She Was Sent to the Iron Duke as His Arranged Bride, Terrified and Knowing Nothing About Marriage — But When He Realized She Was Still a Virgin, What He Did That Wedding Night Changed Everything Between Them

PART 1

Eleanor Ashworth had run a bankrupt household since she was sixteen, and she had never once been frightened by a column of figures. She was frightened now, and it took her most of that afternoon to understand that the two things were not the same.

Her father would not turn around. That was the detail she carried out of that room and kept for the rest of her life — not the words, which were ordinary enough, but that Edmund Ashworth stood at his own study window with his back to his daughter and told her she was going to be a duchess, and could not make himself face her while he did it.

“The settlements are agreed,” he said. “It will be announced in the spring. He has asked for you particularly.”

“He has never spoken to me, Papa.”

“He has asked for you particularly,” her father said again, as though repetition were a kind of proof. “You will be Duchess of Vale. You will save this family. I do not think there is anything else that wants saying.”

He crossed to the desk, opened a small velvet box, and set it between them. Inside was a diamond ring Eleanor had never seen. “His mother’s,” he said. “You have four minutes, if you require them.”

Eleanor was four-and-twenty. She knew the state of that family better than the man at the window did, because she was the one who had kept it upright. She knew the farms had gone the year her mother died. She knew about the canal shares, the four years of unpaid interest, the two servants let go at Michaelmas and the two more who would have to follow before Christmas. She knew, because she wrote the letters herself, that nine tradesmen in the town were owed money, and that four of them had stopped even asking, which was worse than being asked. She had four younger brothers and sisters, the eldest not yet twenty.

The mantel clock ticked through all four minutes. Eleanor looked once at the ring, once at her father’s back, and understood that the time was not really hers.

“Yes, Papa,” she said, closed her hand around the ring, and went upstairs, and sat on the edge of her bed for a quarter of an hour. Then she came back down and did the household books, because it was Tuesday, and the books were always Tuesday.

What she did not know — and this was the whole of the trouble, though it would take her the better part of a year to understand it properly — was that her father had lied about the one part that mattered. Adrian Vale had not asked for her particularly. He had not asked for anybody. He had told his lawyers in the spring that he intended to marry, told his mother she might make the arrangements, and signed whatever was placed in front of him without reading past the seal. The name on the page might have been any of four young women that season. Eleanor Ashworth had simply been at the top of the pile — because her father had made certain of it, calling in every acquaintance he had left, trading what remained of his good name for the privilege of being noticed by a duke who was not, in fact, choosing anyone at all.

She was told he had chosen her. It made the whole arrangement bearable, and she carried that single fact into her engagement like a coin held tight in a closed fist. It was not true, and she would not learn that it wasn’t for months.

The Duke of Vale had been called the Iron Duke since he was six-and-twenty, and had never once discovered who started it. He had inherited the title at four-and-twenty — a brother of nine-and-twenty perfectly well in March and dead by June — and had walked, at an hour’s notice, from being the spare into a room with four lawyers and ninety servants and no earthly notion what to do with any of it. He had learned by refusing to be bad at it, and had done the learning quietly enough that no one in London had ever seen him do it. Eight years of that will make a man cold, or make him look it, and by two-and-thirty Adrian Vale could no longer have told anyone which had actually happened to him.

His mother had been putting young women in front of him since the second year of his dukedom — fourteen of them, by his own count, at dinners arranged with such transparent care that he had eventually begun to feel sorry for the women themselves. He refused every one, and gave no reason, because the reason was not one he could say aloud in that house. He had watched his brother Henry marry a girl chosen at just such a dinner, and had watched the two of them be perfectly civil to each other for three years — not unkind, simply two people making the best of a house they had been placed in together, and going on making the best of it. There had been a particular way Henry’s wife said, “Of course, my dear,” that Adrian had heard perhaps four hundred times and had never gotten out of his head. She had gone home to her own family within a year of Henry’s death, and remarried inside of four, and Adrian had been glad of it, and had told no one that either.

What finally moved him was a clause. His lawyers had put it in front of him that spring — a provision in his father’s old settlement, eight years unread, stating that if Adrian died without a son, a substantial part of the Vale property passed sideways to a cousin’s line in Northumberland. It was not a scandal. It was not a plot. It was the ordinary work of careful men in another generation, and it meant that a duke of two-and-thirty could no longer treat marriage as a thing he might get around to eventually. He read the clause twice, sat with it an hour, and sent for his mother.

“You may make the arrangements,” he told her. That was the whole of it. He never once pretended otherwise afterward — not to anyone, and least of all to Eleanor. It was very nearly the first true thing he ever said to her.

They met once before the wedding, on a Thursday, for perhaps twenty minutes, with four other people arranged around the room like witnesses to a transaction. Eleanor had built him a great deal in the six weeks since her father’s study — a cold man, an impatient man, a man who would look at her once and be visibly disappointed. She had rehearsed responses for nine different versions of him.

What she found, when the doors opened, was a man standing alone at a library window with a letter forgotten in his hand, who had plainly lost track of the hour and forgotten they were coming at all.

He set the letter down. “Lady Eleanor. Your grace.”

Neither of them said anything more for four full seconds. Eleanor watched a man of two-and-thirty run entirely out of conversation in his own library, and understood, with a small shock that reorganized everything she had prepared, that he was every bit as unequal to this room as she was.

“I am going to say something,” he said at last, “and I have been trying since Monday to find a graceful way of putting it, and there is not one. So I shall simply say it, and you may think of me what you like. I will not pretend this marriage was either of our first choices.”

“Your grace.” She held his gaze. “I want to say — because I think you will have heard a great many things about me, and half of them will be that I am difficult — that I am aware you have been given rather less choice in this than I have, and I am not going to insult you by suggesting otherwise.”

He looked at her properly for the first time.

“May I ask you something?” she said.

“You may ask me anything.”

“Did you choose me?”

He opened his mouth to answer. Beside her, the aunt brought along for the purpose said, in a bright, indulgent voice, “My dear — what a question,” and the room laughed, low and easy, and the moment slid past and was gone.

He did not answer it.

Eleanor went home that afternoon and turned the unfinished question over for the better part of a week, and then put it away, because there was nothing whatever she could do with it, and because a woman being married in nine weeks could not afford to sit up at night with a thing like that.

She thought of it again on her wedding night, in a house she had never seen, in a room where nobody had told her one single thing about what was going to happen to her — and where the man walking toward that door already knew, better than she did, exactly how much silence he was about to walk into.