Before Three Hundred Guests, the Duke Declared His Marriage Over, Certain His Wife Would Beg Him to Stay — She Placed Her Ring Beside His Glass, Bowed, and Thanked Him for Letting Her Serve His Family

PART 5

The first week after Eleanor left, Sebastian Wickliffe ran Ravenshire the way he had always believed he ran it. With authority. With precision. With the assumption that the estate would continue to function because he commanded it to.

By the second week, he understood he had been wrong.

It began with the school. Not Eleanor’s school in Kingsford — the village school attached to the Ravenshire estate, the one that educated the children of tenant families. It had been operating for six years. Sebastian had approved the initial budget, signed the deed, and considered the matter concluded.

The schoolmaster, a thin anxious man named Mr. Garvey, appeared at the manor door on a Tuesday morning with his hat in his hands.

“Your grace. I wished to inquire about the quarterly allocation.”

“The allocation is managed by my steward. Speak with Hadley.”

“I did, your grace. Mr. Hadley informed me that Lady Eleanor managed the school account directly, and that he does not have the allocation details in his records. The ledger her grace maintained is not on the estate premises.”

The personal documents Eleanor had taken with her the night she left.

Sebastian sent for Hadley.

“How much does the school require quarterly?”

“I do not know the full figure, your grace. Lady Eleanor negotiated the supplier contracts for the school books, the paper, the heating coal, and the teacher’s supplementary salary.” A beat. “The last of which was drawn from a separate fund she maintained herself.”

“Get me everything you have. Everything that touches her name.”

Hadley brought a stack of documents the width of Sebastian’s forearm. Sebastian read for five hours.

What he found was not chaos. Eleanor had not left chaos behind when she left. She had left order — the order of a woman who had known she might not always be there, and had built the systems to outlast her presence.

She had negotiated with the local physician for a rate the tenant families could afford. She had arranged with three local merchants to extend credit to Ravenshire families through difficult harvest years. She had personally corresponded with the county school board to ensure Ravenshire’s village school was recognized as meeting national education standards — a distinction that had protected the school from a county reorganization which closed four comparable schools the previous year.

She had done all of it with no instruction from him, no authorization, no acknowledgement.

“Hadley,” he said, not looking up. “How many people in this county know who actually ran this estate?”

Hadley was quiet for exactly the wrong length of time.

“I see,” Sebastian said.

“That was not a criticism of you, your grace.”

“She never told anyone I did not know.”

“No, your grace. She was very careful about that.”

Sebastian thought about what that had cost her. Not the work — the silence. The choice, every day, to do the work and accept no credit for it.

He walked to the window. The grounds stretched in every direction, tidy and well-maintained — the result of careful management by people who had worked for Eleanor as much as for him.

He had moved through his own life like a man walking through a building he had never looked at.

The letter arrived three days later. From Percival.

Sebastian — I am writing because I consider you my oldest friend and I find I cannot remain silent. Lady Constance informs me that several members of our circle have received correspondence from Lady Victoria Harkort in the past month, describing your separation in terms that present Eleanor as emotionally withdrawn and socially negligent, and you as having made a regrettable but necessary decision. The correspondence does not mention Victoria’s own role in advising you toward that decision. I thought you should know the story is being told without your participation. And I thought you should know who is telling it. — P.

Sebastian read it twice. He put it down. He had been carrying Eleanor’s telegram reply in his coat pocket for three weeks, transferring it each morning with the absent mechanical habit of a man who does not examine what he is doing or why. He smoothed it flat on the desk beside Percival’s letter.

She decided what she wanted and she arranged the conditions and she left you thinking it was your own decision.

He had believed the decision was his. He had believed the unhappiness was his. He had believed Eleanor’s quietness was Eleanor’s failure, and his restlessness was Eleanor’s fault, and the distance between them was a problem Eleanor had created.

Not once had he seriously asked himself: What if I am wrong?

He had been managed — slowly, skilfully, by a woman who understood exactly what his pride required and had fed it to him like a prescription. And he had never noticed, because he had been too occupied with his own certainty to notice anything at all.

He pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward him, and he began to write.