The Wolf I Saved Was the Mad Duke novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Button

Home in the shabby Belmoray kitchen, Ianthe learns the size of the debt, forbids her sister to sell herself, pulls the arrow and finds a strangely neat scar under it; at midnight the Minister of War knocks at the door.

"Ianthe," her father said. "Darling. That's a wolf."

"Yes, Papa."

"In the kitchen."

"He was bleeding on the front steps. The neighbors were looking."

The wolf lay on the flagstones in front of the kitchen hearth, taking up most of the room.

Odalie sat on the table with her feet tucked up and her eyes enormous.

Her ginger cat sat on the dresser with its back arched, making a noise.

"He's beautiful," Odalie whispered. "Can we keep him?"

"I already paid for him," Ianthe said.

"With what?" Papa asked.

Ianthe touched her collar where the pearls had been.

He saw, and his face went soft and old all at once.

"Oh, Ianthe. Your mother's."

"She'd have done the same."

"She'd have done worse. She'd have bitten the Prince."

Odalie laughed, and then she stopped, because Ianthe hadn't told them the rest yet.

So Ianthe told them.

The engagement.

The thirty thousand crowns.

The first snow.

Papa sat down slowly in the kitchen chair with the broken rung.

"I thought you'd be married by Midsummer," he said. "Then it wouldn't have mattered."

"Papa. How much is the house mortgaged for?"

He took off his spectacles and cleaned them on his waistcoat, which meant all of it.

"The wine fleet would have tripled it. Every ship. Then the storm."

"I know about the storm."

"I didn't tell you the sum because you'd have married him anyway. And you'd have hated it."

"I was going to marry him anyway."

"I know," he said. "That's why I didn't tell you."

Ianthe couldn't be angry at him.

She had tried, many times, and it never lasted till supper.

Odalie slid off the table.

"I'll marry the wine merchant on Tanner Street. He asked me at the Harvest Fair."

"He's sixty-one, Odie."

"He's sixty-one and he has a warehouse."

"He has a wet laugh and three dead wives."

"Two. The third ran off with a fiddler." Odalie lifted her chin. "I'd only have to stand him for ten years or so."

"No."

"You were going to marry Orlian."

"Orlian is twenty-six and only stupid. No."

Odalie opened her mouth.

"I'll find the money," Ianthe said. "Nobody in this family is getting sold to save a house."

The wolf lifted his head off the stones and looked at her.

Ianthe knelt down beside him with a basin of hot water and Papa's last bottle of brandy.

"This is going to hurt," she told him. "I'm sorry. Try not to take my hand off."

He didn't move while she cut the fur away around the arrow.

When she broke the shaft, he made a sound low in his chest, like a door closing in another room.

Odalie put her hands over her eyes.

The head came out clean.

Ianthe poured the brandy in after it, and he shut his eyes and shook all over and let her.

"Good boy," she said. "Good, brave boy."

When she washed the blood away, she found something else under the fur.

An old scar, long and pale, running down from the top of his shoulder.

Somebody had stitched it once.

Neatly, in rows, the way a surgeon would.

Ianthe ran her thumb down it.

"Who sewed you up?" she asked him.

He opened his grey eyes and looked at her, and didn't say.

Papa came and peered over her shoulder.

"Huntsmen do that, sometimes. For their dogs."

"He's not a dog."

"No," Papa agreed. "He's much worse. What are you going to call him?"

Ianthe looked at the wolf.

He was the size of a pony, black as soot, with paws like dinner plates.

"Button," she said.

The wolf turned his head and gave her a look of the deepest disgust she had ever seen on any face, animal or person.

Odalie fell off her chair laughing.

"Button," Ianthe said again, firmly. "You're the only thing I've bought in two years. I'll call you what I like."

He put his head down on his paws and sighed through his nose.

Papa went up to bed, and Odalie carried off her outraged cat.

Ianthe sat on the floor with her back against the warm bricks.

The wolf lay beside her with the fire in his eyes.

"Do you want to know why I did it?" she asked him.

He didn't say anything, which made him the best listener she'd had all year.

"You looked at us like you were asking," she said. "Everybody else up there was looking at you like you were a wager."

She pulled her knees up under her chin.

"Orlian used to look at me like that. Like a bet he'd lost."

The fire popped.

"My mother would have liked you," she said. "She liked anything that bit."

The wolf shifted and laid his chin on the toe of her boot.

It was heavy and warm.

Ianthe left it there.

She was nearly asleep when someone knocked on the front door.

Not a polite knock.

Three slow blows, the kind you hear in a house at midnight and remember for a long time.

The wolf's head came up.

Every hair along his back stood straight.

Ianthe took a candle and went through the dark hall and opened the door a crack.

The Marquess of Morcaine stood on the front step in a fur collar, with two men and a lantern behind him.

"Lady Ianthe," he said, smiling. "May I come in? I think you have something of mine."

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