Page 31 of Duke of Sapphire

Her hands, she noticed, were trembling.

“You have thought of everything,” she said.

“I try to.”

“You have considered every angle, every practical benefit, every—” Her voice was thinner than she wanted it to be. She pressed her lips together. “You have reduced a marriage to a business arrangement and presented it to me as though you were offering me something generous.”

“I am offering you something⁠—”

“Do you know what I have wanted?” She was on her feet again without entirely meaning to be. “Not what would solve your problem. What I have wanted, for myself, my whole life.” She could feel it building behind her ribs, the particular pressure that came when something had been held down too long. “My father told me what was best for me. Lord Redmont—" She said the name like a curse. “Lord Redmont never once looked at me and asked what I thought. And now you stand there with your timber contracts and your deed of guardianship and your perfectly arranged list, and you tell me you are offering me freedom.” Her voice cracked just once before she got it back. “I cannot believe this. You are just another man who thinks he knows what’s best for Lady Charlotte Ashford.”

The Duke’s expression shifted. He opened his mouth.

“I need to breathe.”

The dress was too tight. It had not been too tight a moment ago, but it was worse now with the wool pressing against her ribs, the fire too hot, the room too small. She did not wait for a response. She turned and walked to the door and out of it, and behind her she heard it slam.

She did not slow down.

The hallway. The stairs. The entrance hall, where a footman looked up with mild alarm at a young woman moving through it at considerable speed. She went past him, through the front door, and out into the night air, and it hit her like icy water—sharp and clean and entirely necessary.

Charlotte kept walking.

The gravel path to the stables crunched under her feet. She could see the outline of the stable block against the dark, and for one moment she pondered her options.

A horse.

One of the big greys she had admired when they arrived, or even the smaller roan in the far stall. She could ride. She had ridden since she was six. She could be across the moor before anyone knew she was gone.

She stood at the stable yard gate.

Then she thought about where, exactly, she would go.

She turned away from the stable and looked at the tree line in the distance. The woods were dark and the moon was partial behind the clouds, but it was not raining, and the path into the trees was visible enough if she kept moving.

She shook her head, dismissed the idea, but continued striding away from the manor.

The woods were birch and oak, old growth, the kind that did not care about Dukes or proposals or the sound of a slamming door. Charlotte walked until the house lights were dim behind her, until the noise of the evening settled into the ordinary sounds of the dark. Her skirts caught twice on undergrowth. She freed them without stopping.

She found the oak by almost walking into it. It was enormous—wide-trunked and ancient, its lower branches sprawling out at an angle that invited exactly the sort of thing she was about to do. She circled around it once. Then twice.

Then she folded the skirt of her dress up over her arm, gripped the lowest branch, and pulled herself up.

She had not climbed a tree since she was fourteen. Her body, apparently, had not forgotten. She found the next branch and then the next, and then she was properly in it, the bark rough under her palms, the wood solid beneath her feet, and she went higher. Higher than was probably sensible. The branches thinned and the leaves moved and then a breeze came through, cold and entirely indifferent to her distress.

Charlotte stopped. She sat on a branch thick enough to be trustworthy, braced her back against the trunk, and breathed.

In. Out.

The night was wide up here. The moorland opened beyond the trees, and the sky above it was enormous, and none of it knew anything about a library proposal or a deed of guardianship or a duke with impeccable posture and an irritating habit of being right about everything except what mattered most.

She closed her eyes.

Marriage of convenience.

The words sat in her chest like a stone. She had read about such arrangements in novels and histories and the sort of social commentary that her father thought entirely unsuitable. She had understood them in the abstract, the way one understands something that happens to other people in other circumstances.

She had never imagined it could happen to her. Because when she was small and the world was still in the right shape, her mother had told her otherwise.