Chapter One

 

 

“Steady, Atlas. Steady.”

The words came out rougher than Nathaniel intended, scraping against a throat still raw from another sleepless night. His gelding, a seventeen-hand grey with more sense than most members of Parliament, flicked an ear backwards but kept his pace even, along the forest track.

Dawn was beginning to bleed pink and gold through the canopy of oaks, and the air held that particular quality of early autumn: crisp enough to sting, soft enough to promise warmth later. It should have been peaceful. It should have been precisely the sort of morning that reminded a man why England was worth fighting for.

Instead, Nathaniel Warrick, seventh Duke of Ravensfield, veteran of the Peninsular War, and current disappointment to roughly half the House of Lords, was counting his breaths in sets of four and trying very hard not to think about cannon fire.

In through the nose. One, two, three, four. Out through the mouth. One, two, three, four.

His physician, an earnest man with spectacles and an unfortunate tendency to use phrases like nervous exhaustion, had recommended riding, the quiet, and the deliberate removal from society. “Your Grace requires an environment of calm,” Mr. Ashby had pronounced, as though calm were a location one could simply visit, like Bath.

So here Nathaniel was. Visiting calm, or attempting to, at any rate.

He’d chosen the old hunting lodge specifically because it sat at the furthest edge of his holdings, accessible only by roads that most sensible travelers avoided. No neighbors paying calls, no assembly rooms with their crushing press of bodies and their echoing acoustics, and no well-meaning acquaintances asking after his health with that particular tilt of the head that meant we’ve heard the rumours, you know.

Just trees, silence and the rhythmic thud of Atlas’s hooves against packed earth.

For three days now, Nathaniel had ridden the perimeter of his lands at dawn, deliberately choosing the old forest road rather than the village route. People used the village road, and he was not ready for their staring eyes, their whispered conversations and their desperate attempts to pretend they hadn’t heard that the Duke of Ravensfield had returned from the war somewhat less intact than when he’d left.

The forest road, by contrast, saw only estate workers and the occasional poacher. People who had better things to do than gawk at a duke who couldn’t keep his hands from shaking.

He told himself it was merely a survey of the ground, renewing his acquaintance with every approach, each line of sight, and any point of weakness. The fact that it also allowed him to avoid the small party of servants at the lodge until he had regained some command of himself was, he supposed, only incidental.

He was not hiding. Dukes did not hide.

They merely… strategically positioned themselves for optimal recovery.

Atlas snorted, as though offering commentary on this rationalization.

“Yes, thank you,” Nathaniel muttered. “Your opinion is noted.”

The path curved ahead, dipping through a section of older forest where the oaks gave way to beech, and the undergrowth grew wilder. According to the estate maps, which Nathaniel had memorized during three consecutive nights of insomnia, a tenant cottage lay somewhere beyond this stretch. Part of the traditional holding for the family that supplied herbs to the estate. He’d seen it listed in the ledgers: Farrow cottage. Herbal supplies and medical preparations. Rent: waived by arrangement since 1743.

He made a mental note to ride past another way tomorrow. The last thing he needed was some well-meaning herbalist emerging to curtsey and stare.

The first rumble of thunder was so distant that Nathaniel almost convinced himself he’d imagined it.

The second was not.

It rolled across the sky like something heavy being dragged across wooden boards, and Nathaniel’s hands tightened on the reins before he could stop them. Atlas, sensing the shift in his rider’s posture, began to prance sideways.

It’s thunder, Nathaniel told himself firmly. Not artillery and not the French. Just weather. Just clouds doing whatever it is clouds do.

Unfortunately, his body had not received this message.

His heart was already accelerating, his breath already shallowing, and his vision already doing that thing where the edges went slightly grey, and the center sharpened to almost painful clarity. He could smell sulfur that wasn’t there and hear screaming that existed only in his memory. He could also feel the phantom weight of Sergeant Cooper’s body going slack against his shoulder as the man bled out from a wound Nathaniel couldn’t stop, couldn’t fix, couldn’t…

The third crack of thunder split the sky directly overhead, and Atlas decided he’d had quite enough of standing still while the world exploded.

The gelding bolted.

Later, Nathaniel would reflect that he should have been able to control the horse. He’d ridden through actual battles. He’d charged cavalry lines, jumped artillery positions and done all manner of things that should have made one spooked gelding on a country lane a minor inconvenience at worst.

But his hands weren’t cooperating. They’d gone rigid on the reins, locked in that useless clenching grip that happened when his mind decided he was back in Spain and the French were coming and everything was about to go very, very wrong.

Tree branches whipped past his face. Atlas’s hooves pounded against the path—or was that cannon fire? No. No. Hooves. Just hooves. One two three four, one two three four…

The counting wasn’t working. Nothing was working. The world had narrowed to smoke and blood and the absolute certainty that if he didn’t do something, right now, someone else would die and it would be his fault, again, again…

Atlas stumbled.

The impact of hitting the ground drove the air from Nathaniel’s lungs and, mercifully, also drove the flashback from his head. He lay there for a moment, staring up at the canopy of leaves above him, cataloguing injuries with the detached efficiency of long practice. Left shoulder: already scarred, now probably bruised. Hip: would ache for days. Pride: absolutely destroyed, as usual.

Atlas stood a few feet away, looking vaguely apologetic. His left foreleg was lifted slightly—a thrown shoe, most likely, given the way the horse was favoring it.

“Wonderful,” Nathaniel managed, still flat on his back. “This is all going wonderfully.”

He should get up. He knew he should get up. But his body had apparently decided that lying in the dirt while his heart rate slowly returned to something approaching normal was the superior option, and who was he to argue?

The thunder had faded to a distant mutter. Rain would come eventually, but not yet. Small mercies.

 

***

 

Marian Farrow was elbow-deep in dried chamomile when she heard the hoofbeats.

Not the steady rhythm of a horse being ridden with purpose; this was frantic, uncontrolled, the sound of an animal in genuine distress. And on this road, of all places. The old forest track saw perhaps one traveller a week, usually an estate worker taking a shortcut or a shepherd moving between pastures.

She wiped her hands on her apron and moved to the window, frowning. Through the trees, she caught a flash of grey, a horse, moving far too fast, and then the unmistakable sound of something heavy hitting the ground.

Someone’s hurt.

She didn’t stop to think about propriety, or caution or any of the other things a woman living alone was supposed to consider before rushing toward unknown men on deserted roads. Someone had fallen, badly by the sound of it, and Marian had been treating injuries since she was old enough to hold a bandage.

She grabbed her mother’s medical satchel from its hook by the door, a habit so ingrained she barely noticed doing it, and set off down the path at a pace just short of running.

The man was lying flat on his back in the middle of the track, staring up at the sky with an expression she recognized immediately. Not the vacant look of unconsciousness or the grimace of physical pain—this was something else entirely. Something she’d seen before, in the soldiers who’d come back from the wars with wounds that didn’t show on the outside.

He was breathing too fast. Shallow, rapid breaths that weren’t getting enough air into his lungs. His hands were clenched at his sides, rigid as stone, and though his eyes were open, she’d wager her best copper pot that he wasn’t seeing the oak canopy above him.

Marian slowed her approach, deliberately making her footsteps audible. Startling a man in this state was the surest way to make everything worse.

“Sir?”

She kept her voice calm and measured. The same tone her mother had taught her to use with skittish animals and frightened children. The tone that said I am not a threat and you are safe, without using those actual words, because those tended to have the opposite effect on people who weren’t feeling safe at all.

The man turned his head slowly, and Marian found herself looking into a pair of grey eyes that were struggling to focus on the present. He was perhaps thirty, with dark hair disheveled from his fall and features that would have been handsome if they hadn’t been drawn tight with barely controlled panic. The cut of his coat spoke of money, significant money, and there was something familiar about the sharp line of his jaw, the particular shade of those storm-grey eyes…

Oh.

She knew who this was. The Duke of Ravensfield had come to his hunting lodge at last. The village had been buzzing about it for days; half of them convinced he’d come to raise rents, the other half whispering darker theories about why a duke would bury himself in the countryside instead of taking his seat in Parliament.

None of the theories, she suspected, had come close to the truth.

“Can you tell me your name?” she asked, crouching down to bring herself to his level. It was the first question her mother had taught her to ask, because it was a way to assess whether the patient was oriented, but also a way to ground them in the present. You are a person with a name. You exist here, now, in this moment.

“Warrick.” His voice was rough, scraped raw.

“And do you know where you are, Mr. Warrick?”

She used the name deliberately, stripping away the title. A duke in crisis didn’t need to be reminded of all the things he was supposed to be. He needed to remember that he was, first and foremost, a man.

Something flickered in those grey eyes—surprise, perhaps. “Ravensfield lands. Somewhere between the lodge and… the Farrow cottage, I believe.”

“You believe correctly.” She let a note of warmth enter her voice; approval for a correct answer, the kind of small positive reinforcement that helped pull people back from the edge. “I’m Miss Farrow. Now, I’m going to need you to do something for me, Mr. Warrick.”

She could see him struggling, and she was sure that a part of him wanted to inform her that he didn’t take orders from tenant farmers. But another part of him, the part that was still half-trapped in whatever horrors his memories had constructed, was desperate for an anchor. Something solid to hold onto.

“Can you look at that oak tree?” She pointed to the ancient specimen about thirty feet away, its trunk split by some long-ago lightning strike. “The one with the damaged bark, just there.”

He looked, and that was good. Looking meant engaging with the present.

“Good. Now tell me five things you can see.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Five things you can see,” she repeated, patient as her mother had always been. “Then, four things you can hear, and three you can touch. It’s a grounding technique and helps bring the mind back to the present when it’s gone… elsewhere.”

For a moment, she thought he would refuse. Dukes were not, as a rule, accustomed to taking medical advice from herbalists half their social standing. But something in her manner must have reached him, because he turned his attention to the tree and began, haltingly, to speak.

“The tree. The leaves—some are already turning. My horse.” A pause. “Your boots.”

“That’s four. One more.”

His gaze moved upward, and Marian became suddenly aware that she was being examined. Not in a threatening way, but more like a man, cataloguing details to anchor himself to reality. She felt his attention catch on her rolled sleeves, her practical grey skirt, and the few strands of dark hair that had escaped her braid in her rush to reach him.

“Your hands,” he said finally, and something about the way he said it made heat rise unexpectedly at the back of her neck.

Stop that, she told herself firmly. He’s a patient. He’s in distress. This is not the time to notice that his voice has dropped low and intent.

“Good,” she managed, keeping her tone professionally neutral. “Now, four things you can hear.”

He really listened, she could see him making the effort, and the rigid set of his shoulders began, incrementally, to ease.

“Birds. The wind…” Another pause, and when he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “Your breathing.”

Her breathing. As if that were something worth noticing. As if that were an anchor worth holding onto.

Marian cleared her throat. “And yours, which is slowing down. That’s good. Three things you can touch.”

He pressed his palms flat against the ground, and she watched his fingers dig into the dirt and leaf litter, grounding himself in the most literal sense possible. “The earth. These leaves. This root.”

“Excellent.” She sat back on her heels, studying him. The grey was receding from his vision; she could tell by the way his eyes were focusing properly now, tracking her movements with awareness rather than that terrible blank stare. “The worst is passing, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” He sounded almost surprised by this. “How did you know to do that? The counting and the listing.”

“My mother was a healer. She treated soldiers, after they came back.” Marian rose to her feet and extended her hand before she could think better of it. “I learned from her. Can you stand?”

He looked at her offered hand for a long moment—long enough that she wondered if she’d overstepped, if a duke would find it insulting to accept assistance from a woman of her station. But then his fingers closed around hers, warm and callused and surprisingly strong despite the tremors she could feel running through them, and he let her help him to his feet.

They ended up standing closer than she’d intended.

Close enough that she could see the individual shades of grey in his eyes: storm and steel and something softer underneath. Close enough to catch his scent: horse and leather and something spicier beneath, sandalwood perhaps. Close enough that when he inhaled sharply, she could see his chest expand beneath his coat.

Close enough to count the faint scars on his left hand, pale lines that spoke of older injuries and battles survived.

“Thank you,” he said, and his voice had dropped into a lower register, roughened by something more than just his recent distress.

Marian released his hand and stepped back, putting proper distance between them. Her palm tingled where they’d touched, but she ignored it.

“Your horse has thrown a shoe,” she said briskly, nodding toward the grey gelding who was watching them with an expression of equine concern. “The smithy is in the village, three miles east. You’ll want to send someone to attend to it before you ride him again.”

“Yes. I…Yes.” He seemed to be struggling to regain his composure, and Marian found herself oddly reluctant to watch. There was something painfully private about a man trying to reassemble his dignity after it had been so thoroughly shattered.

She busied herself checking the horse’s leg; the shoe had come off clean, no damage to the hoof, while the duke collected himself behind her. When she turned back, he’d managed to arrange his features into something approaching aristocratic neutrality, though the effect was somewhat undermined by the dirt on his coat and the leaf fragments in his hair.

“Thank you, Miss Farrow.” Formal now, the duke rather than the man. “For your assistance. I am… grateful.”

“It was nothing. This road is rarely used. I heard the hoofbeats and assumed a worker had been injured.” She paused, then added, more gently than she’d intended: “The grounding technique. Practice it, if you can. The counting becomes easier with time.”

Something flickered across his face—surprise, perhaps, that she was acknowledging the reality of his condition rather than politely pretending it hadn’t happened.

“I will.”

He gathered Atlas’s reins and began to lead the horse back toward the path, favoring his left hip slightly in a way that suggested tomorrow would bring impressive bruises. Marian watched him go, noting the set of his shoulders, the careful way he moved, and the determined straightness of his spine.

He was trying so hard to look like a duke again, like a man who had everything under control.

She found it unexpectedly affecting.

He’s a duke, she reminded herself firmly, with a condition that requires careful management and a life so far removed from yours that you might as well be a different species.

He paused at the bend in the path and looked back.

Their eyes met across the distance—grey and brown, duke and herbalist, two people who had no business feeling whatever it was that crackled in the air between them. Marian raised her hand in acknowledgment, nothing more, and watched him nod once before disappearing around the curve.

She stood there longer than was sensible, listening to the fading sound of hoofbeats.

Then she shook herself firmly, picked up the medical satchel she’d dropped in her haste, and walked back to her cottage.

The chamomile was waiting, her work was waiting, and life, in all its ordinary practicality, was waiting.

But all the way home, she couldn’t quite shake the memory of storm-grey eyes and a voice gone rough with gratitude.

And she couldn’t quite stop wondering if she’d see him again.

 

 

 

Chapter Two

 

 

“Your Grace, the post has arrived from London.”

Nathaniel looked up from the window where he’d been staring at nothing in particular, or rather, at the treeline where the old forest road disappeared into shadow, and found his steward hovering in the doorway with an expression that suggested the post contained nothing good.

Dawson had been with the Warrick family for thirty years. He’d served Nathaniel’s father, weathered the chaos of the old duke’s death, managed the estates during Nathaniel’s years at war, and greeted him upon his return with the same unflappable calm he’d shown when Nathaniel was a young boy tracking mud across the entrance hall. If Dawson looked worried, the situation warranted worry.

“How many letters?” Nathaniel asked, turning from the window.

“Seven, Your Grace. Three from Parliament, two from your solicitor, one from Lady Whitmore, and one from…” Dawson hesitated. “Lord Ashborn.”

Nathaniel’s jaw tightened. Ashborn. Of course. The man had been circling like a vulture ever since Nathaniel’s return, offering “friendly counsel” that always seemed to involve Nathaniel ceding influence on various committees. The vulture had apparently grown impatient with his prey’s refusal to simply lie down and die.

“Leave them on the desk. I’ll attend to them shortly.”

“Very good, Your Grace.” Dawson set the stack of letters on the mahogany desk but didn’t immediately withdraw. “If I may, Your Grace…”

“You may not.” The words came out sharper than Nathaniel intended, and he forced himself to soften his tone. Dawson didn’t deserve his temper. Dawson was, in fact, one of the only people in his life who had never once looked at him with pity or fear. “Forgive me, but it’s been a difficult morning.”

A masterful understatement, that. He’d returned from his dawn ride covered in dirt, limping slightly, and with a horse missing a shoe—all of which Dawson had noted with careful neutrality while arranging for the smith to be summoned. The steward had asked no questions because, Nathaniel suspected, he’d already guessed the answers.

“Of course, Your Grace.” Dawson bowed and retreated, closing the study door behind him with a soft click.

Nathaniel stood motionless for a moment, staring at the stack of letters as though they might burst into flames if he glared hard enough. Then he crossed to the desk, lowered himself into the chair, and reached for the first envelope with the resignation of a man approaching the gallows.

The letter from Parliament was predictable enough—a pointed inquiry about when His Grace might see fit to resume his duties, given that several important votes were approaching, and his absence had been noted. The subtext was clear: We’re keeping track. We’re watching. Your seat is not secure simply because you inherited it.

The solicitor’s letters were worse. Dry, technical language that somehow managed to convey deep concern about “the management of certain financial matters during His Grace’s period of recuperation” and “questions being raised in certain quarters about the stability of the Ravensfield holdings.”

Questions being raised. Nathaniel knew what that meant. Creditors were getting nervous, business partners were reconsidering arrangements, and the whole delicate web of financial relationships that kept a dukedom functioning was beginning to fray at the edges because the man at the center of it had proven himself unreliable.

Lady Whitmore’s letter was a masterpiece of social warfare disguised as friendly concern. She wrote to “inquire after his health” and to share that she’d “heard the most distressing rumours” at Lady Pemberton’s card gathering. Apparently, someone had told someone else that the Duke of Ravensfield had been seen in a most alarming state at his London house before he left. And really, would it not be better if he returned to town and put such talk to rest? Society was always ready to gossip, and silence only invited more of it…

Nathaniel set that letter aside with hands that weren’t quite steady.

The rumors… There had been rumours since the moment he had stepped off the ship at Portsmouth with shadows under his eyes and a flinch he couldn’t control. He’d done his best to manage them by appearing at the right events, saying the right things, pretending that everything was perfectly fine even as his mind fractured a little more with each crowded ballroom and each unexpected loud noise.

It hadn’t been enough because it was never enough.

He reached for Lord Ashborn’s letter with a sense of grim inevitability.

My dear Ravensfield, it began, the false familiarity setting Nathaniel’s teeth on edge.

It pains me greatly to write to you on such a delicate matter, but I feel that our long friendship…

They had no friendship. They had a mutual acquaintance and a shared membership in two clubs, nothing more.

…compels me to speak frankly. Your continued absence from London has become a matter of considerable discussion. I will not pain you with the specific nature of the speculation, but suffice it to say that words like “unstable” and “unfit” have begun to circulate in circles that matter.

Nathaniel’s grip on the paper tightened.

I write not to wound but to warn. There are those who would use your current difficulties to their advantage. Questions about your capacity to manage your estates, your seat, your responsibilities—these questions are being asked, and your silence is being interpreted as confirmation.

As your friend, I urge you most strongly to return to London at your earliest convenience. Make an appearance, demonstrate your fitness and prove the gossip wrong.

Should you require any assistance in navigating these troubled waters, I remain, as ever, your humble servant…

Nathaniel set the letter down very carefully, as though it might explode if handled roughly.

Unstable… Unfit.

He stood abruptly, the chair scraping against the floor, and crossed to the window again. The forest road was still there, still disappearing into shadow, still leading to…

No. He cut off that thought before it could fully form. He was not going to think about where that road led. He was not going to think about brown eyes with flecks of gold, or a voice that had been low and steady when everything else was chaos, or hands that had gripped his with surprising strength and pulled him back from the edge.

He was not going to think about Miss Farrow.

Her breathing, his mind supplied unhelpfully. You listed her breathing as one of the things you could hear.

Nathaniel pressed his forehead against the cool glass of the window and tried to remember how to breathe.

The letters were right, damn them all. His absence was being noticed. Every day he spent hiding in the countryside was another day for the rumors to grow, for his enemies to sharpen their knives, and for the fragile edifice of his reputation to crumble further.

He knew he should go back and face the whispers head-on. He should prove he was still capable of managing his affairs, and show them all that the Duke of Ravensfield was not unstable, unfit or any of the other words they were using to describe him.

But the thought of London, the crowd, the noise, the constant performance of normality, made his chest tighten in a way that had nothing to do with his bruised ribs.

The memory surfaced unbidden: Miss Farrow’s voice, calm and matter-of-fact, offering him a truth no one else had ever spoken aloud. She’d looked at him, really looked, not the careful sideways glances he’d grown accustomed to, and seen something other than a title in crisis.

She’d seen a man.

Stop it, Nathaniel told himself savagely. She’s a tenant herbalist who helped you through a moment of weakness, and that’s all. She’s not a solution to your problems, she’s not an escape from your responsibilities, and she’s certainly not someone you should be thinking about with this level of…

He couldn’t even finish the thought. He couldn’t name the feeling that curled in his chest when he remembered the particular shade of her eyes, brown, warm and startlingly direct. The way her voice had never wavered, never pitched with false sympathy or barely concealed alarm. The steadiness of her hands when she’d helped him up, and the way her fingers had felt intertwined with his for that brief moment.

Low and unhurried, his mind supplied. Her voice was low and unhurried. Does she speak to everyone that way? Or was it only for you?

The question was absurd. Meaningless. She was a healer who had treated a patient in distress; of course, her voice had been calm. It was a professional skill, nothing more. The fact that it had reached something deep inside him, some wounded part that had been screaming for years without anyone hearing, was entirely beside the point.

He had letters to answer, a reputation to salvage, and a dukedom to prove himself worthy of.

He had no business standing at windows thinking about herbalists with steady hands and warm eyes.

Nathaniel turned from the window, sat back down at his desk, and reached for a fresh sheet of paper.

But before he began to write, he allowed himself one more moment, just one, to remember the way she’d said Mr. Warrick, as though the title didn’t matter, as though he could be simply a man standing in the forest with leaves in his hair and gratitude in his throat.

Then he dipped his quill pen in ink and began the laborious work of lying to Lord Ashborn about how well his recovery was progressing.

***

 

The village of Thornwood was not, by any reasonable standard, a hotbed of gossip and intrigue.

It boasted one church, one public house, one blacksmith, one general shop, and a population of perhaps two hundred souls who mostly concerned themselves with the eternal verities of weather, crops, and whose daughter was walking out with whose son. The arrival of a duke at the old hunting lodge was, by local standards, the most exciting thing to happen since the Miller’s cow had wandered into the church during Easter services three years prior.

Naturally, everyone had an opinion.

“Remember my words,” Mrs. Pritchard was saying as Marian entered the general shop, her basket over her arm and her mind still uncomfortably occupied with grey eyes and trembling hands. “There’s something not right with him. Why else would a duke bury himself out here when he could be in London, doing……. Whatever it is dukes do?”

“Parliament, I think,” offered young Tom Barker, who was waiting for his mother to finish selecting ribbons. “And balls…. Lots of balls.”

“Exactly my point.” Mrs. Pritchard leaned forward with the air of someone about to share information of tremendous import. “My sister’s husband’s cousin works in a great house in London, not the duke’s house, but a fine house nonetheless, and he says that the Duke of Ravensfield was seen at a ball last season having some sort of episode.”

The word landed in the shop like a stone dropped in still water, and Marian’s hand tightened on the handle of her basket.

“Episode?” Mr. Graves, the shopkeeper, looked up from his accounts with interest.

“Apparently, he just stopped. Right in the middle of the dancing. He went pale as death and started shaking like a leaf.” Mrs. Pritchard’s voice dropped to a theatrical whisper. “They had to escort him out, and there was talk of a physician being called.”

“It could have been anything,” Tom said, with the optimistic dismissiveness of youth. “Maybe he ate something that disagreed with him.”

“For three hours?” Mrs. Pritchard shook her head. “No, remember my words. The man came back from the war wrong. They say he has violent fits and his own servants are afraid of him.”

Marian knew she should stay quiet. The last thing she needed was to insert herself into village gossip about the duke, especially given that she had firsthand knowledge of his actual condition and absolutely no desire to explain how she’d come by it.

But the casual cruelty of it: ‘came back from the war wrong’, as though he’d failed some fundamental test of manhood, made something hot and sharp twist in her chest.

“That seems rather unfair,” she heard herself say.

Every head in the shop turned toward her.

“The soldiers who’ve returned from the Peninsular War have endured things most of us can’t imagine,” Marian continued, keeping her voice carefully neutral. “If some of them struggle afterwards, that’s hardly a character failing. It’s an injury, same as a wound to the arm or leg.”

Mrs. Pritchard’s expression suggested she’d just bitten into something unexpectedly sour. “Well. That’s a very… modern perspective, Miss Farrow.”

“It’s a medical perspective.” Marian moved toward the counter, deliberately casual. “My mother treated soldiers for years. The mind can be wounded just as surely as the body. The only difference is that people find it easier to look away.”

A heavy silence fell over the shop. Marian could feel the weight of it; the curiosity, the speculation, the dawning awareness that she might know more than she was saying.

Fool, she told herself. You’ve just made yourself the subject of conversation instead of the duke.

“Speaking of your mother,” Mr. Graves said, with the transparent eagerness of a man desperate to change the subject, “I have that shipment of glass bottles you ordered. Shall I put them on your account?”

“Please.” Marian handed over her list of needed supplies and focused very intently on the mundane business of shopping, refusing to meet Mrs. Pritchard’s calculating gaze.

But as she waited for Mr. Graves to assemble her order, she couldn’t help hearing the continued whispers from the other side of the shop.

“He drinks heavily, they say. To help him sleep.”

“I heard he has nightmares and screams loud enough to wake the whole household.”

“I wonder if it’s safe, having him so close to the village. What if he becomes violent?”

Each rumor was worse than the last, each whisper more cruelly distorted from whatever truth might lie beneath. Marian thought of the man she’d found lying in the forest road: not violent, not dangerous, just desperately trying to find his way back to himself while his mind betrayed him. She thought of the way his voice had broken on the word thank you, and the raw gratitude in his eyes when she’d treated him like a person instead of a spectacle.

They don’t know him, she reminded herself. They’re just filling silence with noise, the way people always do.

But the rumors would spread. They always did. And each time the story was told, it would grow a little darker, a little more monstrous, until the man himself was buried under an avalanche of speculation and fear.

She collected her supplies, paid her account, and left the shop with her head held high, ignoring the whispers that followed her out the door.

The walk back to her cottage took her along the edge of the forest, where the old road branched off toward the hunting lodge. Marian paused at the junction, looking down that shaded path, and allowed herself a moment to wonder how he was faring.

Grey eyes like a winter sky before snow. The thought surfaced unbidden, bringing with it a flush of heat she had no business feeling.

She’d treated dozens of soldiers in the years since the wars began. She had helped them through flashbacks, night terrors, and all the invisible wounds that society preferred to pretend didn’t exist. She’d never once found herself standing at a crossroads, thinking about the particular colour of their eyes.

Stop it, she told herself firmly. He’s a duke with a reputation in tatters and problems far beyond your ability to solve. The last thing he needs is a tenant herbalist mooning over him like a girl with her first infatuation.

She would not walk up that forest road to see how he was faring.

She would not.

But as she unpacked her supplies in the quiet of her cottage, she found herself glancing out the window toward the path more often than was strictly necessary.

And when the sound of hoofbeats echoed faintly through the trees, probably just a groundskeeper, probably nothing to do with the duke at all, she hated how quickly her heart fluttered in her chest.

This is ridiculous, she told herself for the hundredth time that day. You are a practical woman with practical concerns, and he is a man from another world entirely.

Marian went back to her work, determinedly not thinking about winter-grey eyes and a voice that had broken on gratitude, but she was entirely unsuccessful.

 

 

 

Chapter Three

 

 

“You’re going out again, Your Grace?”

Nathaniel paused in the act of pulling on his riding gloves, caught by the careful neutrality in Dawson’s voice. It was the same tone the steward had used yesterday when the letters arrived, and the day before when Nathaniel had returned from his dawn ride looking like he’d lost a fight with the forest floor.

“I am.” He kept his own voice equally neutral. “I find the morning air beneficial.”

“Of course, Your Grace.” A pause. “Shall I have the Cook hold breakfast?”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll eat when I return.”

Another pause, this one weighted with things unsaid. Nathaniel could feel Dawson’s gaze on his back as he checked Atlas’s girth; the horse had been freshly shod yesterday, the smith summoned with admirable efficiency, and he knew exactly what the steward was thinking.

Three days in a row. The same direction each time. Something is drawing him to the forest road.

Let him think, let him speculate. Nathaniel had spent enough of his life explaining himself to people who didn’t understand and couldn’t help. He was tired of explanations.

“I may be some time,” he said, swinging into the saddle. “Don’t send out a search party unless I’m gone past noon.”

“Very good, Your Grace.”

Nathaniel urged Atlas forward before Dawson could say anything else, guiding the horse down the drive and onto the track that led toward the old forest road. The morning was cool and bright, autumn settling properly into the countryside now, and the air smelled of fallen leaves and distant woodsmoke.

He knew he should not be doing this.

The letters on his desk remained unanswered, or rather, answered with careful lies that would buy him perhaps another week before the pressure became unbearable. Parliament and his solicitors wanted him in London. Everyone, it seemed, wanted him in London, performing the role of a capable duke while his mind slowly tore itself apart.

Instead, he was riding toward a tenant cottage to thank a woman he’d met exactly once, under circumstances he’d rather forget.

Mr. Ashby had advised him to seek out calm surroundings and composed company. Miss Farrow, he reflected, was the very embodiment of both.

It wasn’t a lie, exactly. His physician had indeed suggested that his recovery would benefit from peaceful surroundings and a steady presence. What Nathaniel had not mentioned to Mr. Ashby, what he could barely admit to himself, was that in the three days since his humiliating collapse on the forest road, he had not been able to stop thinking about the particular quality of Miss Farrow’s calm.

It wasn’t the false serenity of society women with the practised mask of pleasant indifference. It wasn’t the nervous deference of servants, always watching for signs of displeasure. It was something else entirely; a stillness that seemed to come from somewhere deep, as natural as breathing.

Her breathing. He’d listed it as one of the things he could hear during the grounding exercise. Her breathing, steady and slow, while his own had been ragged with panic.

He wondered if she’d noticed. He wondered if she’d thought him foolish, pathetic, or simply strange.

But then, he wondered why he cared.

The forest road opened before him, dappled with morning light, and Nathaniel felt some of the tension in his shoulders begin to ease. Here, at least, there were no letters demanding his attention, no whispers about his fitness to lead and no one watching him for signs of imminent collapse.

Just trees, silence, and the steady rhythm of Atlas’s hooves. And, in approximately ten minutes, a cottage with a garden full of herbs and a woman who had looked at him like he was a person instead of a problem to be solved.

This is a terrible idea, the rational part of his mind observed. You’re a duke, and she’s a tenant. You have no business seeking her out, no matter how calming you found her presence.

The rest of his mind, apparently, had decided to ignore rational objections.

He found the cottage without difficulty because he’d memorized the route, though he preferred not to examine that fact too closely, and reined Atlas to a halt at the edge of the small clearing. Smoke rose from the chimney, and the herb garden was bright with late-season growth. Everything looked exactly as he had imagined: peaceful, welcoming and utterly removed from the chaos of his life.

For a long moment, Nathaniel simply sat there, uncertain how to proceed. He hadn’t actually planned what he would say. ‘Good morning, Miss Farrow, I’ve come to thank you formally for preventing me from dying of humiliation in your forest’ seemed inadequate. ‘Good morning, Miss Farrow, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you’ was obviously impossible.

The cottage door opened before he could decide, and Miss Farrow stepped out.

She was dressed simply, as before: a practical grey dress, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and an apron dusted with what looked like dried herbs. Her dark hair was pulled back in the same sensible braid, though a few strands had escaped to curl against her neck. She carried a basket over one arm and wore an expression of mild surprise that shifted, as she recognized him, into something more complex.

“Mr. Warrick.” She set down the basket and regarded him steadily. “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

Mr. Warrick. Not Your Grace. The choice was deliberate, he remembered their brief exchange about titles, about needing to be a person before being a duke, and something in his chest loosened at the sound of it.

“Miss Farrow.” He dismounted, perhaps more quickly than was dignified, and found himself standing at the edge of her garden without quite knowing how he’d gotten there. “I came to… I wanted to…”

He stopped, frustrated with his own incoherence. He commanded men, he gave speeches in Parliament, and he was perfectly capable of stringing words together into sentences.

Except, apparently, when faced with a woman in a grey dress who was watching him with calm brown eyes and waiting patiently for him to remember how language worked.

“I came to thank you,” he managed finally. “Properly. For your assistance the other day.”

“You thanked me at the time.” Her voice was neutral, neither encouraging nor discouraging. “There was no need to ride all this way to do so again.”

“Nevertheless.” He straightened his shoulders, trying to reclaim some semblance of ducal authority. “Your intervention was… valuable. The technique you taught me. I’ve been practising it.”

Something shifted in her expression; interest, perhaps, or approval. “Has it helped?”

“Yes.” The admission came more easily than he’d expected. “Not always. But sometimes, it has helped more than anything else has.”

She studied him for a moment, and Nathaniel had the uncomfortable sense that she was seeing more than he intended to show. The shadows under his eyes, probably because he still wasn’t sleeping well, despite the practice, the tension in his jaw that he couldn’t quite release, or the way he stood too still, braced against threats that existed only in his memory.

“You look tired,” she said quietly. Not an accusation, just an observation.

“I am tired.” The words escaped before he could stop them. “I am… profoundly tired, Miss Farrow. I have been tired for a very long time.”

She nodded, as though this confession was perfectly ordinary, and gestured toward the cottage door. “Would you like to come in? I was about to make tea.”

Every rule of propriety he’d ever learned screamed that he should refuse. A duke did not enter the private residence of an unmarried woman of a lower station. Not without chaperones, formal invitations and all the other social scaffolding that made such interactions acceptable. A duke certainly did not accept tea from a tenant herbalist simply because he was tired and her presence made the constant noise in his head go quiet.

“Yes,” he said. “Thank you.”

Miss Farrow’s cottage was small but immaculate, filled with the scent of dried herbs, woodsmoke and something else, something green and growing that he associated now with her. Bundles of plants hung from the low ceiling beams, lavender, chamomile, others he couldn’t identify, and the walls were lined with shelves holding glass jars and ceramic pots, each carefully labeled in a neat hand.

“Sit, please.” She indicated a sturdy wooden chair near the fireplace. “I shall heat some water.”

Nathaniel sat, feeling out of place in the cozy space. His riding boots were probably tracking dirt across her clean floor, and his presence was probably disrupting the peaceful rhythm of her morning. He should apologize, make his excuses and leave…

“You’re thinking very loudly,” Miss Farrow observed, without turning from where she was preparing the tea things. “I can practically hear the wheels turning from here.”

Despite himself, Nathaniel felt his mouth quirk. “A common complaint.”

“I imagine so.” She set a kettle over the fire and turned to face him, leaning against the worn wooden counter with her arms crossed. “What brings you here, really, Mr. Warrick? And please don’t say gratitude again because you could have sent a note for that.”

It was so direct, so refreshingly, unexpectedly direct, that Nathaniel found himself answering honestly.

“My physician advised me to seek out calming environments and calming people.” He met her gaze, watching for any sign of offence or alarm. “You were calming the other day. More calming than anything has been in a very long time.”

Something flickered across her face—surprise, perhaps, or a kind of cautious pleasure. “So, I’m a medical prescription, I suppose?”

“That’s not…” He stopped, recognizing the gentle teasing in her voice. “That came out wrong.”

“It came out honestly.” She uncrossed her arms and turned back to the tea preparation, her movements efficient and unhurried. “I appreciate honesty. It’s rarer than people think.”

He watched her work, noting the steadiness of her hands as she measured dried herbs into a small pot. No tremor, no hesitation—just calm, and competent movements that spoke of years of practice. Her hands were not the soft, white hands of a society lady. They were working hands, capable hands, hands that knew how to do things.

He found them unexpectedly beautiful.

Stop that, he told himself firmly. You’re here because she’s calming, not because you find her hands attractive.

But he did. Heaven help him, he did.

“This is a sleep blend,” Miss Farrow said, drawing his attention back to the present. “Chamomile, valerian, a bit of lavender. Nothing that will make you groggy, just… gentle. It helps quiet the mind.”

“Are you offering me treatment?”

She glanced back at him, one eyebrow raised. “I’m offering you tea. Whether you choose to view it as treatment is entirely up to you.”

The distinction mattered, he realized. She wasn’t presuming to know what he needed. She wasn’t pushing remedies on him uninvited. She was simply offering, leaving the choice in his hands.

When had anyone last given him a choice?

“I would be grateful for the tea,” he said carefully. “And if you were willing to explain more about the grounding technique. How it works and why it helps?”

Miss Farrow’s expression softened almost imperceptibly. “I can do that.”

The kettle began to steam, and she turned to pour the hot water over the herbs, releasing a fragrance that was at once medicinal and comforting. Nathaniel breathed it in, feeling some of the tension in his chest begin to unknot.

“The technique works by engaging the senses,” she said. She sat across from him, maintaining a proper distance, though in the small cottage, even a proper distance felt closer than it should. “When the mind gets trapped in memory, in the past, the senses anchor it to the present. This is what I see now, this is what I hear now, and this is what I feel now. It interrupts the spiral.”

“You speak as though you’ve experienced it yourself.”

A shadow crossed her face, there and gone so quickly he might have imagined it. “Not the way you have. But I’ve spent years watching those who do. My mother treated soldiers after they came back from earlier campaigns, and I learned from her.”

“She taught you well.”

“She did.” Miss Farrow’s voice was soft with memory. “She believed that everyone deserved care, regardless of station or circumstance. That suffering didn’t discriminate, and neither should the healing.”

Nathaniel turned that over in his mind, considering it. In his world, the world of Parliament, society and endless political maneuvering, everything discriminated. Station determined who you could speak to, who you could touch, and who you could acknowledge as fully human. The idea that suffering might be a great equalizer was oddly comforting.

“Your mother sounds like a remarkable woman.”

“She was.” The past tense hung in the air between them. “She died three years ago. A fever that moved too fast for any of her own remedies to stop.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I.” Miss Farrow picked up her teacup, cradling it between her palms. “But she taught me everything she knew, and I carry that forward. It’s a way of keeping her alive, I suppose.”

Nathaniel thought of his own dead, the men he’d lost in Spain, the soldiers whose faces still visited him in nightmares, and understood something of what she meant. The weight of carrying the dead. The way they shaped you, even in their absence.

“The tea,” he said, reaching for his own cup. “How does it work?”

Miss Farrow launched into an explanation of the various herbs and their properties, her voice falling into the steady, unhurried cadence he remembered from their first meeting. He listened, genuinely interested, but found his attention drifting to other things as well. The way she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear when she was thinking. The gold flecks in her brown eyes, which were visible now in the firelight. The curve of her mouth when she spoke about something she knew well.

She was beautiful. He’d noticed it before, in the forest, a flash of awareness quickly suppressed, but here, in the warm light of her cottage, it was harder to ignore. Not the polished beauty of society diamonds, all artifice and careful presentation. Something realer. Something that made him want to lean closer, to breathe in that lavender-and-green scent, and trace the line of her jaw with his fingertips.

Absolutely not, he told himself firmly. You came here for calm, not for… Whatever this is.

But when he reached for his teacup, and their fingers brushed, briefly, accidentally, over the worn ceramic, he felt the contact like a brand.

Miss Farrow’s breath caught, barely audible, but neither of them acknowledged it.

“The tea should be cool enough to drink now,” she said, her voice perfectly steady despite the faint flush he could see creeping up her neck. “Let it steep too long, and the valerian becomes bitter.”

Nathaniel drank, grateful for something to do with his hands, something to focus on besides the lingering feeling of that brief touch. The tea was good, earthy and floral, with a sweetness that softened the medicinal edge, and he could feel it working already. Some of the tightness in his shoulders was beginning to ease.

“This is…” He paused, searching for the right word. “Helpful.”

“Good.” She was watching him over the rim of her own cup, her expression carefully neutral. “You can take some with you, if you like. I have more than I need.”

“I couldn’t impose…”

“It’s not an imposition.” She rose and moved to one of the many shelves, selecting a small cloth pouch and beginning to fill it with dried herbs. “Consider it part of the estate arrangement. The Farrows have provided herbal remedies to Ravensfield for generations. This is simply… continuing the tradition.”

She was giving him an excuse, he realized. A socially acceptable reason to take something from her, to maintain a connection that propriety would otherwise forbid. The kindness of it, the quiet thoughtfulness, made something ache in his chest.

“Thank you,” he said. “For the tea and the explanation. And…” He hesitated, then continued before he could lose his nerve. “For treating me like a person. Most people find it easier to treat me like a problem.”

Miss Farrow turned from the shelf, the pouch of herbs in her hands, and for a moment, something unguarded flickered in her eyes. “Most people,” she said quietly, “don’t know the difference.”

She crossed the small space between them to hand him the pouch, and Nathaniel rose to accept it. They stood closer than was proper, closer than was wise; close enough that he could see the individual threads of grey woven through the brown of her eyes and smell the lavender that seemed to cling to her skin.

He should step back. He knew he should step back.

But he didn’t.

“Miss Farrow.” His voice came out rougher than he intended. “I find myself… I wonder if…”

She waited, patient as always, making no move to either close the distance or increase it.

“Would it be acceptable,” he managed finally, “if I were to call again? To report on the efficacy of the tea, if nothing else?”

Something that might have been a smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “I would find that acceptable, Mr. Warrick.”

Mr. Warrick. Not Your Grace. Still treating him like a man instead of a title.

He should leave. He’d stayed too long already and had pushed the boundaries of propriety further than was wise. But standing here in her cottage, breathing in lavender and woodsmoke, feeling more at peace than he had in months…

“The tea,” he said, because he had to say something. “How often should I drink it?”

“Once in the evening, before you attempt to sleep. More than that, and you risk becoming dependent on it.” She finally stepped back, and the spell broke. “The goal is to teach your body to remember what rest feels like. The tea is a tool, not a cure.”

“You sound like my physician.”

“Your physician sounds like a sensible man.” She moved toward the door, and Nathaniel understood the implicit message: the visit was ending. “Come back in a week and tell me if it’s helped. If not, we’ll try something else.”

We’ll try something else. As though his recovery was a project they were undertaking together. As though she intended to see it through.

Nathaniel followed her to the door, collecting his gloves and hat from where he’d set them. Atlas was waiting patiently outside, nosing at a patch of clover near the garden fence.

“Miss Farrow.” He paused on the threshold, turning back to face her. “Thank you. Truly.”

“You’re welcome.” She stood in the doorway, framed by the dark interior of her cottage, and for a moment, he let himself simply look at her. The practical grey dress, the escaped strands of dark hair, and the steady brown eyes that saw too much and judged too little.

“Mr. Warrick.” Her voice was soft, almost reluctant. “The grounding technique; it works better with practice. But it also works better with… anchors. Things in the present that matter enough to pull you back.”

“Anchors?”

“People, places and sensations you associate with safety.” She held his gaze, and something passed between them that neither could name. “Find your anchors, Mr. Warrick. They’ll serve you better than any tea.”

He nodded, not trusting his voice, and turned to mount Atlas. The horse responded to his command with familiar ease, and Nathaniel guided him back toward the forest road, resisting the urge to look back the way he had three days ago.

But he failed.

He looked back, and she was still standing in the doorway, watching him go. This time, she didn’t wave; she just held his gaze across the distance until the trees swallowed him from view.

Nathaniel rode home with the pouch of herbs tucked inside his coat, close to his chest, and a word echoing in his mind that he couldn’t quite dismiss.

Anchors.

He thought of brown eyes, of a voice that was low and unhurried and of hands that were steady, capable and unexpectedly beautiful.

He thought of the way her breath had caught when their fingers brushed.

Find your anchors, she’d said. Things in the present that matter enough to pull you back.

He was beginning to fear he already had.