sharp jab.
A shower of sparks erupted, illuminating the hearth.
In the center of the flames lay a familiar thick blue spine, the anatomy of melancholy.
The gold leaf lettering blistered, bubbled, and melted into the fire.
Beside it, a stack of worn calf skin volumes was already reduced to a glowing structural ruin.
They looked like the rib cages of small charred animals.
Megan’s legs gave out.
It wasn’t a graceful swoon.
Her knees hit the hardwood floor with a loud, bruising crack.
The sound echoed in the high ceiling room, but Brenda didn’t flinch.
“Get up!” her aunt commanded, finally glancing over her shoulder.
The smell of stale lavender water and mothballs drifted from her heavy skirts, cutting through the smoke.
You are 22, too old for theatrics, and certainly too old to be rotting away in that damp library, reading the delusions of dead men.
The damp was ruining them anyway.
I smelled mildew.
Mildew?
Megan whispered.
Her throat felt lined with sandpaper.
She crawled forward.
The heat pushed against her face, drying her eyes before tears could even form.
She reached into the grate.
She didn’t think about the fire or the heat or the blistering consequences.
She just saw a scrap of parchment, a loose page from her father’s journal, tucked inside a book on botney, fluttering at the edge of the grate, browning at the corners.
Her fingers closed around it.
The searing pain was instantaneous.
“Foolish girl!”
Brenda snapped, stepping back as Megan dragged the smoldering page onto the hearth rug.
Megan beat the embers out with her bare palm.
The smell of burning hair and scorched flesh mingled with the scent of roasted paper.
She didn’t cry out.
She just sat back on her heels, staring at the charred scrap in her hand.
Only three words remained legible in her father’s sprawling script.
Pok to endure the endure what? the winter, the debt, the crushing, suffocating reality of living under the roof of a woman who viewed imagination as a moral failing.
“I will have the maid sweep this out in the morning,” Brenda said, setting the poker back in its brass stand with a sharp clink.
“You will wash your hands, put some salve on those ridiculous burns, and prepare your blue silk.
We are attending the Duke of Ashford’s assembly tomorrow evening.
You will smile.
You will speak only when spoken to, and you will secure a proposal, Megan, or you will find yourself securing employment as a governness in the north.
Brenda swept out of the room, her heavy skirts whispering against the floorboards.
Megan remained on the rug.
The fire cracked, a hollow sound.
Her right hand throbbed, an angry red blister already rising across her index and middle fingers.
She rubbed the soot between her thumb and forefinger.
It was soft, horribly soft.
The accumulated knowledge of four generations, the margins filled with her father’s notes, the pressed flowers from her mother’s garden hidden between the pages, all reduced to dust that slipped through her fingers and stained her skin.
She didn’t weep.
The cynicism she had spent years cultivating hardened into something sharp and cold in her chest.
Crying wouldn’t bring the books back.
Crying wouldn’t pay the estate’s debts.
She carefully folded the burnt scrap of her father’s journal and slid it into the pocket of her skirt.
Then she stood up, her joints aching, and walked to the window to watch the rain.
The fire behind her slowly died, taking the last of her childhood with it.
The assembly room smelled of roasting meat, cheap beeswax candles, and the frantic sour sweat of desperation.
Megan stood by the punch bowl, keeping her back pressed firmly against the flock wallpaper.
The blue silk dress Brenda had forced her into was tight across the ribs.
The corset stays dug into her hips with every breath.
It was a dress designed to make a woman look like a confection, a sponge sugar ornament waiting to be consumed.
She hated it.
She hated the noise, the forced laughter of girls pretending not to understand politics, the booming gau of men who understood nothing else.
She held a glass of tepid lemonade in her left hand.
Her right hand, concealed by a white silk evening glove, rested against the folds of her skirt.
The blister had popped that morning, leaving a raw, weeping circle of skin.
Every time the silk brushed against it, a sharp jolt of pain shot up her arm.
She welcomed it.
It kept her awake.
It kept her anchored to reality.
You look as though you’re contemplating murder.
The voice was low, devoid of the forced joviality that infected the rest of the room.
Megan turned her head.
Craig Blackwood, the Duke of Ashford, stood 2 ft away.
He hadn’t approached with the swagger typical of men with his title.
He had simply materialized, blending into the shadows by the drapery.
He was not a handsome man in the traditional sense.
His jaw was too square.
His nose had a slight crook from an old break, and his eyes were the dull flat color of winter iron.
He wore a coat of severe dark wool that smelled faintly of cold air, horse lather, and expensive tobacco.
There was no gold braiding, no ostentatious crevat pin.
He looked like a man who found his own wealth tedious.
Not murder, your grace, Megan said, keeping her voice even.
Arson, perhaps.
Craig’s gaze flicked to her face.
He didn’t smile, but a tiny muscle near his jaw twitched.
He leaned back against the wall beside her, staring out at the chaotic waltz floor.
A messy business, arson, he noted.
Unpredictable.
The wind changes and suddenly you’ve burned down your own barn along with your enemies.
Some barns are better off burned, Megan muttered.
She immediately regretted it.
You do not speak of destruction to a duke when you are supposed to be marketing yourself as a docile, pleasant wife.
Craig turned his head to look at her fully.
His gaze dropped from her eyes to her hands.
He stared at her right hand.
Megan shifted, trying to hide it further behind the folds of her blue silk.
The glove was white, but she knew what he was seeing.
Before leaving the house, she had tried to scrub the soot from beneath her fingernails.
It hadn’t come out, and the raw burn on her palm was seeping a faint yellowish fluid that had begun to stiffen the thin silk of the glove, leaving a pale, unsightly stain.
“You are injured,” he said.
“It wasn’t a question.”
“A clumsy accident,” Megan replied smoothly, the lie practiced and ready.
I grabbed the handle of a hot kettle.
“A kettle?
Yes.
Craig took a sip from the crystal tumbler he was holding.
It smelled of dark pey scotch.
I have spent a considerable amount of time in military camps, Miss Megan.
I have seen burns from boiling water.
They blister wide and red.
They scald.
He lowered his glass.
The burn weeping through your glove is concentrated.
The soot smeared into the cuff of your sleeve, which your maid evidently missed, is greasy.
You reached into a fire.
Megan froze.
Her pulse became a dull, sickening thud against her ribs.
She looked at her sleeve.
He was right.
A faint charcoal gray smudge stained the delicate lace at her wrist.
She looked back at him, her cynicism flaring up as a shield.
Are you in the habit of interrogating your guests, your grace, or do you reserve your forensic observations only for the impoverished ones?
Craig didn’t take the bait.
He didn’t look offended.
He looked tired.
I observe because people rarely say what they mean, he said softly.
You are standing against a wall at a marriage mart, wearing a dress you clearly despise, nursing a burn you lied about, with ashes on your cuff and a look in your eye that suggests you have lost something irreplaceable.
He paused, the iron gray of his eyes locking onto hers.
What did you burn, Megan?
The use of her first name jarred her.
It wasn’t intimate.
It was direct.
Stripped of pretense.
For a second, the overwhelming urge to laugh bubbled in her throat.
A hysterical, ugly laugh.
What did I burn?
Nothing.
My aunt burned my sanity.
My aunt burned my father.
Nothing of consequence to a duke, she said, her voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
She pushed off the wall.
If you will excuse me, your grace, the lemonade is giving me a sour stomach.
She didn’t wait for his dismissal.
She turned and walked away, her back rigid, the pain in her right hand pulsing in time with her heart.
She felt his eyes on her back until she disappeared into the crowd, a cold, heavy weight that made her shiver despite the stifling heat of the room.
It rained for six straight days.
The estate grounds turned into a soup of brown mud and rotting vegetation.
Megan spent the days in her bedroom staring at the peeling wallpaper.
The silence of the house without the library was deafening.
She hadn’t realized how much time she spent reading until the option was gone.
The hours stretched out, empty and hollow, echoing with Brenda’s constant complaints about the price of coal.
On the seventh morning, the sound of heavy hooves and grinding iron wheels woke her.
It was a deep guttural sound vibrating through the floorboards.
Megan sat up, pulling her woolen shawl tight around her shoulders.
The room was freezing.
She moved to the window, the glass cold and foggy with condensation, and rubbed a circle clear.
Down below, tearing deep trenches into the muddy gravel of the driveway, was a line of wagons.
Not simple carts, but heavy canvas covered freight wagons pulled by massive draft horses.
There were four of them.
Brenda was already on the front steps, an umbrella held over her head by a shivering maid, screaming at a burly driver in a waxed canvas coat.
Megan dressed quickly, ignoring the stiff pulling sensation of the healing burn on her hand.
She hurried down the stairs, the cold drafts of the hallway biting at her ankles.
When she reached the open front doors, the smell hit her.
It wasn’t the chemical stench of burning glue this time.
It was the rich earthy scent of cured calf skin, vellum, binding dust, and old ink.
It was the smell of a sanctuary.
I did not order these.
Brenda was shrieking, her voice cracking.
Take them back.
We have no room for this.
This rubbish.
Ain’t for you, ma’am.
The driver grunted, pulling a heavy wooden crate from the back of the first wagon.
It hit the muddy ground with a bone rattling thud.
Delivery for a Miss Megan.
Megan stepped out onto the portico.
The damp air immediately clung to her hair.
For me?
The driver looked up, wiping rain from his brow.
You, Miss Megan?
Yes.
And these are yours.
Got orders to unload them all. 40 crates in total.
Brenda spun around her face purple with rage. 40 crates of what?
We cannot pay for this.
Who authorized this?
The driver ignored her.
He pulled a thick waxsealed envelope from his inner pocket and held it out to Megan.
She walked down the steps.
The mud instantly soaked through her thin slippers, chilling her toes, but she didn’t care.
She reached out and took the envelope.
The paper was heavy, expensive.
The seal was stamped with a snarling wolf, the crest of the Duke of Ashford.
Her hands shook slightly as she broke the wax.
There was no poetry inside, no flowery declarations of affection.
There was a stack of legal documents heavy with official stamps and a single piece of crisp white stationery with a few lines written in a sharp slanted hand.
Miss Megan, a house without books is a barn, and as we discussed, some barns are better off burned.
I have purchased the entire inventory of the late lord’s estate library in London.
The deed of ownership enclosed is in your name alone.
Your aunt has no legal right to sell, discard, or burn them.
Consider it an investment in preventing further arson.
Ashford.
Megan stared at the ink.
The rain was blowing under the portico, dotting the paper, but she couldn’t move.
She looked up at the wagons.
Men were pulling crate after crate down, stacking them in the mud.
Through a gap in the wooden slats of the nearest box, she saw the dull gleam of leather bindings.
Green ox blood dark navy.
“It wasn’t a gift.
It was a barricade.
It was an arsenal.”
“What is the meaning of this?”
Brenda demanded, snatching at the letter,” Megan stepped back, pulling the letter out of her aunt’s reach.
Her heart wasn’t fluttering with romantic joy.
Instead, a terrifying heavy weight settled in her stomach.
She had spent her life making herself small.
She had hidden her intelligence, hidden her grief, hidden her fury beneath a cynical facade.
And in one brief, tense conversation by a punchbowl, Craig Blackwood had seen straight through her.
He had seen the void left by the fire, and he had filled it with overwhelming, undeniable force.
It made her feel fiercely, intensely vulnerable.
He had given her back her armor, but in doing so, he had proven that he knew exactly how to strip her bare.
“They are mine,” Aunt Brenda, Megan said, her voice shaking, not with fear, but with a sudden, sharp adrenaline.
She looked at the 40 crates, smelling the leather in the rain.
“Tell the maids to clear the east drawing room.
We have a library to unpack.”
Brenda stared at her, her jaw working furiously.
But the legal crest on the documents in Megan’s hand silenced her.
For the first time in 10 years, Brenda turned around and walked into the house without a word.
Megan stood in the rain, clutching the letter to her chest, watching the men unload her new world, terrified of the man who had bought it for her.
The East drawing room had not been used in 5 years.
It smelled of stagnant air, dead flies, and the bitter, sharp scent of the lie soap the maids used to scrub the floorboards.
By noon, the maids had dragged the sheetated furniture into the hallway, leaving an echoing cavernous space.
By dusk, the space was no longer empty. 40 wooden crates sat in jagged rows across the faded Turkish rug.
The wood was rough huneed pine, still damp from the rain, exuding a sharp, reinous odor that fought with the stale air of the room.
Megan knelt beside the first crate.
She had traded her ruined slippers for heavy leather boots, and pinned her hair back so tightly her scalp achd.
Her right hand, wrapped in fresh white linen, throbbed with a dull, steady rhythm, matching her pulse.
She wedged an iron crowbar under the lid of the nearest box.
The wood groaned, a high-pitched splintering sound that made the back of her neck prickle.
She leaned her weight onto the iron.
The nails shrieked as they gave way, and the lid popped off, releasing a cloud of trapped ancient dust.
Megan coughed, waving a hand in front of her face.
When the dust settled, she looked inside.
They were packed tightly, spine to spine, wrapped in thin sheets of oil cloth to protect against dampness.
She reached in with her left hand and pulled the first volume free.
It was heavy, bound in dark green Morocco leather.
The gold tooling on the spine was rubbed faint from decades of handling.
She opened it.
The pages were thick, creamy vellum, the edges jagged and uncut.
It smelled of vanilla, old tobacco, and dust.
It was an English translation of an ancient philosopher.
She dragged another book out, a treatise on agricultural crop rotation, then a volume of Persian poetry, then a heavily annotated atlas of the Mediterranean.
For 3 days, Megan did nothing but pry open crates and haul stacks of heavy leatherbound bricks across the room.
She refused the maid’s help.
The physical labor was a necessity.
Her arms achd, her shoulders burned, and her fingernails became packed with grime and splinters.
It was exhausting, bruising work, and it grounded her.
If she stopped moving, if she sat down and simply looked at the sheer volume of wealth sitting on her floor, the panic would set in.
Because Craig Blackwood had not just bought her books.
He had bought the old lord’s entire collection.
The old lord had been a notorious eccentric, a man who spent 60 years acquiring rare first editions, obscure scientific journals, and controversial philosophical texts.
This wasn’t just a library.
It was a fortune.
Brenda hovered in the doorway like a vulture waiting for a carcass to drop.
She didn’t speak, but her silence was radioactive.
She tallied the cost of the crates, the cost of the leather, the cost of the carriage that had delivered them.
Brenda saw only leverage.
She saw a duke who had thrown an obscene amount of money at her niece.
She saw a transaction.
On the evening of the third day, Megan sat on the floor, surrounded by towering, precarious columns of books.
Her hands were black with dust.
Her back screamed in protest.
She picked up a small, unassuming brown volume.
As she opened it, a slip of paper fluttered out and landed on the floorboards.
She picked it up.
It was a receipt from a London book binder dated 50 years ago, paid in full.
Beatric stared at the faded ink.
Her stomach twisted, dropping into a cold, hollow space.
This wasn’t her father’s library.
Her father’s books had smelled of pipe smoke and damp wool.
They had dogeared pages and ink stains from where he had fallen asleep reading.
His marginalia was familiar, a dialogue between her father and the authors he loved.
These books belong to a stranger.
They were pristine intimidating and overwhelmingly valuable.
Craig had replaced her loss with something 10 times its size.
But in doing so, he had strapped a mountain of debt to her back.
Not a financial debt.
He had made the deed ironclad, but a moral one, an emotional one.
How does a woman who has nothing repay a man who casually purchases a universe for her?
She couldn’t just write a polite thank you note on Brenda’s cheap lavender scented stationery.
Thank you, your grace, for the 40 crates of priceless literature.
The weather here is quite damp.
It was absurd.
It was insulting.
Megan closed the small brown volume.
She looked at her bandaged right hand, the stark white linen stark against the grime on her fingers.
She couldn’t hide behind a letter.
She had to look him in the eye.
She had to know exactly what he expected in return.
Because in Megan’s world, no one gave you something for nothing.
Ever.
The hired carriage rattled violently. every rut in the road sending a jarring shock up Megan’s spine.
It smelled of wet straw, old horsehair, and the sour sweat of previous passengers.
The journey to Hawthorne Hall took 4 hours.
By the time the carriage crunched onto the gravel drive of the Duke’s estate, Megan was freezing, her teeth clamped together to keep from chattering.
Hawthorne Hall was not a palace.
It was a fortress built of dark iron gray stone.
It sat aggressively on a rise overlooking the moors.
There were no decorative gardens, no marble statues of nymphs, no sprawling terraces.
There were only sheer walls, tall narrow windows, and a heavy oak front door flanked by two massive mud spattered hounds who watched her arrive with bored yellow eyes.
The butler who answered the door was as unadorned as the house.
He wore a simple black coat and did not flinch when Megan gave her name.
His grace is in the gun room, miss, if you will follow me.
The interior of the house smelled of beeswax, wood smoke, and wet dogs.
The floors were uncarpeted oak scarred by heavy boots and claws.
There was wealth here, immense wealth, but it was utilitarian.
It was a house that expected to survive a siege.
The butler opened a heavy door at the end of a long corridor.
Miss Megan, your grace.
The gun room was warm, heated by a roaring fire and a massive stone hearth.
The walls were lined with glass fronted cabinets displaying rifles and fouling pieces.
The air was thick with the sharp metallic tang of gun oil and the rich scent of solvent.
Craig sat at a long wooden table, a disassembled rifle spread out on an oiled cloth before him.
He wore no jacket, only a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up to his elbows.
His hands were smeared with black grease.
He didn’t look up immediately.
He finished wiping down a steel barrel with a rag, his movements precise and unhurried.
Finally, he set the rag down and looked at her.
Those flat winter iron eyes hit her with the same physical force as the cold wind outside.
“Miss Megan,” he said.
His voice was low, scraping against the quiet of the room.
“I did not expect you.
I am aware, Megan said.
She stepped into the room, refusing to shrink back toward the door.
She kept her hands clasped in front of her, the bandage on her right hand hidden within the folds of her gray woolen cloak.
I could not send a letter.
A letter felt entirely inadequate for the level of absurdity you have introduced into my life.”
Craig picked up a clean rag and slowly wiped the grease from his fingers.
“Absurdity?
That is a novel word for a library.
It is not a library, your grace.
It is a siege engine.
Megan stepped closer to the table.
The smell of gun oil made her eyes water slightly, but she didn’t blink. 40 crates, 2,000 volumes, first editions of Kepler, vellum manuscripts.
You bought the old lord’s entire estate.
Do you have any idea what my aunt is doing?
She’s planning my wedding to you.
She’s pricing out floral arrangements.
She thinks you have purchased me.
Craig stopped wiping his hands.
He tossed the rag onto the table.
It landed with a soft, heavy slap.
He stood up.
He was much taller than she remembered from the assembly, his broad shoulders blocking the light from the fire.
He walked around the table, stopping a few feet from her.
He smelled of metal, solvent, and something dark and masculine, like pine needles crushed underfoot.
“And what do you think, Megan?” he asked.
The use of her first name again sent a jolt of nervous adrenaline straight to her chest.
“Do you think I purchased you?”
“I think you are a man who is used to solving problems by throwing a staggering amount of money at them,” she shot back, her voice tight.
“I think you saw a pathetic girl crying over a burned book and decided to play God.
I came to tell you that I cannot pay you back.
Not with money, not with favors, and certainly not with the sering grateful devotion my aunt expects me to offer.
Craig stared at her.
For a long moment, the only sound in the room was the crackle of the fire and the rain lashing against the narrow windows.
Then slowly, the muscle in his jaw twitched, and Craig Blackwood laughed.
It wasn’t a loud sound.
It was a rough, rusty bark of amusement that seemed to surprise him as much as it surprised her.
Simpering devotion,” he repeated, rubbing a hand over his jaw.
“God forbid.”
He turned away from her, walking toward the fire.
He picked up an iron poker and adjusted a burning log.
Sparks hissed up the chimney.
“I didn’t buy those books for you to pay me back.
I didn’t buy them out of pity, and I certainly didn’t buy them to court you, so you can tell your aunt to cancel the florist.”
He turned back, the fire light casting harsh shadows across his crooked nose and square jaw.
I bought them because I despise bullies, Craig said, his voice dropping all trace of amusement.
It was cold now.
Absolute zero.
I despise people who destroy things simply because they cannot understand them.
Your aunt is a tyrant who rules a very small, very damp kingdom.
She burned your father’s legacy to remind you that you own nothing.
I bought Hemlock’s library and put the deed in your name to remind her that her power is entirely localized.
He walked back toward her, stopping so close she could feel the heat radiating from his skin.
I gave you a weapon, a physical, undeniable asset that she cannot touch, cannot sell, and cannot burn without risking legal ruin.
What you do with it is your business.
Read them, sell them, use them as firewood.
I don’t care.
He looked down at her clasped hands.
Gently, without asking permission, he reached out, his fingers, still smelling faintly of oil, closed around her wrist.
He pulled her hands apart, exposing the white linen wrapped around her right palm.
“But do not insult me,” he said softly, his thumb brushing against the edge of the bandage.
“By accusing me of treating you like a purchase.
You are many things, Megan, but you are not for sale.
That was the entire point.”
He let go of her wrist and stepped back.
Megan stood frozen.
The warmth of his fingers seemed to linger on her skin, a phantom heat that wared with the chill in her bones.
Her cynicism, the sharp defensive shield she carried everywhere, had just met a solid brick wall.
He hadn’t patronized her.
He hadn’t coddled her.
He had simply handed her a sword and told her to defend herself.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
The words tasted foreign on her tongue, heavy and raw.
Craig gave a brief, sharp nod.
“Have your driver take you to the kitchens before you leave.
The cook will give you hot tea.
You look like you’re about to shatter.”
He turned back to the table and picked up the oily rag, dismissing her.
The audience was over.
Megan turned and walked out of the gun room, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, entirely unsure if she had just won a battle or lost a war.
The three weeks Craig was in London were a masterclass in psychological warfare.
Brenda had seen Craig’s carriage depart.
She had seen the way Megan looked when she emerged from the library, flushed, defensive, wideeyed.
Brenda didn’t need to hear the conversation to smell blood in the water.
The campaign began the next morning.
It wasn’t a loud assault.
Brenda didn’t scream.
She used the quiet, insidious tactics of a woman who controlled the purse strings, the food, and the heat.
The coal scuttle in Megan’s bedroom remained empty.
The meals brought to her were cold, the meat tough and gristly.
The maids were instructed not to speak to her.
Brenda was turning the house into a freezer, trying to starve Megan into submission.
“He is playing with you,” Brenda said.
One evening they were sitting in the small parlor.
The fire was roaring, but Brenda had forced Megan to sit in the drafty corner near the window.
Dukes do not marry penniles orphans who read military history.
He bought the books to amuse himself.
He enjoys watching you play the eccentric.
Megan kept her eyes on the mending in her lap.
The needle slipped, pricking her index finger.
A tiny beat of blood wled up, bright red against her pale skin.
She didn’t wipe it away.
His grace’s motives are his own.
His motives are obvious.
You are a novelty, but novelties wear off.
Brenda took a slow sip of her sherry.
Lord Calvin has inquired after you.
He is 60, a widowerower, and he needs a mother for his four daughters.
It is a respectable match.
I have invited him to dinner on Thursday.
I will not marry Lord Calvin.
An Aunt Brenda set her glass down with a sharp clack against the saucer.
You will or you will pack your bags on Friday morning.
I have indulged this ridiculous charade with the Duke of Ashford because I thought he might actually make an offer.
If he has left for London without securing an understanding, he has no intention of doing so.
Megan finally looked up.
The house is legally mine, Aunt Brenda.
My father left it in trust.
Your father left a mountain of debt.
Brenda snapped, her lips thinning into a bloodless line. debt that I have managed, debt that I pay the interest on.
Without my money, the bank seizes the estate by the end of the quarter.
You owe nothing but 40 crates of dusty paper.”
Brenda leaned forward, her eyes glittering with malice in the firelight.
“And do not think those books will save you.
The deed may be in your name, but the roof over them is mine.
If you are not in this house, how will you protect them?
A damp winter in a cheap storage unit will rot the vellum.
Or perhaps I will simply have the maids pile them in the yard while you are gone.
Accidental fires happen so easily.
The silence in the parlor was deafening.
The ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall sounded like a hammer hitting an anvil.
Megan stared at the woman who had raised her.
She smelled the familiar sickening scent of stale lavender and mothballs.
It was the smell of a cage.
Brenda wasn’t just threatening her future.
She was holding a knife to the only thing Megan had left.
The books weren’t just paper and ink anymore.
They were Craig’s acknowledgement.
They were her mind.
If she left, Brenda would destroy them.
If she stayed, Brenda would destroy her.
Thursday.
Brenda repeated softly, leaning back into her plush armchair.
“Wear the blue silk and try to look less severe.
Men do not like severe women.”
Megan didn’t argue.
She stood up, her joints popping in the cold air, and walked out of the parlor.
She went straight to the east drawing room.
She locked the door, sliding the heavy brass bolt into place.
The room was freezing.
Brenda had ordered the fireplaces in the unused rooms extinguished, but it still smelled of leather and vanilla.
Megan lit a single candle.
She walked along the shelves, dragging her fingertips lightly across the spines.
Senica Hobbs, locka.
She stopped in front of the locked glass cabinet where she had placed the most valuable texts.
The old lord’s prized possessions.
She unlocked it and pulled out three books.
A first folio of Shakespeare, its leather binding cracked but holding.
A hand illuminated 15th century book of ours.
And a first edition of Newton’s Principia, the margins thick with Hemlock’s excited, illegible scrawl.
They were heavy.
They felt like bricks in her hands.
Megan carried them to the desk, she found a heavy canvas flower sack the cook had discarded, shaking the white dust from it, carefully wrapping each volume in her heavy winter shawl to protect the corners, she placed the three books inside the sack.
Brenda thought she had cornered her.
Brenda thought Megan was still the girl who would fall to her knees and burn her hands to save a scrap of paper.
She was wrong.
Megan had learned exactly what it cost to endure.
You didn’t endure by sitting in the fire.
You endured by taking the fire with you.
She didn’t pack clothes.
She didn’t pack trinkets or jewelry.
She tied the canvas sack closed with a length of rough twine, strapped it over her shoulder, and waited for the house to go to sleep.
It was raining again.
Of [clears throat] course, it was raining.
The walk to Hawthorne Hall was 4 miles of unpaved, deeply rutdded country road.
Megan walked it in the pitch black, a solitary lantern swinging from her left hand.
The canvas sack cut a brutal groove into her right shoulder.
The mud sucked at her heavy leather boots, trying to pull her down into the earth with every step.
She didn’t stop.
She couldn’t feel her toes, and her fingers were numb, stiff claws wrapped around the lantern handle.
She was not walking toward a romantic rescue.
She was a pragmatist to her bones.
Craig had given her an asset and she was going to liquidate a portion of it to save the rest.
She would sell these three volumes back to him.
The Duke of Ashford could afford it.
The money would be enough to hire three freight wagons, move the remaining 37 crates to a secure warehouse in London, and rent a small room for herself while she found work as a governness.
It was a business transaction, nothing more.
By the time the massive iron gay silhouette of Hawthorne Hall loomed out of the mist, dawn was breaking, a sickly, bruised purple light bleeding across the horizon.
The hounds didn’t bark when she approached the heavy oak door.
They whed, recognizing her scent from the weeks of book deliveries, and nudged her wet skirts with their heavy snouts.
Megan dropped the lantern.
Her hands were shaking so violently she couldn’t grasp the iron knocker.
She hit the wood with the side of her fist, leaving a smear of mud on the oak.
It didn’t take long.
The door swung open.
It wasn’t the butler.
Craig stood in the doorway.
He was wearing dark trousers and a wrinkled linen shirt half unbuttoned at the throat.
He looked as though he hadn’t slept in days.
The sharp angles of his face were shadowed with dark stubble, his eyes bloodshot and heavy.
He stared at her.
Beatric knew what she looked like.
Her hair had escaped its pins plastered to her skull in wet, heavy ropes.
Her face was streaked with mud and rain.
Her lips blew.
She looked like a drowned rat pulled from a canal.
Megan.
It wasn’t a greeting.
It was an exhale, a harsh expulsion of air.
He stepped forward, grabbing her by the upper arm and hauling her out of the freezing rain and into the warmth of the stone entryway.
He slammed the door shut behind her, cutting off the wind.
“What happened?” he demanded, his hands dropping to her shoulders.
His fingers were hot through the soaked wool of her cloak.
“Are you hurt?
Did that woman touch you?”
“No,” Megan rasped.
Her teeth were chattering so hard she bit her tongue, the metallic taste of copper filling her mouth.
She shrugged his hands off, letting the heavy canvas sack slide off her shoulder.
It hit the stone floor with a dull, heavy thud.
She dropped to her knees, her stiff fingers struggling with the wet twine.
I need money, she said, her voice cracking.
I brought the Shakespeare, the Book of Hours, and the Newton.
They are in perfect condition.
I wrapped them in wool.
I need carriage fair to London, and enough to hire freight wagons.
She threatened to burn the rest.
I can’t leave them there, Craig.
I can’t.
Craig didn’t look at the bag.
He looked at her, kneeling on his stone floor, shivering violently, trying to hawk first editions like a desperate peddler.
“Stop,” he said quietly.
“I looked up their auction value,” Megan rushed on, her breath coming in shallow, frantic pants.
She finally snapped the twine, pulling the wet canvas back to reveal the dry wool beneath.
“They are worth at least £400.
I will sell them to you for 50.
It’s a bargain.
It’s Megan.
Stop.
Craig dropped to his knees in the mud in front of her.
He didn’t care about his trousers.
He reached out, taking both of her freezing, mudcaked hands in his large, warm ones.
He held them firmly, stopping her frantic movements.
“I am not buying your books,” he said.
Panic, sharp and blinding, spiked in her chest.
“Craig, please.
I have nothing else to sell.
I can’t go back there.
You are not going back, he said, his voice dropping into that low absolute register that commanded the room.
He squeezed her hands, forcing her to look at his face.
“And you are not going to London to freeze in a boarding house.”
He let go of her left hand and reached up, his thumb brushing a streak of mud from her cheekbone.
The touch was agonizingly gentle, completely at odds with the severity of his face.
I came back from London early, Craig said, his eyes tracing the line of her jaw.
Parliament is a room full of men arguing over ghosts, I found I had zero tolerance for it.
I was going to ride to your aunt’s house at a decent hour this morning with a very different kind of contract.
But since you have broken into my house at dawn looking like a war refugee, we will skip the pleasantries.”
Megan stared at him, her chest heaving.
“A contract?
I don’t want a dependent, Megan,” he said. the iron in his eyes steady and unyielding.
I don’t want a sering wife who agrees with me for the sake of peace.
I want the woman who corrects my margin notes.
I want the woman who looks at a duke and accuses him of playing God.
I want a sparring partner.
I want you.
He didn’t offer poetry.
He didn’t talk about the stars or fate or his beating heart.
He offered exactly what she needed.
Solid ground, a fortress, an equal footing.
Marry me,” Craig said, his voice rough.
“Bring the 40 crates here.
We will build shelves in the West Wing.
You can read them.
You can argue with me about them, and you will never ever have to flinch at a fire again.”
Megan looked at his hands, holding hers.
She looked at the canvas sack on the floor containing the weight of her survival.
She looked at the man who had seen through her cynicism, and loved the sharp edges underneath.
The cold finally left her bones.
You are going to regret this,” Megan whispered, a wet, exhausted laugh breaking from her throat.
“I’m going to bankrupt you buying French philosophy.”
Craig’s mouth twitched, the ghost of a smile breaking through the harsh lines of his face.
He pulled her forward, wrapping his arms around her soaking, muddy frame, burying his face in her wet hair.
“He didn’t care about the dirt.
He didn’t care about the mess.
Bankrupt me, Megan,” he murmured against her neck, his grip tightening like a vice.
THE END
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Disclaimer
This story is a work of fiction inspired by real events. Names, characters, and details have been altered. Any resemblance is coincidental. The author and publisher disclaim accuracy, liability, and responsibility for interpretations or reliance. If you would like to share your story, please send it to [email protected].
