My Bride Thought I Was Dying In 5 Years — I Had A Very Different Plan

Part 1

Mud caked the hem of my borrowed trousers, heavy and freezing against my ankles.

I hadn’t come to this crumbling manor looking for romance or a fairy tale.

I came for reconnaissance, a duke dressed as a stable hand, expecting to find a desperate, simpering bride rehearsing her curtsies.

Instead, standing outside the cracked oak door of the drawing room, I heard a voice that struck like a wet stone against my pride.

She wasn’t plotting to win my heart.

She was planning my funeral.

The coarse wool of the stableman’s coat scratched fiercely at the nape of my neck.

It was a cheap, poorly woven garment that smelled intensely of stale hay, damp sheep, and old sweat.

I had purchased it from a tavern boy three villages back, trading a handful of silver for clothes that fit terribly across the shoulders.

Every time I shifted my weight in the saddle of the rented piebald gelding, the rough seam dug into my collarbone.

It was maddening.

It was exactly what I wanted.

I was David, Duke of Rothford, and I was a man exhausted by velvet.

I was twenty-eight, wealthy enough to buy small nations, and thoroughly sick of the simpering, perfume-drenched pantomime of the London marriage mart.

For three seasons, I had watched mothers push their terrified daughters into my path.

I had listened to rehearsed giggles, endured agonizing recitals on out-of-tune harpsichords, and smelled the desperate metallic tang of anxiety masked by heavy rosewater.

Women didn’t look at me.

They looked at my crest.

They looked at the estates, the immense income, the undeniable political influence.

And now there was Sarah.

Her father was a man who had gambled his family’s legacy down to the absolute last silver spoon.

The proposal sent to my solicitor had been blunt, bordering on tragic.

It was a desperate plea for an alliance, thinly veiling a plea for financial salvation.

Needing a wife to secure my line, and preferring a clean transaction over a pretense of love, I had agreed to a meeting.

But a persistent, cynical knot in my gut had driven me to leave my crested carriage and liveried outriders at an inn ten miles out.

I wanted to see the trap before I stepped blindly into it.

The crumbling estate emerged from the morning fog like a rotting tooth.

It was a sprawling Jacobean monstrosity of dark brick, half strangled by overgrown ivy.

The iron gates were rusted permanently open, their hinges fused by years of neglect.

As I rode up the muddy drive, the silence of the place felt heavy and ominous.

There was no bustling staff, no manicured lawns, just the sound of my horse’s hooves sucking at the wet earth.

A single crow circled the sagging roofline, letting out a sharp, mocking cry.

I guided the gelding around to the rear of the house, slipping easily into the role of a transient laborer.

I slouched my posture, let my jaw go slack, and pulled the brim of my woolen cap low over my eyes.

The stable yard was a miserable swamp of manure and cracked cobblestones.

A grizzled, exhausted groom was fiercely scrubbing down a ruined saddle in the freezing muck.

He didn’t look up, only barked at me, asking if I was lost.

I dismounted, keeping my voice a low, rough rumble, and told him I was looking for work.

I said I heard the master might need extra hands for the approaching winter.

The stable master snorted, spitting a stream of brown tobacco juice onto the stones, and said the master needed money, not mouths.

But he offered me a trade.

If I had hands, I could muck out the mare’s stall and then go round to the kitchen.

He said the cook might give me half a loaf of bread for chopping the kindling.

I lied smoothly, offering him a generic alias.

For the next two hours, I, the Duke of Rothford, shoveled horse manure.

It was foul, back-breaking, utterly miserable work.

My muscles, accustomed only to the elegant exertion of fencing and riding thoroughbreds, screamed in protest at the repetitive heavy lifting.

The sharp stench of ammonia burned my nostrils.

Splinters from the cheap, unvarnished pitchfork handle bit deeply into my palms.

They threatened the soft, uncalloused skin beneath my riding gloves, which I had wisely left hidden in my saddlebag.

Yet, there was a strange, grim sort of satisfaction in it.

Down here in the muck, there were absolutely no expectations.

I was just a pair of arms.

When the stall was passably clean, I leaned the pitchfork against the rotting timber wall and wiped my brow with the back of my forearm.

The freezing cold air bit at my sweat-dampened face.

I walked toward the back of the house, my boots incredibly heavy with muck.

The kitchen was a cavernous, dimly lit room that smelled strongly of boiling onions, wood ash, and desperation.

A frantic woman in a flour-dusted apron was violently attacking a lump of dough on the scarred wooden table.

I stood in the doorway and told her Craig had sent me to chop the wood.

The cook didn’t stop kneading for a second.

She ordered me out back, telling me to stack it high and bring a massive load to the main hall.

She warned me not to track mud on her floors.

She said if I dropped any dirt on the carpets, Miss Sarah would have my hide, and she would take whatever was left.

I nodded silently, retreating to the frost-covered woodpile.

The axe was horribly dull, the handle slick with old grease, but I swung it with a rhythm born of pure frustration.

With every piece of oak that split, I thought of the marriage contract sitting on my solicitor’s desk.

I thought of her father’s trembling signature.

I thought of the unseen Sarah, likely sitting in a silk gown in some drafty parlor, dreaming of my jewels.

I gathered a massive armful of the freshly split wood.

The rough bark scraped painfully against my jaw.

The sharp wooden edges dug straight through my coat into my bare forearms.

I carried the load back into the house, stepping past the kitchen and into the servants’ corridor.

The transition from the working quarters to the family wing was jarringly abrupt.

The cold stone floors gave way to floorboards that groaned in absolute agony under my weight.

The smell of onions faded entirely.

It was replaced by the scent of beeswax polish that couldn’t quite mask the underlying odor of damp rot.

The wallpaper, once an opulent crimson flock, was peeling at the corners.

It revealed gray plaster beneath it like exposed bone.

I moved silently, a ghost in coarse wool, following the chill drafts toward the front of the ruined house.

I stopped abruptly.

I was outside the drawing room.

The heavy oak door was cracked open, perhaps to let the meager heat from the hallway stove circulate.

I shifted the heavy load of wood in my arms, fully prepared to knock with my boot.

Then a voice stopped me absolutely dead in my tracks.

It was not a soft voice.

It lacked the melodic breathy quality that women of the high society cultivated so fiercely.

It was low, slightly raspy, and incredibly grounded.

It sounded like a woman who was tired of hearing herself speak, yet forced to do so anyway.

She told a man named Michael that the sum was three thousand pounds.

Michael’s voice answered, weary and thin, saying that staring at the ledger wouldn’t make the numbers shrink.

She firmly stated that my contract cleared all of it.

It cleared her father’s gambling debts, the back wages for the tenants, and the massive mortgage on their fields.

I stood perfectly still.

The wood pressed agonizingly against my chest, but I hardly felt the pain.

I stopped breathing entirely.

The metallic tang of adrenaline flooded my mouth as I leaned slightly closer to the gap in the door.

She spoke the words with a cold, terrifying sterility.

She told him it wasn’t a contract, it was an acquisition.

She said she was simply the livestock thrown in to sweeten the deed to a worthless swamp.

When Michael reminded her I was a duke, she snapped back that I was a bank.

The sharp, tearing sound of thick paper being ripped echoed through the narrow gap.

She asked him if he had read the accounts of me or listened to the relentless gossip.

She asked if he was completely deafened by the ringing of imaginary coins.

I felt a dark, cynical smirk pull at the corner of my mouth.

I wanted her to go on, to tell him what a ruthless tyrant I was.

I fully expected accusations of my coldness, my reputed ruthlessness in Parliament, or my harsh dismissal of previous suitors.

Instead, her next words hit me like a brutal physical blow.

She called me notoriously frail, her tone completely clinical.

She said society gossips swore I had a weak chest, some lingering childhood consumption I covered up with heavy tailoring.

She insisted my father’s gout had already taken firm root in my legs.

She claimed I drank too much port, hardly left my club in the winter, and looked terribly pale in all my portraits.

I blinked, my stomach plummeting.

Frail?

I fenced three times a week.

I could easily outride any man in my entire county.

The weak chest was a blatant lie my mother had told when I was seven to avoid sending me to a brutal boarding school.

And the gout belonged entirely to my uncle.

A hot, crawling flush of deep embarrassment crept rapidly up my neck.

Michael sighed, telling her she couldn’t plan a marriage around a man’s medical chart.

She replied with a chilling calmness that she wasn’t planning a marriage.

She was planning a timeline.

There was a heavy thud, like a large book being slammed shut.

She wasn’t planning a marriage; she was actively planning my funeral, giving me five years to live.