My Husband Tried to Kill Me for His Mistress

Conrad moved before I could stop him.

He strode through the iron gates, his boots crunching over frost-hardened gravel, and seized Sarai by the shoulders. The crowd inhaled as one. I watched his fingers dig into the silk of her gown, watched him haul her to her feet with a roughness that made several women gasp.

"You are carrying my child," he said, his voice pitched to carry across the courtyard, across the two hundred witnesses who would repeat this moment in every drawing room from here to the capital. "I will not abandon you. I will not let them cast you aside like refuse."

The words landed like cannon fire.

I felt the shift in the air—the way shock curdled into something darker, something that smelled of scandal and ruin. Beside me, Lady Catherine's grip on my arm tightened fractionally. A warning. Or perhaps permission.

I let my knees buckle.

The collapse was an art form. I had practiced it in the privacy of my chambers, timing the sway, the flutter of eyelids, the way my hand would reach instinctively for support that wasn't there. My body folded with the grace of white silk slipping from a table, and I heard the collective cry of alarm as I crumpled onto the frost-slicked stone.

Hands caught me before I hit the ground—Lady Catherine's, steady and sure, and a dozen others rushing forward in a flurry of velvet and concern. Through my half-closed lids, I saw Conrad freeze mid-step, his face draining of what little color remained. Sarai stood abandoned at the gates, her mouth open in a silent scream of betrayal.

"The Marchioness!" someone cried. "Fetch the physician!"

"Give her air—"

"The shock—in her condition—"

I let them lift me, let my head loll against Lady Catherine's shoulder as she knelt beside me. Her fingers found my wrist, a theatrical check of my pulse, and when she spoke, her voice cut through the chaos like a blade through silk.

"How dare you." She was not looking at me. She was looking at Conrad, and her tone could have frozen the Thames. "How dare you subject the First Lady of the Realm—a woman heavy with child, honored by the Queen herself—to this... this spectacle."

Conrad opened his mouth. No sound emerged.

Lady Catherine rose, still cradling my shoulders, and turned her gaze to Sarai. The crowd parted instinctively, creating a clear line of sight between the two women. When Catherine spoke again, her voice carried to every corner of the courtyard, cold and precise as a coroner's report.

"Sarai Chapman." She let the name hang in the air, watching it curdle. "Daughter of Lord Edmund Chapman. Executed for high treason against the Crown seven years past. His estates seized, his title stripped, his name struck from every record of nobility."

The silence that followed was absolute.

I felt it ripple outward—the recognition, the horror, the sudden, visceral understanding of what Conrad had just publicly aligned himself with. Not merely adultery. Not merely a bastard child. But the tainted bloodline of a traitor, a man whose head had rotted on a spike above the city gates as a warning to anyone who would betray the realm.

Sarai's face went white as bone. "No," she whispered, but the word was lost beneath the rising murmur of the crowd, the way bodies shifted backward, creating distance, as though treason were a contagion that could spread through proximity alone.

"My lady," Lady Catherine said, her voice softening as she looked down at me, "let us get you inside. You have endured quite enough."

I let my eyes flutter open, let them see the tears gathering on my lashes—real tears, born not of sorrow but of the sheer, vicious satisfaction burning in my chest. I reached up with a trembling hand and touched Catherine's cheek.

"Forgive me," I whispered, my voice breaking beautifully. "I did not mean to cause a scene."

The crowd melted.

I was carried inside on a tide of sympathy and outrage, leaving Conrad standing alone in the courtyard with his pregnant mistress and the smoking ruins of his reputation. Through the closing doors, I heard Sarai begin to sob—great, heaving sounds that echoed off the stone walls.

I did not look back.

---

The study door slammed with enough force to rattle the decanters on the sideboard. I heard it from my chambers above, heard Conrad's boots on the stairs, the low, vicious hiss of his voice as he dragged Sarai inside.

Margaret stood at my window, her face pressed to the glass, watching the last of the guests flee into the winter night like rats from a sinking ship. She turned to me, her eyes wide.

"My lady, should I—"

"No." I sat in the chair by the fire, my hands folded over my belly, feeling my son kick against my palms. "Let them finish it."

The sounds that came from below were muffled but unmistakable. Sarai's voice, rising in panic. The crash of something heavy—a chair, perhaps, or a table overturned. Then Conrad's voice, low and brutal, the words indistinct but the tone clear as a death knell.

Then screaming.

It went on for a long time. Long enough for the fire to burn down to embers. Long enough for Margaret to press her hands over her ears and turn away from the door. Long enough for me to close my eyes and remember the taste of poison on my own tongue, the way my body had convulsed as the life drained out of me in that other life, that other death.

When the screaming finally stopped, the silence was worse.

I rose and walked to the window. Below, in the courtyard, I saw Conrad emerge from the side entrance. He moved like a man underwater, his steps slow and unsteady. His hands were shaking. He did not look up.

Behind him, the study door remained closed.

I rested my forehead against the cold glass and felt my son turn inside me, restless and strong. "Soon," I whispered to him, to myself, to the ghost of the woman I had been. "Soon, you will be safe. And they will have nothing."

In the morning, the physician would confirm it: Sarai Chapman had lost the child. A tragic miscarriage, brought on by shock and hysteria. The tincture Conrad had forced down her throat would leave no trace.

I had not lifted a finger.

I had simply let them destroy each other, exactly as I knew they would.