PART 14 — The Proposal Society Tried to Stop
Spring came to Wardington Manor with scandal still clinging to the gates.
Reporters waited in carriages across the street. Society ladies sent invitations written like traps. Politicians who had once sought Arthur’s favor now treated him with careful caution, because reform was admirable only until it reached their own bank accounts.
Katherine Coldwell became famous.
She hated it.
Strangers praised her courage in public while questioning her virtue in private. Newspapers sketched her face without permission. Pamphlets claimed she had bewitched the Duke. One magazine printed a cruel cartoon of her wearing a maid’s cap beneath a duchess’s coronet.
Arthur found Theo staring at it one morning.
The boy’s face was red with anger.
“They made her look mean.”
Arthur took the paper gently.
“Yes.”
“She isn’t.”
“No.”
“Can you make them stop?”
Arthur folded the paper.
“I can punish some lies. Not all cruelty.”
Theo looked toward the breakfast room door, where Katherine had just entered carrying correspondence for the reform commission.
“Then I’ll tell everyone.”
Katherine paused. “Tell everyone what?”
Theo stood on his chair.
“That you saved me.”
The room went silent.
Then Arthur smiled — a small, proud, aching smile.
“You may start by getting down from the chair.”
Theo obeyed, but only after muttering, “Still true.”
That evening, Arthur asked Katherine to walk with him in the garden.
It was the first warm evening of the year. The roses had not yet bloomed, but green life had begun pushing through the soil, stubborn and bright.
Katherine knew something was coming before Arthur spoke.
He looked too formal.
Too careful.
Too much like the Iron Duke trying to ask permission from his own heart.
“Katherine,” he began.
She stopped walking.
“Arthur.”
The use of his first name still had the power to undo him.
He looked at her for a long moment.
“I have spent months telling myself that gratitude is not love. That admiration is not love. That Theo’s attachment to you should not influence my heart. That grief might be disguising need as devotion.”
Katherine’s breath caught.
“And?” she whispered.
“And I have come to the conclusion that I am a better man when I stop lying to myself.”
He took a small velvet box from his coat.
Katherine stepped back.
Not because she did not love him.
Because she did.
And love, she had learned, could ruin a woman faster than poverty if the world decided she had reached too high.
“Arthur, do not.”
His face tightened. “Do not?”
“Not like this. Not in the garden where only we can hear. Not before you understand what this will cost.”
“I know what it will cost.”
“No,” she said, voice shaking. “You know what it will cost you. You do not know what it will cost Theo. They will say I used him. They will say I replaced his mother. They will say your grief made you foolish and my ambition made me cruel.”
Arthur closed the box.
Not rejected.
Listening.
Katherine’s eyes filled despite her efforts.
“I have survived being poor. I have survived being mocked. I have survived being lied about. But I do not know if I can survive becoming the reason your son is hurt again.”
Arthur stepped closer.
“You are not the reason people are cruel.”
“No. But I would become their excuse.”
Before Arthur could answer, Theo’s voice came from behind the hedge.
“That’s stupid.”
Both adults turned.
Theo emerged with dirt on his knees and a guilty expression that suggested he had been listening for some time.
Katherine stared. “Theo Wardington.”
He winced. “I was looking for beetles.”
Arthur lifted an eyebrow. “In our private conversation?”
“Beetles move.”
Katherine almost laughed through her tears.
Theo walked to her and took her hand.
“If people say bad things, Papa can be scary and I can be louder.”
Arthur coughed once into his hand.
Theo continued, very serious.
“And Mama would like you.”
Katherine went still.
Theo looked toward the house.
“I don’t remember everything about her. But I remember she liked people who told the truth even when their voice shook.”
Katherine covered her mouth.
Arthur’s eyes shone.
Theo looked between them.
“So if you want to marry Papa, I think you should. But not if Papa keeps looking sad and weird while holding that box.”
Arthur exhaled something dangerously close to a laugh.
Katherine knelt before Theo.
“You are certain?”
Theo nodded.
“You are not afraid I will take your mother’s place?”
He frowned.
“No one can take Mama’s place. That’s where Mama is.”
He touched his chest.
“People can have more rooms.”
That undid her.
Arthur opened the velvet box again.
No witnesses but a child, a garden, and the first evening warmth after a long winter.
“Katherine Coldwell,” he said, voice low and unsteady, “will you marry me?”
She looked at Theo.
Then at Arthur.
Then at the house that had once been a tomb and had somehow become a home.
“Yes,” she whispered.
Theo shouted so loudly three gardeners looked over the wall.
For one perfect minute, happiness stood untouched.
Then a footman came running from the terrace, pale and breathless.
“Your Grace,” he called. “A telegram from the prison.”
Arthur took it.
Read it.
And the joy drained from his face.
Katherine touched his arm. “What is it?”
May you like
Arthur looked at her.
“Lady Evelyn is dead.”
