Page 1 of A Wicked Duke's Arranged Marriage
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.
