They Gave the Doomed Duke the Wrong Bride novel · Chapter 2 of 32
Chapter 2: Rook
A ranger called Rook lets her go with advice, the confiscators find bare rooms, and Bryony goes home to rob her father's strongroom until her sister catches her at the dowry door.
"I'm the other Penhallow girl," I said. "The one they don't put on the invitations."
The blade didn't move.
"Where did it go?"
"Where did what go?"
"Don't." His thumb pressed the inside of my wrist. "I watched you walk in a full room and walk out of an empty one. Where is the gold?"
He smelled of horse and snow and woodsmoke.
His voice was rough, like he hadn't used it much lately.
"Somewhere the Crown can't take it," I said. "Which is more than you can say for anything else in this house."
"So you're a thief."
"I'm the Duchess of Draycott. As of this afternoon. Who are you?"
A pause.
Then something that might have been a laugh, very quiet, against my hair.
"The Duchess," he said. "Of course you are."
"If you're going to cut my throat, do it before the guards change. They're louder than you."
The steel went away.
His hand let go of my wrist.
I turned around.
He was only a shape at first. Tall. Broad through the shoulders. A hood pulled forward, a short beard, the gleam of an eye.
"I'm nobody," he said. "Call me Rook."
"Is that a name or a bird?"
"Tonight it's a man who could have shouted for the guards and didn't."
"Then why didn't you?"
He looked past me at the empty vault for a long moment.
"Because you're taking it out of their hands," he said. "And because the woman upstairs is going north with nothing. Is that what you're doing it for?"
I thought about Isobel's face in the chapel. The kitchen one.
"I'm doing it because my father wants me dead in the snow," I said. "Everything else is a bonus."
He was quiet.
"Then listen to me, Duchess. Gold won't buy bread where they're sending you. Nobody up there sells. Take boots. Furs. Salt. Seed grain. Needles and thread. Every blanket in the house."
"I took the blankets."
"Take the hay out of the stables if you can. The horses are going north too, and the Crown won't feed them."
I hadn't thought of the horses.
I hated that he'd thought of them first.
"Why do you care?" I said.
Boots in the gallery. The guards changing.
He stepped back into the dark.
"Lock the door behind you," he said, "so they think it was robbed before you got here."
When I looked again, there was nobody there.
I locked the door.
I took the hay.
Dawn came gray and wet.
The Crown's captain arrived with forty men, two clerks and a list.
By the time he reached the pantry, his face had gone a dark plum color.
By the time he reached the treasury, he was shouting.
He lined the household up in the front hall.
The steward, the cook, the maids, Isobel in her black wool, Ned in his nightshirt and a coat.
Me, in my sister's gown, because I hadn't owned a dress of my own in that house.
"Thieves," the captain said. "Every one of you. Where is it?"
Nobody spoke.
He grabbed the old steward by the collar.
"I'll have you hanged for this."
"He's seventy," I said. "You'll need a short rope."
The captain swung round on me.
Isobel spoke first.
"Ask her," she said. "She's a Penhallow. Her father's had his hand in every treasury in this kingdom. They sent her here to strip us."
The whole hall looked at me.
I could have told her.
I looked at the captain instead.
"Search me," I said. "Search my room. I came here yesterday with one gown, and it isn't even mine."
They searched me.
They searched my room.
They found a hairbrush and a pair of borrowed shoes.
The captain stood in the middle of the bare hall, breathing hard, and finally wrote something in his book.
"Everything forfeit," he said. "Everything found: nothing. The column leaves the city gate at noon. Any of you not on it will be hunted."
Isobel's eyes stayed on me. They didn't believe me for one second.
I didn't need them to.
"I'd like to say goodbye to my father," I said.
The captain laughed.
"You've got till noon, Duchess. Take an escort."
Penhallow House stood across the river, all yellow stone and tall windows, the house where I'd slept above the kitchen since I was four.
The escort waited at the gate.
The servants let me in without a word. They knew my face. They didn't know I'd come back.
My father was at the palace.
Of course he was. There was a coronation to plan, and a Chancellor's chain to be measured for.
I didn't go to his study.
I went down the cellar stairs to the strongroom.
I'd carried his ledgers in and out of that room for eight years. The Quartermaster's books.
Grain bought. Grain delivered.
Grain sold. His figures and my handwriting, because he said mine was neater and a bastard should earn her bread.
The numbers had never added up.
I'd never asked.
The strongroom door stood behind two locks. I had the keys to both. He'd never taken them back. He'd never imagined he needed to.
Chests. Papers. Coin. Letters with seals I didn't look at.
I shut the door with my mother's key in my fist.
Bare stone.
The granary in the back court next. Long, dark, stacked to the rafters with sacks marked with the Crown's own stamp.
Odd, I thought. Then I shut that door too.
Three hundred sacks of grain went into the cold.
The last door was on the second floor, at the end of the pink hall.
Seraphine's dowry room.
Chests of silk. Fox furs.
Pearls. Twelve pairs of kid gloves.
A silver bath. The bridal linens with the royal crest stitched on them by six women over six months.
I stood in the middle of it with the key in my hand.
Something rustled behind me.
"What," said my sister's sweet voice, "are you doing in my room?"
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