Trapped in Their Manor, Twin Dukes Keep Me Captive

Chapter 9:The True-Blooded Bride

The two heirs presiding over the Haiges household of this generation bore the names Ian William Haiges and Elvis William Haiges. Most vital of all, Elvis William Haiges was the elder twin brother.

Old David had told me the elder Lord Elvis was nothing like Ian, that sadistic fiend who delighted in inflicting torment. A fragile spark of hope flickered to life within Eleanor’s battered heart as she pondered his words. If Elvis learned of all the brutal humiliations and agony she had endured, would he step in to curb his brother’s madness? To reduce a fellow noble to the station of a mere slave, merely for trespassing upon his lands out of desperate straits—such a scandalous, unthinkable act would utterly ruin the Haiges family’s noble reputation once word spread across the realm.

I no longer dared to dream of being treated with the dignity owed to my station. All I craved now was to flee far, far away from Ian William Haiges, that deranged monster. I would surrender every last asset I owned, pay any price whatsoever, if only it bought my escape.

For several days running, Ian William Haiges did not set foot in my wing.

Word had come that bears had been spotted deep in the northern forests, beasts that had already attacked livestock and villagers—a rare peril for Kolleck Manor. The count, ever eager for sport, had seized the chance and ridden off at once with his troop of marksmen and a retinue of attendants to hunt the brown bears.

Ian’s presence had loomed over me like an oppressive, suffocating shadow every waking hour. Learning he had departed Kolleck Manor lifted a crushing weight from my chest, akin to a prisoner granted a fleeting reprieve from their cell. Though his servants still lingered throughout the estate, every muscle in my body unwound with unguarded relief.

As soon as my wounds knit together enough to let me move without crippling spasms, I sought out Steward David without delay, begging him to assign me labour far from the main house. I offered to work alongside foremen and slaves digging irrigation trenches, or patrol the woodlands with the gamekeepers—anything, so long as it put as much distance as possible between myself and any place Ian Haiges might wander.

Old David’s brow creased with deep misgivings.

“The labour set for slaves is backbreaking work, far too harsh for your injured frame. Worse still, if the count returns unexpectedly and demands to see you…”

I needed no further elaboration to grasp his unspoken fear. The mere thought of Ian seizing upon this as another excuse to torture me sent cold shudders crawling down my spine.

In the end, Old David settled upon a lighter duty for me: overseeing the cleaning of eleven designated chambers within the manor’s right wing.

“These rooms are prepared in advance for Lord Elvis’s visits. He has only come once before, so the workload will be light. This wing sits a great distance from my master’s private quarters; he rarely ventures over here.”

The suite of chambers covered a sprawling layout: two interconnected sitting rooms linked by a narrow side door, one grand reception parlour and one smaller intimate salon, a private oratory, a study partitioned into outer and inner chambers, a dining hall, a dressing room lined with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and an art studio sparsely hung with landscape canvases. There stood a cabinet chamber housing Claudion woodcuts, Pateaux ceramic paintings, and Dürer engravings, alongside an empty exhibition gallery. Even a lady’s morning toilet chamber belonged to the lot—though it had clearly lain untouched for years. Aside from an ornate sculpted stone hearth, a carved vanity table and its cabriole-legged stool, not a trace of powder, rouge or perfume lingered within its walls.

While technically tasked with tending to all these rooms, two maids and two footmen were already assigned their regular upkeep. My true duty amounted only to supervising them, ensuring they did not grow lazy and overlook minute details simply because Lord Elvis rarely occupied the wing.

To avoid drawing watchful, scheming eyes from the count’s personal retinue, Old David ordered me to rise at five each dawn alongside the rest of the servants. Though this land lay thousands of miles from my European homeland, all nobility kept the same leisurely schedule, rising no earlier than eleven o’clock. The count’s favoured attendants, whose sole purpose was to amuse him, did not appear until half past ten. By starting my work so early, my hours would never overlap with theirs. Should anyone seek to manufacture trouble, Old David could easily defend his arrangement by pointing out I laboured alongside common servants. After all, no peer of noble blood would ever be forced to rise before sunrise for menial labour.

Before long, Old David found an even kinder task for me: sorting the volumes lining Lord Elvis’s study shelves. None of the manor’s staff could decipher the foreign script printed on the book spines; the maids could only stack them haphazardly by thickness when tidying.

This task felt like a sanctuary, a slice of paradise amid my endless torment.

Lord Elvis’s study housed two full towering bookcases crammed with texts, most printed in French and English, alongside volumes in Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. The thickest tome was heavy enough to serve as a pillow.

The French and English collections leaned heavily into travelogues and noble genealogies, interspersed with period newspapers dated mostly within the past two years. I suspected the lord ordered multiple copies delivered, placing one at every manor he might visit. Kolleck, remote and far from the main family estate, received far slower updates; the newest journal I found was over a month old.

I would hide away in Lord Elvis’s study, losing myself within the French prose that had once bored me to tears, and steal small, fleeting moments of lighthearted banter with Annie, the prettiest maid among the staff, to grasp whatever trivial joy I could scrape together. Meanwhile, torrential downpours persisted for days on end, blocking the hunting party’s path home. They had holed up in a hunting lodge on the forest’s edge, indulging in days of unbroken revelry.

Whispers spread among Kolleck’s maids that the heavy rains might force the count to linger longer at the estate. No lord had resided here for an extended stretch in decades, not since the previous count’s lifetime.

In truth, these poor young women had grown up trapped in this remote corner of the world. They had never witnessed true noble opulence, nor possessed the coin to adorn themselves finely. When the count’s glamorous female attendants arrived, the maids’ modest beauty dimmed like fireflies beside the blazing sun.

Women never yielded gracefully in matters of appearance. They gazed at the elegant retinue with undisguised envy, silently comparing themselves to the ladies-in-waiting. They convinced themselves that, save for Béatrice—whose beauty they could never hope to rival—the loveliest girls of Kolleck matched the haughty attendants step for step, lacking only exquisite gowns and a skilled stylist to unlock their full charm.

Annie was the boldest of the group, the one who turned quiet longing into active plotting, her ambition plain for all to see. Once I stumbled upon her alone, practising the delicate lilt and cadence of one of the count’s favoured ladies-in-waiting. When she spotted me, she did not flee in shame. Instead, she switched to mimicking another attendant’s tone and repeated the lines, then turned to me with a curious glint in her eye.

“Which do you think the count prefers—the first voice, or the second?”

Bound by a quiet shared resentment toward the count’s inner circle, Annie regarded me as a mentor who could guide her across the invisible divide separating the village maids from his elite attendants. Her trust was well-placed; having once mingled with countless beautiful noblewomen and court beauties, I knew well how to polish an unremarkable gem into a dazzling treasure, given the right methods.

Only one barrier stood in her path: her birth. Annie was of mixed English and Scottish blood, and her father had been sold into s*****y for theft. I feared this unchangeable fact would render all her efforts futile.

“The count bears a clear hatred for all things English. If not for that prejudice, I would be settled in New Jersey instead of trapped here. Should he learn of your English lineage, your hopes will vanish entirely.”

Annie remained brimming with unshakable confidence.

“I cannot speak to his feelings toward English men, but he certainly admires English women’s beauty. Have you met Christine?”

I knew her well—the third-tier lady-in-waiting who once left me exposed to bitter cold wind. She had not accompanied the count on this bear hunt, and her presence was one of the reasons Old David had stowed me away in Lord Elvis’s right wing; this was the one corner of the estate her clique dared not trespass freely.

“She is English, and she crossed the ocean as one of the European mail-order brides.”

The revelation stunned me utterly.

“Merciful God—she was a mail bride?”

Seeing my shock, Annie grinned triumphantly, as though she had checkmated me in a game of chess.

“I knew you would not know. I pried the story out of the junior footmen. Word travels that another ship will arrive soon, bringing a second English mail bride to the count’s household. That proves my point—he holds no disdain for English ladies. Besides, half my blood is Spanish.”

“I see,” I ground out quietly, a surge of pity swelling in my heart for the unnamed English gentlewoman soon to sail across the ocean into Ian’s clutches. “It seems his hatred extends only to English men.”

A critical clarification must be made here: mail-order brides were by no means victims of human trafficking. Anyone who equated European mail brides with abducted, traded slaves gravely misunderstood their standing.

The practice of European mail brides rose directly from the growing traffic between the Old and New Worlds. For generations, far more men than women had migrated to the new continent. Established great noble families could maintain ties with aristocratic lineages back in Europe to secure proper marriages, yet newly risen minor lords and landowners faced a dire shortage of well-bred, devout young ladies of matching station to wed. This shortage forced countless lesser nobles to delay marriage well into middle age.

Across the sea, especially in England, many young gentlewomen raised to the strict standards of ladylike conduct and religious piety remained unmarried, unable to secure matches with gentlemen of equal rank due to insufficient dowries.