At Our Wedding Feast, My Husband Introduced His Mistress, So I Asked the Bishop for an Annulment novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lady of the North Wing
At her wedding feast the duke presents his mistress, the bride remembers her past life and the poison in her cup, and she asks the bishop aloud how to annul him; then the mistress lifts the poisoned goblet to drink.
Isaline's husband of six hours stood up at their wedding feast and tapped his goblet with a knife.
Two hundred guests went quiet.
"My friends," Lothaire said, "I won't keep secrets in my own house."
He smiled down at his bride.
He had a dimple when he smiled. Isaline had thought it was sweet that morning, in the temple.
"So let me present the lady of the north wing."
The small door behind the high table opened.
A woman in red walked out onto the dais.
She was small, with black curls piled high and a red mouth, and she walked like she'd done it a hundred times.
Lothaire held out his hand to her.
She took it.
"Lady Sidonie has my heart," he told the hall. "And my bed. My wife will have my name. I think that's fair."
Somebody laughed.
Then a lot of people laughed.
And the memories of another life rushed into Isaline's head all at once.
The lady of the north wing.
She knew those words.
She had read them on a phone screen in a white room that smelled of disinfectant.
She had been sitting on a stool behind a pharmacy counter at three in the morning, between two night shifts, eating cold rice.
She had read it on every break for a month.
"The Lady of the North Wing."
It was a silly translated love story about a sweet baron's daughter and the handsome duke who adored her.
And his cold, jealous wife.
The wife's name was Isaline.
Her own name was Isaline.
She sat very still in her ivory silk and her long lace veil and let it all come.
The hospital. The counter. The drawers of tablets she could count blind.
The night she sat down after the second shift and didn't get up again.
She had been thirty-three.
Now she was twenty-six, and she had been married at noon, and she was sitting in chapter three.
In chapter three, the duke presented his true love at the feast.
The jealous wife slapped her in front of everyone.
He sent the wife to the north wing.
And at dawn they found her there, dead of poison, with a letter blaming the sweet heroine.
Her maid leaned over her shoulder and filled her goblet with red wine.
"Drink, Your Grace," the maid whispered. "It'll help."
Isaline lifted the goblet.
It smelled of bitter almonds.
Not much. Under the wine and the spice, there was a thin bitter thread.
Most people can't smell it at all.
She always could.
Laurel water. Cherry laurel leaves, boiled and distilled. Enough in one cup to stop a grown woman's breathing before she reached the stairs.
Her hand didn't shake.
Ten years of handing strangers their medicine had taught it not to.
On her left, her father leaned close.
He smelled of bergamot, the way he always had.
Gervais, Count Ostrevant, had arranged this marriage himself, down to the last crown.
"Drink your wine and smile, darling," he murmured. "Don't make it worse."
Isaline looked at Lothaire with his arm around the woman in red.
She looked at the two hundred faces waiting to see the bride cry.
Then she stood up.
The hall went quiet again, faster this time.
She raised the goblet.
"To my husband," she said. "And to the lady of the north wing."
Lothaire's dimple flickered.
He had expected tears.
She touched the rim to her lips and didn't let a drop past them.
She set the goblet down on the cloth.
Then she turned to the bishop at the end of the high table.
He was seventy and had married them at noon, and he was holding a chicken leg.
"My lord Bishop," Isaline said, loud enough for the back of the hall.
"How long must a marriage stay unconsummated before the temple will dissolve it?"
Nobody breathed.
The bishop put down his chicken leg.
"Your Grace," he said carefully.
"If the husband refuses the marriage bed before witnesses, and it stays that way a hundred days, the wife may ask us to dissolve it."
"And what she brought to the marriage?"
"Is returned to her."
Isaline looked out at the hall.
"Two hundred witnesses," she said. "Shall we count from tonight?"
Lothaire laughed.
It was a big, easy laugh for the room.
"Count all you like, wife. You'll never see my bed."
"Then we agree," she said. "How nice. Our first night married, and already we agree."
Across the hall, one man laughed out loud.
Only one.
He was sitting at the lowest table near the door, where somebody had put him on purpose.
He was very tall even sitting down, black-bearded, in a dark green coat with a grey fur collar.
The king's witness.
She knew him too.
The grim Margrave of the Greymarch.
In chapter twenty he died alone of fever in his snowbound castle at midwinter, and the duke got his lands.
He lifted his own cup to her across the whole hall.
Her father's fingers closed around her wrist under the table.
They were cold.
"Isaline," he said softly. "Sit down."
She didn't.
Lady Sidonie let go of Lothaire's hand.
She came down the high table toward Isaline in her red silk, smiling with all her teeth.
"The duchess doesn't seem thirsty," she said to the hall.
She picked up Isaline's goblet.
"If she won't drink to us, I will."
And she lifted it to her red lips.
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