On the morning Eleanor Bellamy came to finalize the flowers for her own wedding, she found her sister wearing the ring that had once been hers—and everyone in the room had been hiding the betrayal for months. Her father’s solution to the humiliation was to send her away to marry a stranger, a duke in Wales. No one asked whether she consented. In that family, Eleanor’s feelings had never mattered enough to require permission.

 PART 4

He was tall and dark and older than her by nine years, and his face was the sort that gives nothing away, and is therefore invariably described as cold. There was a healing scratch along the back of one hand. He was drying his forearm on a cloth as he came, and he stopped when he saw her, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

“Your Grace,” said Eleanor, and curtsied.

“Miss Bellamy.”

He did not bow immediately. He was still looking at her. Then he did it, correctly.

“Forgive the arm. We have had a mare falling out of season, and losing an argument about it. I did not expect you until seven.”

“The roads were better than we were promised.”

“They generally are, on this side. It is the other side that lies.”

He handed the cloth to somebody without looking.

“Mrs. Kradock will take you up. There is a fire in your rooms. There has been a fire in them since Tuesday, so they will be dry. We dine at five, because the yard rises at four and I will not keep men up for fashion. If five is intolerable to you, say so now, and it will be seven from tomorrow.”

“Five is perfectly—”

“That was not a courtesy, Miss Bellamy. It was a question.”

He said it without heat.

“If you say yes to everything in the first fortnight, I shall have no way of knowing what you actually want, and I shall be guessing at it for years. It is inefficient.”

Eleanor discovered that she had no ready sentence.

“Five,” she said, “is genuinely early. But I have kept farm hours before. I will manage six.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It was not a smile. It was the place a smile would go, if one were ever issued.

“Good,” he said.

And then, when Mrs. Kradock had gone ahead with the candle, and the hall was empty but for the two of them and the old dog, the Duke of Blackmir said the sentence that changed the direction of Eleanor Bellamy’s entire life.

He said it so plainly that she almost missed it.

“Miss Bellamy, before you go up — did you agree to come here?”

Eleanor turned.

“I am here,” she said.

“Yes.”

He looked at her steadily.

“Those are different answers.”

The hall was very quiet. Somewhere out in the dark, a horse called, and another answered.

“I have had a letter from your father,” he went on, “which was three pages long and told me nothing whatever about you. I have had a settlement from a solicitor, which tells me a great deal about your father. I have not had one word from you.”

He set his hands behind his back.

“So I am asking you. Not tomorrow. Not before witnesses. Not with a clergyman standing by. Now, while nothing has been signed, and there is a carriage still in my yard with the horses not yet unharnessed — did you agree to come here, or were you sent?”

And Eleanor Bellamy, eight and twenty years old, who had been managing other people’s questions since she was eleven, found that she could not answer, because nobody had ever asked her one before.

Her eyes stung. She was furious about it.

She stood in a stone hall in Wales in her travelling clothes, with her ears still ringing from five days of wheels, and she thought: This is a trick. This is a manner. This is how such men disarm women.

And she looked at his face and knew perfectly well that it was not.

“Both,” she said at last. “I was sent. And then I agreed.”

The Duke considered that.

“That is an honest answer,” he said. “Thank you. It will do to begin with.”

He nodded to her and went back through the door to the left, and Eleanor went up the stairs with her heart beating oddly, and did not sleep for a long while, and could not have told anybody why.

He sent for her the next morning, which she had expected. He had a paper on the desk, which she had also expected. She came in with her chin up and her hands folded and every defence she owned laid neatly in a row, because she knew exactly what came next.

She had watched her father do it a hundred times. Now the conditions. Now the list of what is required of you.

“Sit down,” he said. “This is not the settlement. Your father’s man and my man may quarrel over the settlement for a month; it is what they are paid for. This is between us.”

He turned the paper round so that it faced her.

She read it.

Then she read it again.

“These are terms,” she said, “in my favour.”

“They are terms,” he agreed.

Separate apartments, for such duration as the duchess shall find necessary, and without any requirement that a reason be given. Two hundred per annum at her own disposal, paid quarterly, not accountable to me or to any steward. Correspondence unopened and unexamined, incoming and outgoing. The right to appoint and dismiss her own personal servants without reference to the household. No requirement of intimacy of any kind. No requirement to perform affection in public.

And in the event she should conclude, at any point within the first year, that she had been brought here by coercion — the right to remove to the Dower House at Pentagarth, or to any place of her choosing, at my charge, permanently, with her income continuing.

Eleanor looked up.

“Do you know what my father would say if he saw this document?”

“I imagine he would say I was a fool. He would say you had given away every hold a husband has.”

“Yes,” said the Duke of Blackmir. “That is what it is for.”

She put the paper down.

Her hands were not quite steady, and she disliked that.

“Then I am obliged to ask you plainly. What is it that you want? Because no man writes that on a Tuesday morning without wanting something, and I would very much rather know now than discover it in March.”

He did not take offence.

That was the second thing about him she could not account for. Her whole life, men had taken offence at being asked a direct question. It was practically a hobby among them.

He thought about it. He actually thought, for the length of several seconds, as though the question deserved the time.

“An honest answer when I ask you one,” he said. “That is all.”

“That is a great deal.”

“You will find it is a great deal, in a year or two.”

He stood, and went to the window, where the yard was full of steam and lads and the noise of buckets.

“Miss Bellamy. Your family brought you here because other people made choices. Your sister made one. Lord Martin made one. Your father made one on top of theirs, and not one of the three of them consulted you. And by the time the matter reached you, it had the appearance of weather — something that had simply happened, which you were required to endure.”

He turned round.

“I am not going to begin our acquaintance by making a fourth.”

Eleanor sat very still in the chair.

“You have thought about this a great deal,” she said, “for a man who has never met me.”

And there was — she was almost certain of it afterwards, though at the time she was too tired to trust her own eye — the smallest hesitation before he answered.

“I have thought about it,” he said, “a great deal.”

They were married on the second of December, in the parish church at Lanbrin, which held ninety people and contained eleven. There were no flowers, because it was December, and Eleanor had said when asked that she would rather not have flowers brought two hundred miles to be pretended at.

There was no wedding breakfast of any consequence. There was a stud groom of forty years’ service named Price, who wept unaccountably all the way through, and a housekeeper who did not, and an aunt of the Duke’s who arrived from Shrewsbury in a great deal of grey silk and looked at Eleanor the entire service, in the manner of a woman examining a horse she had not been consulted about.

Eleanor knew exactly what was happening three hundred miles to the south. On the ninth, Cecily Bellamy would marry Frederick Danvers in a church with four hundred seats, and there would be white roses forced under glass at unspeakable expense. Eleanor had priced them herself in September, in a ledger she had left behind on her father’s desk.

She thought about it once during the vows. Then she folded the thought away, like a letter she had decided not to answer.

Her husband said the words as though they were a contract, which they were, and looked at her when he said them, which not every man does.

Afterwards, in the vestry, while the register was still wet, he took something from his coat and set it in her palm.

It was a seal. A signet of dark silver on a short chain, worn smooth at the edges, cut with a rook, and a sprig of something, and the letter B.

“That is the Blackmir seal,” he said. “Not the great one that stays in the strongroom. This one goes about. Anybody on my land who sees it knows that what you have said, I have said. It opens the granary, the stores, the account at Pritchards in Lello, and any door on this estate — including three that are supposed to be locked. It does not require my countersignature. It does not require you to tell me afterwards what you have used it for.”

Eleanor closed her hand around it.

And felt — she was ashamed of this later — the old sick familiar tightening under her ribs, because she knew what a set of keys meant. She had been given a set of keys at ten years old, two days after her mother’s funeral, by a father who had said, You are the sensible one.

Those keys had cost her eighteen years.

Here it is, she thought. Not a husband. A post. He has looked at me and seen what everybody sees — a capable woman going spare — and he has hired me, and the wage is a title.

“Thank you,” she said. “I shall try to be useful.”

The Duke of Blackmir looked at her for a moment with an expression she could not read at all.

“That,” he said, “is not what it is for.”

But he did not explain, and she did not ask.

And they went out into a churchyard where it had begun, very finely, to snow.