“I’M STILL A MAN… YOU THINK I CAN’T DO THIS?” THE WHEELCHAIR-BOUND DUKE WHISPERED TO HIS BRIDE

Chapter 7

The trustees were coming, and the whole house knew it.

Lily learned of it from Mabel, who learned of it from the estate office, who learned of it from a groom who had ridden to the village for a telegraph. A formal visit. The first since the accident. Four men who held the fate of the Kensington trusts between them, and a cousin who had spent eighteen months persuading them that Charles Kensington was no longer fit to hold anything at all.

“They will watch him at breakfast,” Mabel said, hands busy with linen. “They will watch him at dinner. They will watch how he lifts a cup, how long it takes him to cross a room, how many times he must stop. And then they will go back to London and write it all down.”

“They will eat his food and count his failures.”

“They will.” Mabel’s mouth was thin. “It has been done before. It is why the last visit was so short.”

Lily went to Charles that afternoon and found him in the long gallery, staring out at the frozen lake. She did not ask whether he was afraid. She asked what he needed.

He looked at her for a long moment. “A duchess,” he said, “who does not flinch.”

“Then you have one,” Lily said. “Tell me their names. Tell me what they want. Tell me who among them is already Augustus’s man.”

She learned it all in a single evening: the trustees’ histories, their debts, their resentments, the exact shape of Augustus’s campaign. Aldous Reed, the eldest, who had known Charles’s father and grieved him still. Sir Percival Blythe, who wanted the trust income for his own interests. Mr. Justice Hale of the Chancery bench, retired, who prided himself on being unmoved by either side. And Mr. Emory Vance, who took Augustus’s money and pretended otherwise.

“He is the one who will ask about your legs,” Charles said flatly. “Not to know. To make you say it aloud.”

“Then I shall answer,” Lily said, “in a tone that makes him regret asking.”

Charles looked at her then with something close to wonder, and Lily realized — with a small, dangerous thrill — that he had not expected anyone to stand beside him. He had expected to stand alone. He had spent eighteen months preparing for it.

The trustees’ visit came on a Thursday, with frost thick on the gravel and a wind that cut through wool. Lily arranged everything: the fires, the menu, the seating, the order in which rooms would be opened. She moved through the morning like a woman who had run a household all her life, and she watched Charles more carefully than any of the visitors did — watched the tremor he suppressed, the way he timed his breathing, the careful economy of every movement.

They watched him lift his cup. They watched how long it took him to cross a room.

And then they watched his wife set the entire house at ease around him, and they watched him answer every question about the estate’s accounts with a precision that made Vance’s mouth tighten, and they watched Charles Kensington laugh — once, quietly, at something the cook had said about the pheasant — and the laugh did more for his cause than an hour of argument.

At the door, as they departed, Aldous Reed paused and looked back at Lily.

“Your grace,” he said, and the title was not an insult in his mouth. “The last duchess kept this house like a museum. You keep it like a home. I will remember that when I write my report.”

Lily curtsied. When she straightened, she caught Charles watching her from the library doorway — his hand very still on the wheel rim, his face unguarded in a way she had never seen.

That night, he came to her door.

“You did not have to do that,” he said.

“I know. That is precisely why the choice belonged to me.”

He looked at her for a long, slow moment, and Lily’s breath caught, because she knew that look now, and she knew what it cost him to stand on the edge of a thing he had forbidden himself.

“Thank you,” Charles said.

Two words. The whole of him behind them.