The Price of a Title

The park was nearly empty, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows between the greening trees. A soft breeze rustled the leaves, and the scent of early blossoms lingered in the air. Henry offered Elizabeth his arm, and she took it without hesitation.

They walked in silence at first, the only sound the crunch of gravel beneath their boots and the occasional chirp of a distant bird. It wasn't awkward — rather, it felt like the space between heartbeats, full of things unsaid.

Elizabeth was the one to speak first.

"Sometimes," she said quietly, "I wonder what might have happened if the child had truly been yours."

He glanced at her, but her gaze remained forward, fixed on the winding path ahead.

"If Cassandra had not lied. If there had been no affair. No scandal. Just... a child. Yours. A wife you'd chosen. Would you have still come looking for me?"

The question was not sharp, but soft — a whisper of hurt she had tried not to voice until now.

Henry stopped walking.

"I've asked myself the same thing," he said after a moment, his voice low and steady. "And I hate the answer I gave myself — because it makes me ashamed."

She turned toward him slowly, searching his expression.

"I knew I was making a mistake the day I married her," he confessed. "Every syllable of the vows I spoke felt like I was forging another bar of the cage I had built around myself. I told myself it was for the dukedom, for appearances, for duty — but never for love."

He looked down, as if the gravel at his feet might help him explain.

"When I learned the truth — about her, about the child, about what her family had done — I wasn't devastated. I was... relieved. Cassandra and I had no love between us. What we shared was brittle and false."

He exhaled, a breath that sounded like it had been held for too long.

"It gave me cause to seek a divorce. A valid one. And it gave me reason — perhaps an excuse — to look for you."

Her expression was unreadable.

"I didn't expect to find you living so quietly," he went on, "in a cottage on one of my own distant estates, making a life for yourself with dignity and grace — after everything I had taken from you."

She remained silent.

"I regret it all, Elizabeth. The silence. The betrayal. The cowardice. But I've come to believe that... somehow, despite all of it, we've been given another chance. Not just to mend the past, but to make something new. Together. If you'll let us."

For a moment, all she could do was look at him — this man who had broken her heart and was now trying, piece by piece, to offer her his own.

He didn't press for an answer. He simply reached for her hand and brought it to his lips, pressing a soft kiss to her knuckles.

"I'll see you at the ball tomorrow night," he said gently, stepping back. "There should be a parcel arriving for you later today. A dress. One I hoped you might wear."

He walked her the rest of the way home, his presence quiet and steady at her side. At her doorstep, he lingered — as if on the edge of saying something more — but only touched the brim of his hat in parting before turning away, his figure fading into the dappled afternoon light.

Elizabeth stood in the doorway for a long while after he had gone.

Later, when she stepped inside, the dress had already arrived — a gown of deep, luminous blue that shimmered like a twilight sky, strikingly reminiscent of the one she had worn the night they first met. It was the color of memory, of promises lost and perhaps found again. She ran her fingers over the fabric, delicate as a sigh.That night, she sat at her writing desk by candlelight.

She penned a letter to Reverend Winthrop — the words precise, considered.

Then another, addressed to Lord Halbridge — equally careful, equally private.

Both were sealed and sent by morning.

And when she lay in bed, the dress hanging nearby in quiet stillness, she didn't yet know if she could accept what Henry had offered — not fully. The idea of something new, something shared, felt both near and impossibly distant.

But for the first time in a long time, she let herself wonder. Not as a surrender to the past — but as a question of what might still be possible.