Prologue

Prologue

It all started with a death.

No, that wasn't quite true. It started, as many things did, with a smile. A smile from across the room, a flutter of eyelashes, and then the eventual heartbreak that seemed to stretch for an eternity.

The sun shone brightly in the background, an astonishing range of gold, orange, and pale yellow. Without a calendar, anyone would be hard-pressed to know that it was only the very beginning of spring, the flowers already in full bloom and the birds singing gaily beneath all the quiet murmurs that otherwise filled the air. It was beautiful. And it was more damning because of it.

Henry stood woodenly at the foot of the freshly covered grave; his fingers balled into fists at his sides as he tried to block out the random whisperings that carried to him on the warm spring wind. His nails bit sharply into his palms from how hard they were pressed, forming little crescent-shaped cuts in the thick skin.

The pain was the only thing that kept him from reacting.

That and the grief.

It was a cataclysmic thing inside of him, that grief. It welled beneath the surface of every other emotion, thick and cloying. It clung to the very slope of his broad shoulders, bleeding out of him like an actual physical wound throughout the priest's words and the many poems and eulogies read in Martha's honour.

And there were a great many to be read. After all, why shouldn't there be? She had been greatly loved. To know her was to love her. To see her was to become infatuated with her. It was a point of fact. One that Henry imagined had always been so. Like the sun setting in the west and rising in the east, Martha commanded love.

Or had commanded love.

The past tense was like another blow to his chest as he stood there, his ‘friends' surrounding him and mourning the loss of her with him.

Somewhere in the background, her mother was sobbing quietly into her handkerchief, her other daughter holding the rapidly ageing woman up, and both no doubt wracked with the loss of Martha so soon after that of their patriarch.

Henry knew that, as Martha's husband, he ought to go to them. But he was stuck, his feet adhered to the ground beneath them, his grief a weight on his head that all but pushed him down into that earth and past the dirt pile that he so desperately wanted to shove aside and crawl under.

Hands patted his back on what felt like an intermittent timetable, every person that did so the very picture of understanding and support. But then they all would be. There wasn't a person in attendance who wasn't well versed in appearing just as they ought in society.

There wasn't a person in attendance, besides perhaps her mother and sister, who knew the true devastation that Henry had suffered. Or cared beyond what was required of them given his station and title.

"He hasn't shed a tear."

"I know! How peculiar. I think I saw him smile earlier."

"Smile? I didn't see such a thing! You must be mistaken."

"Must be. Who smiles at the funeral of their wife?"

"Their murdered wife no less."

"Has anyone heard any more about that yet? I heard he didn't have an alibi for the night it happened …"

The words came to him like evil tidings on a breath of wind, winding their way through his psyche with all the other drivel that he had pushed out of it throughout the last week.

Murdered.

That word still sounded odd in his head. Like the syllables were all wrong or the conjugation was off.

Murder wasn't exactly unheard of. It was London, and the ton was always rife with scandal. But his wife? Martha? Murdered? It didn't sit right in his head. It didn't make sense.

"The papers cleared him," one of the other voices contradicted, still sounding more than a little skeptical.

"They'd have to though, wouldn't they? I mean he is the Duke of Wallburshare."

"Well, sure, but what reason would he have to murder her?!"

No reason.

Henry could have shouted it at them.

He'd had no reason.

He and Martha had never even traded a cross word. Not even in the most stressful of times. He didn't think that Martha was capable of such a thing. She was – She'd been such an accommodating person. If ever she'd had a temper, he hadn't seen it.

"I heard there was another woman."

"No!"

"Well, I heard that she caught him in some more unsavoury dealings."

"More unsavoury than an affair?"

"More illegal than an affair, that's for sure."

Henry could have laughed. The bitter irony of it all was that the more they speculated, the further from the truth they all got.

Slowly, one by one, bodies were filing out of the cemetery, many stopping by to offer words of condolence and empty platitudes that Henry ignored as staunchly as he was the whispers from further back in the crowd.

He was involved in no illegal dealings. He'd had nothing to do with Martha's death.

Even the thought made his stomach turn.

And made him remember all over again coming home from parliament to find her body stretched across the entryway floor at the base of the stairs, blood pooling around her pale, lifeless form.

Oh, God. Why her?

Why had he taken her? Of all people.

Henry had never sought romance. He'd never thought to find love or marry for anything besides the very basic requirements of his station and title.

And then she had shown up, flowery and kind, unlike any woman he had ever met before her.

And now she was dead.

The words sat like acid inside of him as the crowd thinned out more and more.

Death was an inevitable. Everyone died.

His father and mother had died. All of his various aunts and uncles. Martha's father had died only two years after agreeing to allow Henry to court her. Death happened. It was.

But it wasn't supposed to happen to people as young as them.

It wasn't supposed to happen to her first.

Henry had no idea what he was supposed to do now. How he was supposed to make his feet move from her gravesite or where he was supposed to go afterward. Back home? Back where the memories of her filled every room and every detail?

What was he supposed to do?

Carry on with his life as if he hadn't just lost the single most important person in it?

Return to his duties as a duke?

His duties could wither and burn for all he cared. His inheritance could be given away. His lands, his money, his titles, all of them meant nothing if he didn't have Martha to share them with.

Everything was grey and bleak despite the warm evening.

Everything was… dead.

The murmurs died out with each new party's departure, soon only the sound of the birds and nature itself filling his ears as he remained rooted in place.

The funeral was concluded. The guests had gone.

But Henry remained.

How could he leave her?

Something stuck in his throat, raw and barbed, like thorns catching at the sensitive skin as he blinked heavily to try and clear his vision.

"Your Grace?"

Henry jerked, not expecting the voice so close to him – soft and careful as fingers alighted on the sleeve of his jacket.

Catherine was a small woman, even smaller than her sister had been, and while she had a totally different colouring and facial structure, it was abundantly clear that she and Martha had been sisters. They had the same nose. The same tilt of their eyes and soft, thin lips. There was a delicateness to the women of their family, a beauty that caught one off guard.

And seeing her so close, standing at the foot of Martha's grave, made Henry want to crawl inside himself to avoid the reminder that she provided.

"Henry," he corrected her belatedly, his voice scratching out of his throat. "There is no one else here but the two of us, Catherine. I am still your brother-in-law." And he always would be. To have her return to addressing him the way that she had several years before would be like erasing the very few years of love he had been allowed to spend with her sister.

Catherine smiled, a slow, barely-there curve of her lips as she nodded.

"The funeral is over, Henry." Her fingers pressed softly into the sleeve of his jacket. "Everyone has gone home."

Henry's eyes lifted from her to sweep the empty graveyard, already knowing her to be right but still unable to help himself. Only their two carriages were left, although he could see that it was her mother's waiting, not her husband's and her own.

"Don't allow me to keep you from getting your mother home before the evening chill sets in," Henry said quickly, avoiding the question in her mahogany eyes. "I would be more than happy to see her home and you back to your own, but–"

He didn't have a reason to really give her, his words cutting out as abruptly as he ran out of them.

Catherine's fingers tightened on his sleeve. "Oh, Arthur took mother home already," she assured him quickly. "I decided to take her carriage back. I didn't want to leave you here on your own …"

Henry felt a brief stab of guilt.

Followed by a melancholy thought that that was all he was any longer: on his own.

"I just wanted to …" Words failed him again, his eyes flitting back to the mound of fresh earth in front of them both as he tried to even rationalize what he wanted. Or rather what he could say aloud. He very much doubted confessing to wanting to crawl inside that coffin with his wife was the sort of thing her also grieving sister would want to hear.

"It's only natural for you to grieve," Catherine assured him gently. "You loved her."

There it was. The past tense again in reference to his wife. Like a serrated knife inserted into an already raw wound.

"She was the love of my life," Henry agreed heavily.

And he meant it.

She was all that he knew of love. She embodied it, even after death. She had taken his from him with her when she left the earth, leaving him a hollow shell of a man in her wake.

"She would want you to be happy," Catherine whispered.

Henry recoiled from the words.

Happy?

How could he be happy when his happiness lay six feet beneath him?

"You know how she felt about grief," Catherine pressed on. "You remember what she would always say after Papa had died? He is not in the earth; he is not gone. He is the sound of the notes being played on his grand piano; he is in Arthur's poorly timed jokes and is the whisper on the wind reminding us that he is here." Catherine recited it by rote, her voice so soft that Henry found himself leaning in. Even if only just to hear his wife's words repeated again.

The whisper on the wind …

Like she had summoned it, a breeze tickled his cheek, his eyes closing as he fought the tears that had been absent all day.

Without a word, Catherine stepped into him, wrapping her slender arms around his waist and hugging him tight.

It was inappropriate, given both the setting and their lack of a chaperone.

But for a moment, Henry didn't care.

She was soft, warm, and smelled faintly of patchouli and lavender, just like Martha. And she was a married woman. His sister-in-law. So he embraced her back, allowing his arms to wrap around her and give in to the comfort she was so freely offering him.

Out of everyone else in the world, only she could know to any extent what he was going through.

Martha had been her whole life before her marriage, the pair thick as thieves.

Henry bent his head, closed his eyes, and inhaled as he tried not to wish it was Martha in his arms instead of Catherine. As he tried not to imagine their places traded.

"‘What is life without laughter'?" Catherine quoted her sister again, driving that knife even deeper into Henry's heart.

His ragged chuckle was anything but amused.

What was life without her?

"Martha would want to know that you were moving on," Catherine whispered, her words hot against his chest even through the layers of fabric he wore. Her hands shifted, her palms flattening out against the small of his back as she spread her fingers as wide as they would go. "She would want to know that you were taken care of …"

Henry couldn't argue with her. He knew she spoke the truth.

But he didn't quite grasp what she was doing.

She stepped in even closer to him, even embracing as they were. A half-shuffle forward until he could feel every bit of her pressing into his front, her slender frame fitted to his in a way that was no longer just breaching protocol but entirely doing away with it.

And he froze.

"Catherine?"

Her hands slid slowly up his back, her face lifting as her dark eyes flashed up at him.

"I could be your wife, Henry," she whispered fervently. "I could take care of you. I could do that for her. We could do that for her. To honour her memory, to let her know that you were going to be fine." She pressed her chest into his until he could feel the rapid beating of her heart through both their clothes. "You could marry me."

Her words were like pointed spikes driven into his spine, forcing him to let go of her and step back so abruptly that she teetered on the verge of falling over.

But he didn't dare reach out to steady her.

Instead, he stared at her as if he couldn't quite make out what he was seeing.

"You are married already, Catherine." The words were the only ones he could think of to answer her.

Everything else was too obscene.

She couldn't possibly have just been suggesting what he thought she was …

She was clearly driven by grief just as much as he, though hers had taken an odd, twisted turn that he didn't think he could stomach.

"Henry–"

"You had better see yourself to your carriage," Henry cut her off in an abrasive monotone. "I need to be returning home."

Despite how much he didn't wish to.

Anything was better than standing in that space with Catherine for longer or allowing her grief to give voice to any other insane suggestions.

He strode away from her without waiting for a reply, heading for his carriage with the full intent of just sitting in it until her own had pulled off.

And after that … he would return home. To the empty mausoleum that his manor had now become. He would return home and sit in solitude. He would forget that Catherine had ever said such a thing as she had.

After all, he had no use of those mortal pleasures any longer. He would never be with another woman. Never love another woman. He would live out whatever time he had left and …

Well, that was the question, wasn't it?

And what?