Read Chapter 34: The Duplicity of Sir Hugh

The registry office in Marlow was a squat, soot-stained building wedged between a chandler’s shop and a tavern, and Cordelia had never been more grateful for its plain, unhallowed walls. No incense. No gilded altar. No ancient Ashworth prayers curling through the air like smoke. Just a ledger, a clerk with a rheumy cough, and two witnesses she had chosen with care: a kitchen maid who had never once looked at her with fear, and a groom who thought magic was the province of stage performers.

Roderick squeezed her gloved hand as the clerk droned through the vows. His palm was warm. Real. She did not reach for the thread of his emotion—she had made herself a promise, and she would keep it even now, even here, even with the word *wife* hanging in the air like a struck bell.

“I do,” she said. The words felt heavier than any spell she had ever cast.

Roderick’s eyes held hers. “I do.”

The clerk closed the ledger with a thump. “That’s that, then. Sign here, and here, and you’ll not trouble me again.”

They signed. Cordelia’s hand shook only slightly, and she told herself it was the cold.

Outside, the November wind cut through the narrow streets, and Benedict was waiting by the carriage, his face drawn tight as a drum. He had not smiled once since they’d found him on the road, and Cordelia had learned not to press. But the look he gave them now was not the weary look of a man recovering from imprisonment. It was the look of a man who had just watched a coffin lowered into the ground.

“You’re married,” he said. Not a question.

“Properly married,” Roderick replied, and there was a quiet defiance in his voice that Cordelia had come to recognize. He was still learning to hold the word *husband* without flinching.

Benedict nodded once, then reached into his coat and pulled out a folded paper, creased and stained with something that might have been river water. Or blood. “Then you’ll want to see this before we go home.”

He unfolded it. It was a marriage certificate, printed on the same heavy stock as the one they had just signed—but the names were not theirs.

*Sir Hugh Ashworth, widower, to Lady Cordelia Ashworth, spinster.*

The date was three weeks hence.

Cordelia felt the street tilt. She grabbed the carriage door to steady herself. “That’s—this is a forgery. I have never met the man’s solicitor. He is dead. We saw the lighthouse collapse with him inside.”

“The lighthouse, yes.” Benedict’s jaw worked. “Hugh was not in it.”

Roderick stepped forward, shoulders squaring. “You knew this?”

“I suspected.” Benedict’s voice was raw. “I did not have proof until I reached the wreckage. There were two sets of footprints leading away from the base, not one. A man’s and a woman’s. They followed the tidal path east, and they were moving fast, as if they knew the exact moment the tower would fall.” He looked at Cordelia, and his eyes were the eyes of a boy who had seen too much to be a boy any longer. “Hugh planned it. He used the collapse to disappear. And he has been planning to marry you for longer than we have been hunting him.”

“But why?” Cordelia heard her own voice rise. “He already held the estate through his machinations with Coverdale. Why would he need a marriage to me?”

Benedict’s hand shook. “Because the marriage lines with Coverdale were never valid. She was already wed when she bound herself to Hugh—married in a French chapel under a name she did not own. He knew it. He knew the entire time, and he let her believe she was his true wife, because it gave him control over her.” He swallowed. “But a woman should not share a man’s estate if their union is void. So Hugh needs a new wife. A legitimate one. And the Ashworth name is tied to its magic. A marriage to you would give him a claim to the house that even Old Meg could not dispute.”

Roderick let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “He faked his own death to clear his debts, and now he means to return as a widower and claim an heiress bride who is already supposed to be dead to him.”

“Except I am not dead,” Cordelia said. “I am standing here in a foggy street, married to you, with a certificate that proves it.”

“Which is precisely his problem.” Benedict folded the paper and pressed it into her hand. “He needs you unmarried. Or he needs this forged certificate to be believed. If he can reach a parish registrar before word of your wedding spreads, he can argue that the first marriage was never properly recorded, and that this”—he tapped the paper—“is the true record. Your marriage to Roderick would become a bigamous sham.”

The cold of the paper seeped through Cordelia’s glove. She looked at the date again. Three weeks. They had three weeks before Hugh’s forged ceremony was meant to occur. And Sir Hugh was alive, somewhere east, plotting with a woman whose name he had never even given her.

“We have to find him,” she said.

“No.” Roderick’s voice was hard. “You are not going near that man again.”

“He is coming for me either way. He will not stop. He did not stop when he buried my father, when he imprisoned my brother, when he tried to kill us both.” Cordelia lifted her chin. “We do not have the luxury of running. We have the luxury of choosing where we meet him.”

Benedict looked between them. “There is something else. Something I did not say on the road, because I was not certain I could trust my own memory.”

Roderick’s hand found Cordelia’s again. She held on tight.

“In the prison,” Benedict said, “they did not simply hold me. They questioned me. Not about Hugh’s plans—I knew nothing of those. They asked me about the Ashworth family archive. About documents that my grandmother might have kept. About letters that had been burned.” He paused. “They had a list, Cordelia. A list of names. Every woman in our line who had used the charm on a husband, and what became of them.”

Cordelia felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wind. “Grandmother said the curse was a lie.”

“Perhaps it was,” Benedict said. “But the list was real. And at the bottom, in a different hand, was a name I did not recognize. *Sarah Coverdale.*” He looked at her. “Hugh has been writing to her. For years. Telling her she was the true heir, that the Ashworth magic belonged to her by blood, and that he would help her take it back.”

“She is eleven.” Cordelia’s voice cracked. “He has been poisoning a child for years.”

“He has been preparing a weapon,” Roderick said quietly. “He does not need to marry you to take the estate if he can raise Sarah as the legitimate Ashworth heir and control her through her mother.”

The street seemed quieter than it had been a moment before. Cordelia could hear her own heartbeat. She thought of the brooch she had worn at her throat since her mother’s death, the emerald that had glowed with a warmth no one could explain. Old Meg had called it cursed. Cordelia had never believed that. She had never known why she believed otherwise.

She reached up and touched it now. It was cool, steady beneath her fingers.

“He does not want me for my name,” she said. “He wants me for my magic. The returning magic. He knows it is coming back, and he knows the house will rally to a true Ashworth witch when they see it bloom again.” She looked at Roderick. “And if he cannot have me as a wife, he will have me as a corpse. And raise Sarah to take my place.”

Roderick’s jaw tightened. “Then we hunt him. Not you—we. And we end this before he can reach that parish registrar.”

Cordelia squeezed his hand. “We will need the brooch.”

Benedict frowned. “The brooch?”

“Old Meg called it cursed.” Cordelia smiled, but there was nothing warm in it. “But I think she was wrong. I think it was never cursed at all. My mother gave it to me the night before she died, and she made me promise to wear it always. She knew what Hugh was capable of before any of us did. And she gave me the one thing he could never use against me.”

She lifted the brooch from her collar. The emerald caught the grey light and for a moment—just a moment—seemed to pulse, warm and alive.

“He thinks he knows every trick of Ashworth magic,” she said. “But he never knew my mother. And he never knew this.”