He was the most disciplined man in England, until his own wife whispered four words that shattered him entirely: “I can’t take it.” What she meant, and what he heard, were not the same thing at all.

PART 5

Alexander went very still.

For a moment he said nothing at all, and Eleanor watched with a rising, sick dread the particular stillness come over his features that she had learned to associate with letters from London that displeased him, or memories of his father he did not care to share. She had thought, in that first confused instant after the words left her, that perhaps he would laugh — would take her protest as the teasing it might have been from a more confident wife, one secure enough in her own desirability to voice a complaint without fearing it would be read as rejection entire.

He did not laugh.

“I see,” he said, and the two words carried a weight that made her chest ache. He stepped back from her, and the loss of his warmth felt, in that moment, like something far larger than the simple absence of physical contact. “Forgive me. I had not realized I had become such a burden to you.”

“That is not what I meant.”

“Is it not?” His voice remained controlled — terribly controlled, in the way she had learned meant he was working very hard to keep some larger feeling contained. “You have made your meaning tolerably clear, Eleanor. I have asked too much of you, and you have borne it in silence rather than tell me so, which I confess I find rather more wounding than the complaint itself would have been.”

“Alexander, please —”

“I will bid you good night.”

He was already moving toward the connecting door, and something in the deliberate, careful way he held himself — shoulders set with the discipline that had made him a legend throughout London society — told her he was holding back a great deal more than his measured words suggested.

“You need not fear any further imposition tonight,” he said. “Or, I think, for some time to come.”

The door closed behind him with a quiet, final click that somehow felt louder than if he had slammed it.

Eleanor sat alone in the sudden silence of her chamber for a long while, the pearl combs still scattered across her dressing table, her own reflection staring back at her with an expression of such raw distress she barely recognized it as her own face. She had wanted, more than anything in the world, to run after him — to explain what she had failed to explain clearly enough the first time, that her exhaustion was not a rejection of him, that she wanted him as much as she had ever wanted anything, that what she needed was not less of his desire but simply, occasionally, the permission to say when she required rest without fearing it would be read as the end of something precious between them.

But six weeks of careful upbringing, of lessons in a wife’s proper deference, of watching her own mother absorb every demand her father made without complaint, held her fixed in her chair long enough for the moment to pass. She went to bed that night alone for the first time since her wedding, and slept fitfully, and woke the next morning to find her husband already gone from the house before breakfast — his absence more eloquent than any words could have been.

The days that followed were the coldest of their brief marriage. Alexander remained scrupulously polite, scrupulously correct, and entirely, devastatingly distant — conducting himself with his wife exactly as he might have conducted himself with any other lady of his acquaintance. He no longer sought her out in the conservatory. He no longer appeared at the connecting door. He took to dining later, after she had already retired — a small cruelty she did not think he intended as cruelty at all, only as a wounded man’s instinct to withdraw from whatever had caused him pain.

Eleanor bore it as long as she could, telling herself each day the distance would ease, that some natural warmth would reassert itself once the sting of her poorly chosen words had faded. It did not ease. If anything it deepened, and with it deepened her own private conviction that she had done exactly what she had feared from the very beginning of their marriage — proven herself unequal to the whole of what her husband was, and driven him, through her own inadequacy, into a courteous, permanent distance from which she did not know how to recall him.

She took to walking the gardens alone in the mornings, the one hour of the day she could be reasonably certain of privacy, and turned the whole miserable business over in her mind without ever quite arriving at a solution she had the courage to attempt. A dozen times she resolved to seek him out in his study and say plainly what she had failed to say plainly that first terrible night. A dozen times her resolve failed her at the study door, turned back by the memory of his controlled, wounded voice.

Mrs. Pruitt found her one such morning seated on a stone bench at the garden’s edge, staring at nothing in particular.

“You will forgive an old woman’s plain speaking, my lady,” she said, settling herself uninvited beside her mistress. “But grief kept silent rarely mends itself. I have watched his grace’s family longer than most, and I can tell you the Ashford men have a particular flaw, passed down father to son as surely as the title itself. They mistake wounded pride for indifference, and will nurse an injury in silence rather than risk asking after its cause. His own father did the same with his mother more than once, and it very nearly cost them the whole of their happiness before they found their way clear of it.”

“What did she do?” Eleanor asked, before she could stop herself.

“She stopped waiting for him to ask,” Mrs. Pruitt said simply, and rose to continue about her morning duties, leaving Eleanor alone with words that would not leave her thoughts for the remainder of the day.

It was into this fragile silence that the whispers began. Susan came to her one morning with an unusually troubled expression, and confessed, after considerable hesitation, that talk had begun below stairs — and worse, had apparently begun circulating through the neighboring households as well. Talk that the Duke and Duchess of Blackthorne’s marriage, so warmly regarded in its first weeks, had cooled with unusual and suspicious speed.

Eleanor had not thought, in her private grief over her husband’s withdrawal, to consider how visible that withdrawal might appear to the wider world. The rumors found their most eager audience in London, where Lady Constance Fairweather, still smarting from a disappointment she had never fully relinquished, proved remarkably willing to lend the gossip her own particular embellishments.

Eleanor learned of the worst of it during a call from a family friend who arrived with an expression of poorly disguised pity.

“They are saying,” the friend confided, lowering her voice as though the walls might carry it further, “that the Duke has grown tired of his young wife rather sooner than expected. That perhaps a country upbringing left you somewhat unequipped, my dear, for the demands of so vigorous a husband. I am so sorry to repeat such unkindness, but I thought you would rather hear it from a friend than discover it unprepared at some gathering.”

Eleanor sat perfectly still through the remainder of the visit, and did not allow herself to weep until her friend’s carriage had disappeared entirely down the long drive. The insinuation struck at precisely the wound she had spent the past fortnight nursing in private — and she did not yet know that Alexander had heard the same rumors, in considerably cruder form, from the mouths of gentlemen at his own club. Nor that his reaction to hearing his wife’s private worth impugned in such terms had been very far from the cold indifference his withdrawal might have suggested.

The two of them were obliged, some days later, to attend a reception hosted by Lord and Lady Ashborne — an engagement made weeks earlier, impossible to decline without inviting precisely the sort of speculation both of them, for entirely different reasons, wished to avoid.