The Slave of Silence

Beatrice Darryll stands in black at her own wedding dinner, mourning not a death but something worse: the death of herself. She is selling herself to Stephen Richford, a wealthy man she despises, to save her scandalized family. Her father Sir Charles, humiliated by some undisclosed disgrace, has orchestrated this transaction with cold calculation. Beatrice wears her grief like funeral attire, knowing she surrenders everything, her love for Mark Ventmore, her youth, her very soul. Yet what choice does a woman have when reputation means survival? This is a novel about the violence of silence, the things women swallow to keep households standing, and the price of duty when duty is weaponized against you. Fred M. White writes with sharp melodrama about an Edwardian woman's captivity within the very family she was raised to protect.