She Was Married to the Beast of Wraxholm Sight Unseen — Behind the Frozen Glass, It Was Summer

She Was Married to the Beast of Wraxholm Sight Unseen — Behind the Frozen Glass, It Was Summer Frances Wren was the plain one, the poor relation, the orphaned daughter of a gentle ruined plantsman, kept in her rich aunt's grand cold house at the price of her keep and valued at not a farthing more. So when the recluse Duke of Wraxholm — the man the whole north called the Beast, scarred years before in an accident on the ice and never since seen beyond his own park, who would not carry his marked face through a single ballroom to be refused again — offered a great settlement for a wife chosen entirely sight unseen, contracted by article and sent north to be wed to a husband she had never once laid eyes on, Frances's aunt accepted within the hour and never troubled to ask the girl. Frances asked for one thing only before she would consent, and it was not money: her late father's whole garden and library, saved from the auctioneer's hammer on the very morning of the sale, and carried north with her to the coldest house in England. But Frances Wren read the marriage articles line by line before she signed them, the way she read everything the rest of the world threw away — the Latin on a plant-label, the hand on an old letter, the truth in a face that would not meet hers. And at Wraxholm, braced for a monster, she found instead a silent house where the fires were lit and screened before she woke, where a small camellia stood impossibly in full bloom on her table in the depth of winter, and where — at the frozen heart of a house the county swore kept a dead garden under glass as a monument to its master's spite — she walked into the great glasshouse expecting death and found the warmest, greenest, most living room in the north, high summer behind the frost, kept burning at real cost for twenty winters; and there, on a faded label in a hand she would have known anywhere, her own late father's name. She found a gruff, scarred, meticulous man who wore a glove over his marked hand and asked nothing of her, kept the whole of summer alive for no one, and — on the black night a young couple went through the ice on the mere — rode out and went onto the breaking ice himself while the county watched the Beast they feared carry two of their own back to the bank with his own bare hands. And the truth he finally told her, half-frozen, by the light of the one lamp she would let burn, turned everything she believed about her husband, his ruined name, and the beautiful girl who was said to have fled his face exactly upside down. The wound was never where the county thought it was. Neither was the beauty. Neither was the monster. And when her family came back — a year on, the ducal connection slow to pay, an attorney in the chaise beside them — to trade on the marriage, to threaten scandal, to sell her a second time, it was not the Duke who ended them. It was the clauses Frances herself had thought to require before ever she came north, and one small sealed packet of letters twenty years old, and a choice she laid quietly on the tea-table and left to the person across it. What she did with the truth she found behind the glass — the truth that could have ruined the woman who wronged her husband, and shamed the family that valued her at nothing, in a single afternoon — is the part of this story worth staying to the very end for. Beneath His Scars — Regency tales of ruined Dukes and unwanted brides who find the man behind the monster. Thank you for listening to the story all the way to the end. Please tell us which city you are watching from, and what this story made you feel. And if it moved you, consider subscribing softly, so you won't miss the next one. #BeneathHisScars #Regency #RegencyRomance #period #truestory #audiostory