“TAKE OFF THE WEDDING DRESS,” THE DUKE SAID COLDLY. “THIS MARRIAGE IS JUST REVENGE.”

Chapter 1

The room had no fire in it, and that was the first thing she understood about her marriage — not the vows, not the lace, not the three hundred faces that had turned as one when the chapel doors opened: only that a man who could afford anything had chosen, tonight of all nights, to let his bride freeze.

Verity Barlow counted the pearls down her back without looking at him. Fifty-two. Her father had once priced them the way a farrier prices a horse; now a duke was pricing her, in a house where the clocks ticked and nobody spoke. Somewhere below stairs, in a room she had never entered, a dead man’s map was still nailed to the wall.

She was the only person alive who knew why.

The Duke of Cranmere stood at the tall window with his back to her, still in his tailcoat, his cravat knotted as though he might at any moment walk out into the gaslit square and leave the whole business unfinished. He had not rung for a servant. He had not eaten a scrap of the cold supper laid under silver covers in the next room. Four hours ago — in a chapel so cold her breath had made ghosts — he had slid a ring onto her finger that did not fit, and when the clerk bent over the parish register, he had held the pen like a man signing a warrant.

Then he had said the sentence that would order the rest of her life.

“Take the gown off.”

She had heard hate before. She had lived inside it the way other children live inside a house. This was not hate; this was arithmetic.

“This marriage,” he went on, to the window, to the street, to no one, “was never a marriage. It is a debt of my own choosing, and you are the instrument.”

“I had assumed as much, your grace.”

Her voice came out steady. Her fingers, gripping the pearls behind her shoulder blades, did not. The dressmaker’s girl had been dismissed yesterday — wages were wages, and her father’s creditors were thorough — which meant there was no one left in the world whose job it was to free Verity Barlow from fifty-two small ivory buttons and forty pounds of Belgian lace bought on credit from a woman who had wept while taking the order.

So she reached around, the way she had reached around a thousand problems, and began.

Arthur — Cranmere — turned. He was younger than she had expected from the papers, younger than the bitterness in his letters to her father’s solicitor had suggested: thirty, perhaps, with black hair and the pale, washed-out gray eyes of a man who slept badly and trusted it as a virtue. Something crossed his face that she had seen before, on the faces of moneylenders when she did not beg. Confusion, almost. Then irritation at finding himself confused.

“You are not going to weep,” he observed.

“I did my weeping in the carriage, your grace. It is a wasted expense now.”

The fourth button resisted. The fifth came loose in the wrong way, and the lace at her shoulder slipped, and she exhaled through her teeth — a small, unromantic sound, the sound of a woman doing a job. He watched her fight it for another three seconds. Then he crossed the room.

“Turn.”

His hands were large, and the knuckles were rough — the hands of a man who still took a horse over fences himself. When his fingers found the bare skin between her stays and her spine, they were freezing, and she did not flinch. He worked the buttons with mechanical efficiency, top to bottom, a man reading an inventory.

“Your father destroyed my brother,” he said, to the back of her neck.

“I am aware of the stories about Lord Edmund,” she said. “They are not stories.”

“No.” Click, click. “There is a scheme in the Highlands — Kilcraig. Copper. My brother was twenty years old and had just buried our father, and he wanted, very badly, to be a man too quickly. Your father smelled it on him from across the room. He filled my brother’s head with painted rock and let him pour his whole inheritance into a hole in the ground. And when the engineers found nothing but dirt, Richard Barlow took what remained, and sailed for Paris, and drank it. My brother went down to the study, that room below the library, and he — ”

The final button slid free. The gown let go all at once, the bodice sagging against her ribs, and Verity caught the weight of it before it could pool at her feet. The pearls, all fifty-two, made a sound like rain on a roof, and then the sound stopped, and the room was very quiet.

“He shot himself,” Cranmere said. “Two years ago, in that room. So that you understand precisely what you are in this house.”

She stood in her shift in a room with no fire, and she understood precisely. The understanding had been in her chest for two years — since a morning when a newspaper had sheared the whole world sideways, and she had read a name she knew, and dropped a teacup on a rented carpet, and gone down on her knees among the pieces, and told no one that she was grieving.

“I am sorry for your brother,” she said.

Cranmere turned away as if struck. “I do not want your pity.”

“It was not pity, your grace. It was the only true thing either of us has said tonight.”

She let the dress fall. She was tired in a way sleep had never touched. “I know what I am,” she said. “I am the payment. You bought my father’s debts — eighty thousand pounds of them — not to send him to the Fleet, because a man like him would only starve there and call himself a martyr. You bought them so you could buy the one thing that made him proud and lock it in a cold house. That is competent work, your grace. A very expensive insult, delivered to the correct address.”

For a moment he looked, absurdly, as if she had taken the words out of his mouth and scrubbed them.

“Tomorrow,” he said at last, “you will learn the rest of the terms. Tonight you may sleep.”

He had his hand on the door when she spoke again — and she had promised herself she would not speak, but the room would not let her, the man’s words about the study sitting in the air like smoke.

“The study,” Verity said. “The one below the library. The east window, the watered silk, the desk with the broken latch.”

Cranmere stopped walking.

“The map of Kilcraig is on the wall,” she said. “It is drawn in a young man’s hand. Copper mine, three shafts, a burn running north to south, and a note in the corner about the water table.”

The silence went on so long that she could hear the gas lamps hissing in the square.

“How,” said the Duke of Cranmere, without turning around, “do you know what hangs on my study wall?”

Verity gathered the ruined gown against her chest like a shield she had no confidence in.

“Goodnight, your grace,” she said.