Lady Tremaine let most of the staff go as her husband had demanded, except for Nanny and Rebecca, whom he reluctantly agreed to let stay on. She had lost everything. Her home in London, all her money, and her dignity now belonged to him. She had written to her old solicitor at the behest of Lady Hackle, but there was nothing Lady Tremaine could do about her circumstances. All her money was now her husband’s, as was the law in the Many Kingdoms: upon marriage all assets are controlled by the woman’s husband or father, unless both are deceased. Lady Tremaine had known this going into the marriage. It wasn’t, after all, very different from how things worked in London, and she hadn’t been worried about it at the time. Based on his rank, she had assumed Sir Richard had more money than she did. But she soon found out she couldn’t have been more wrong.

Her solicitor had done some investigating and found that before his marriage to Lady Tremaine, Sir Richard had been penniless and in desperate need to marry a lady of means to keep his estate. He had been in considerable debt to the Crown and used the majority of Lady Tremaine’s fortune to pay it off. She understood now why he was so furious she had hired such a large staff and assumed that his debt was the “court business” he had rushed off to sort out, though as far as she was concerned it didn’t account for the amount of time he was away. She had asked him several times what he had done while he was at the castle, but he had skirted the subject, saying it was a matter for men and that she should stay in her place as lady of the house.

She soon found herself miserable, alone, and depressed. She collapsed on her bed at the end of each day, too tired to even spend time with her girls. Frankly, she was ashamed to have them see her in such a state. Her only companion was her kitten, Lucifer, who was always at her side—that is, when he wasn’t hunting the mice that Cinderella tried to bring into her foul menagerie. There was nothing she could do about the mice Cinderella already kept, Sir Richard made that abundantly clear, but she was determined to keep the girl from acquiring more.