Her Family Cast Her Out for Being Barren — A Widowed Duke with Five Heirs Chose Her.

Chapter 4

The wedding was a quiet, almost furtive affair. A special license. A nearly empty chapel. No flowers, because Marcus had said flowers felt like a lie. Eleanora signed her name in the registry and became a duchess in under ten minutes. She felt less married than she had the first time, when at least there had been hope in the room.

Ashworth House did not celebrate her arrival. The housekeeper, Mrs. Harlow, met her at the door with a curtsy so shallow it barely qualified as one. “Your Grace.” The title came out like an accusation.

“I understand the staff may have questions,” Eleanora said.

“We have none, Your Grace. Only instructions.” Mrs. Harlow’s eyes flicked over Eleanora’s traveling dress — three seasons old, carefully mended at the cuff, the fabric worn thin at the elbows. “His Grace’s late wife wore Worth, but I am sure we will manage.”

The steward, Mr. Graves, was worse. He cornered her on her second day in the house, ledgers tucked under his arm like a shield. “I manage the estate accounts, Your Grace. All of them. His Grace trusts me entirely.” A deliberate pause. “I would advise you not to involve yourself in matters you were not raised to understand.”

“I was raised in a house with accounts, Mr. Graves. A house that sold me off when I proved unprofitable.” She held his gaze until he looked away first. A small victory. It did not feel like one.

The children were the wall she had not braced for.

Julian, sixteen and already taller than his father, would not look at her at all. He passed her in the hallway as if she were furniture that had been moved without his permission. The twins, Celia and Rosalind, eleven, were polite in the way that was its own kind of cruelty. Perfect curtsies. Perfect silence. Eyes that said, We have buried two mothers. We will not bury our hearts for a third.

William, nine, simply stayed in his room. She caught glimpses of him at mealtimes — a pale, thin boy who ate without tasting and spoke without meaning. And Oliver, the youngest, six years old and small for his age, looked at her from behind the nursery door with an expression she could not read. Not hostility, exactly. Something closer to the fear of hoping.

At dinner the first week, Julian set down his fork with deliberate precision. “Father did not ask us before he married you.”

“Julian.” Marcus’s voice carried a warning.

“It is a fair question.” Julian did not flinch. “We have had a nurse leave. A governess leave. We do not need another woman who will be gone in a year.”

“I am not leaving,” Eleanora said.

“That is what the last one said too.” He pushed back from the table and walked out. No one stopped him.

The Dowager Duchess arrived on the tenth day. She swept into the drawing room in black bombazine, her eyes landing on Eleanora with the particular distaste of someone examining a stain on good linen. “So this is the creature my son has saddled himself with.”

“Mother. Do not.”

“Do not what, Marcus? Tell the truth? I have buried two daughters-in-law and watched you grieve them properly. This one comes with a scandal attached like a smell that will not wash out.”

“She is my wife.”

“She is a barren woman from a disgraced family, married for convenience. Everyone in London knows it.” The Dowager turned her full gaze on Eleanora. “You are not wanted here. You are merely tolerated because my son has made a decision I cannot undo. Do not mistake one for the other.”

That night, Eleanora stood at her bedroom window — a different room than Marcus’s, a separate wing entirely, a marriage in name only — and watched the gardens go dark below. A house full of people, and not one of them hers. She thought of her father’s voice. Anywhere that isn’t here. She had traveled so far, married so strangely, and still ended up exactly where she started. Unwanted. In someone else’s house. Waiting for the next person to tell her to leave.

She did not cry. She was almost proud of that.

But somewhere down the corridor, behind a door left a few inches open, a small voice was crying instead. And Eleanora found she could not quite walk past it.