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 2

The wedding itself she got through without disgracing herself, which had been the whole of her ambition since February. She heard two things that day that she would carry a long time.

The first was in the church, from a woman four rows behind her, pitched for the moment when everyone is standing and no one is quite listening. He might have had anybody.

The second came at the breakfast, from a man she never identified, and it was worse because it was kind. Poor girl. I doubt she knows what has hit her.

She was standing four feet away, holding a glass. She did not turn her head. She did not change her face. And she thought, with a clarity that surprised even her: I have been managing a bankrupt house since I was sixteen. I know precisely what has hit me. You have no idea what you are looking at.

Adrian heard the second remark too. He made no speech about it. He crossed the room, took his wife’s arm, and said in an entirely ordinary voice that carried nine feet in every direction, “Come and meet Fathergill. He manages the northern estates, and he is the only person in this room worth talking to.” And then, to the man himself, without breaking stride: “You appear remarkably comfortable discussing the Duchess of Vale while standing at her elbow.” He did not wait for an answer.

Eleanor never saw the man’s face, and never asked. What she felt, walking the length of that room on her husband’s arm, was not gratitude. It took her four days to name it properly. It was the first time in her life that anyone had stood in front of her.

Vale House had ninety rooms. She saw four of them that first evening. She was taken up at ten by a woman she had only met that morning, undressed, and left in a bedchamber the size of her father’s drawing room — a fire, forty candles, and a bed made up with a particular kind of care that Eleanor noticed, understood, and could not look at directly.

The woman went out. Eleanor sat on the edge of that bed for what she afterward reckoned was a quarter of an hour, in a house she did not know, more frightened than she had ever been in her life — and it was not the fear anyone in that house would have assumed. She was not frightened of him. She had met him once. He had been awkward in a library and had stood between her and a stranger’s cruelty at a wedding breakfast. Whatever Eleanor Ashworth was afraid of that night, it was not the Duke of Vale.

She was afraid because she did not know what was going to happen next. Her mother had died when she was nine. Her aunt had come for the last three weeks before the wedding and talked at great length about linen and carriages, and had twice begun a sentence with “Of course, when you are married —” and both times stopped, looked at the window, and changed the subject. On the last night in her father’s house, that same aunt had sat on the edge of Eleanor’s bed and said, “You must simply do as your husband wishes, my dear, and it will all be quite all right,” and kissed her forehead, and gone out.

That was the whole of what Eleanor Ashworth had been told, at four-and-twenty, by the only woman in England who had undertaken to tell her anything at all.

He came in at ten o’clock.

And he understood — inside a single minute, before she had said a word, before she had even fully raised her eyes — precisely how much that silence had cost her, and precisely how much no one in that house had ever thought to say.