My Soldier Love Ignored Me For Six Years — Then He Inherited A Dukedom And Needed My Help

Part 1

Three hundred and twelve.

That is the exact number of times I stripped my soul bare, folded it into a piece of parchment, and paid a farthing to send it into the void.

I told myself the postal service failed.

I told myself he died in the mud of Waterloo.

What I didn’t tell myself was that he was perfectly alive, ignoring me, and currently walking through the tavern door, not as the penniless boy I loved, but as a duke.

Trudging through the Yorkshire mud, my days were consumed by a battered leather satchel filled with other people’s debts.

The village relied on me as its copyist, accountant, and general keeper of ledgers.

When my father died of a chest complaint five years prior, he left me with an encyclopedic knowledge of mathematics, a flawless copperplate script, and a mountain of unpaid apothecary bills.

Renting out my competence was the only way to pay them off.

At twenty-six years old, the permanent stains of iron-gall ink on my hands felt like a life sentence.

Youth had been buried six years ago, long before I was ready to let it go.

It is a terrible thing to quantify grief, but I understood numbers.

Three hundred and twelve letters.

Once a week, every week, I had sat at my wobbly desk and written to Brian.

When he left Oak Haven, he was twenty years old, a farrier’s apprentice with calloused hands and a crooked smile who promised me the world.

He enlisted to fight the French and swore to write.

By the two hundredth letter, the war was over.

The soldiers returned home, but Brian was not among them.

By the three hundred and twelfth letter, the postmaster looked at me with pity and told me the regiment had disbanded three years prior.

I went home, packed the wooden box of my drafts under my bed, and killed him in my mind.

Then, on a Tuesday afternoon in late November, the gossip reached the village.

The Duke of Blackwood had died in London, and a distant cousin had inherited the title.

I was tallying receipts in the tavern when the door rattled open against the raging storm.

The wind howled, extinguishing the candles as a figure stepped over the threshold.

The silence in the room became absolute.

He walked with a slow, deliberate cadence.

I stopped breathing as the blood drained from my face.

He was taller than the boy I had known, his jaw locked tight and a jagged white scar cutting through his left eyebrow.

It was Brian.

He tossed a heavy leather-bound purse of gold onto the bar, and the tavern owner immediately cleared the room.

Within thirty seconds, we were entirely alone.

He walked toward my table, his gray eyes frantic, searching my face for something.

He found none of it.

He reached across the table, his hand hovering inches from mine, and claimed he came as soon as the lawyers released him.

I picked up the broken halves of my pen and asked him when the war had ended.

He blinked, clearly derailed, before admitting it was three years ago.

I stared at his expensive coat and his gold ring.

I told him I had written to him every week for six years, skipping meals to afford the postage.

He closed his eyes tightly, a muscle in his jaw jumping frantically, and admitted he had received them.

He claimed he was starving in the dirt and couldn’t write back to tell me he was a failure.

He wanted to return a gentleman, worthy of me.

I stood up, adjusting the strap of my satchel over my shoulder.

I told him the boy I loved died at Waterloo, and I was entirely done weeping for him.

I turned my back on him and walked out into the freezing rain.

The cynicism I had cultivated over the last six years rattled.

He didn’t return to a muddy, inconsequential hamlet for a girl he had already discarded.

He had business here.

If he was the new Duke, he would be discovering quite quickly that the estate was a hollow shell.

I kept the books for half the village, and I knew the estate steward, Craig Miller, was pocketing the rents and bankrupting the land.

Brian hadn’t just walked into a duke’s legacy.

He had walked into a crime scene.

I lay down in the dark, the silence of my room no longer feeling like a void, but a weapon.

The knock came at dawn.

It was a sharp, authoritative sound.

His voice was deep, resonant, and frayed with desperate exhaustion.

I pulled open the door to find him standing on my threshold, looking worse than he had the night before.

He didn’t step inside.

He waited for me to invite him.

He held up a stack of rotting ledgers and told me I was the only person who could stop his ruin.