The Duke Wed a Veiled Stranger for Her Dowry—His Mother Pointed Him to the Girl Scrubbing the Hall

The house lined up in the great hall of Harrowby to welcome the Duke home from Vienna, and his mother waited until the footmen took his coat. Then she pointed at the girl on her knees by the fireplace, brush in hand. "There is your wife, Kester. The hod-carrier's daughter. She keeps the floor her dowry paid for." Twenty servants heard it, and so did the wife he'd wed behind a veil he never lifted. Kester looked at her cracked hands and said only, "Then she has found her level," and walked past her to dinner, where his mother's chosen bride sat in the duchess's chair. Below stairs Marian scrubbed his bootprints from the marble alone. She knows that floor better than anyone alive, and dust keeps drifting from the gallery above it, a line her builder father taught her to read. His mother calls her a joke. The valet wonders if the joke is on the Duke. How long can a man refuse his own wife? A Regency story about a duke who never lifted his bride's veil and the mother who set her to scrub his floors. This is original fiction: every person in it is invented and a grown adult. Subscribe to The Overlooked Duchess for more Regency stories.