The Duke Signed Her Out of the Contract — She Signed Herself Into a Better One

Susannah Frayne has twenty-six years, nine of them at the same north-facing bench, a bond in four hundred pounds signed in her own hand at twenty-four, and one thing in the world that belongs to her: a way of holding a gold pink still through the glost heat. The place is Culverton in the Staffordshire potteries, where the bottle ovens smoke on Sundays and a woman's name goes on nothing. What Susannah does not anticipate, on Lady Day 1818, is that the Duke of Ellingham will look at the tenth firing of a rose she has failed at nine times, turn the cup over to read the mark, and find there is none. He buys her bond off her master before dinner. Four hundred pounds, eleven minutes, no question asked of her at all — and he cannot understand why she does not thank him. Seven years earlier he was Lord Nicholas Carrow, who published eleven pages on the enamel colours got from gold and was wrong about the whole of it, and she has been arguing with him in the margins of a borrowed volume every winter since. She walks out of the gate and signs herself into a fifteen-year partnership before sundown. What follows is not a courtship. It is an order for four hundred pieces with a clause that lets him refuse the lot, a building lease of 1779 with no covenant for renewal, a hundred and seventy-three plates crazed in a single oven, a bill in Chancery, her own rose on a market stall under another town's name, and a duke with a shovel at three in the morning. And underneath it, the question she will not put to him until September: whether a man who is right every time and asks nothing is a friend to anybody, or only weather. ❤️ Subscribe for a new love story every week: @RegentLoveEra 🔔 Turn on notifications so you never miss an episode. 💬 Would you have made the same choice? Tell us in the comments. ✨ Stories about love, family honour, hidden sacrifices, and the quiet battles behind powerful surnames. 📖 Every story, 4K art, on any screen at https://www.embersidestories.com🕯️ ——— ⚠️ DISCLAIMER: All characters, names, events, and storylines in this video are entirely fictional and created for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This is a work of historical fiction set during the Regency Era (c. 1795–1830) in England. #RegencyEra #RomanceStory #Duke #HistoricalFiction #LoveStory #Regency #PeriodDrama #romantic