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 3

He had not known what to expect either. He had spent the whole of that day getting through a wedding, and had come up the corridor with nine different things arranged to say, and had stopped outside the door with his hand on the latch for a moment he never told anyone about, before or after — the closest he came, in the whole of that day, to losing his nerve. Because he had been thinking, all the way up the stairs, about a sentence. Of course, my dear. He had heard his brother’s wife say it perhaps four hundred times in three years, in that pleasant, even voice, about the carriage and the dinner hour and the fire and everything else in the world. It had taken him a year to notice it and two more to understand exactly what he had been listening to. By the end he could not be in a room where it was said. And he had stood outside his own wedding-night door at half past ten, understanding with perfect clarity that there was a woman on the other side of it who was perhaps four hours away from beginning to say it to him for the rest of her life.

He opened the door and found his wife sitting on the edge of the bed, hands folded, back straight, face entirely white. She stood the moment he entered — the way a servant stands, or a girl before a schoolmaster — hands at her sides, eyes fixed on a point somewhere to the left of him.

“Your grace,” she said, in a voice with nothing whatever in it.

Adrian stopped just inside the door.

“Eleanor,” he said. “Sit down.”

“I would rather stand.”

“Then I shall stand as well, and we shall both be extremely uncomfortable.” He did not move closer. “I am going to ask you a question, and I want you to answer it truthfully, because I think a great deal depends on it.”

She waited.

“Are you frightened of me?”

Something in her seemed to reach for a lie and find none. “I do not know you,” she said.

He felt that sentence land in him whole. I do not know you. Not your grace — which any woman in England would have said, and which he would have accepted, and which would have been the end of it. Not a denial. Not an accusation. A plain statement of fact, from a woman of four-and-twenty, in a room she had never seen, in a house she had entered that same afternoon, about a man she had spoken to once, for twenty minutes.

“No,” he said. “You do not.”

He crossed to the chair by the fire — as far from her as the room allowed — and sat, and put his hands on his knees.

“I am going to say four things,” he said, “and I should like to reach the end of them before you say anything at all, and then you may say whatever you like, and I will not argue with any part of it.”

She said nothing.

“The first is that nothing is going to happen tonight.”

Her hands moved, just slightly, at her sides.

“The second is that nothing is going to happen tomorrow night either, or the night after. I want you to hear that properly, because I believe you are standing there doing arithmetic about how long a thing like this can be put off. It is not being put off. The third is that this is not a kindness, and I will not have it treated as one. You are my wife. You are not my property, and there is a difference — and I have found that about half the men I know have never once troubled themselves to learn what it is.”

He nodded toward the far wall.

“And the fourth is that there is another room through that door. It is made up. You may sleep in it tonight, and every night, for as long as you wish to, and nobody in this house will ever be told a single word about it by me.”

Eleanor stood in the middle of that enormous room for a long moment.

“Why?” she said finally. “I beg your pardon — why are you being kind to me? You have every right in England to expect otherwise. My father has taken your money. There is a clause in your settlement about a son, and I have been sent here — I want to say that out loud, that I know I was sent — and there is not one person in this house, or mine, who would say a single word against you if you simply expected what everybody expects. So I should like to know why. I have been in this house four hours, and I do not understand one thing that has happened in it. I would rather be told the truth than treated well for a reason I cannot see.”

Adrian sat with that for a moment.

“Because kindness ought not to want a reason,” he said. “And because you have just asked me for one anyway, and I find I have got about four, and only one of them is any good.” He looked into the fire rather than at her. “I watched my brother’s marriage. That is the first, and it is not about you. Three years of two people being perfectly civil in a house, and I was in and out of it the whole time, and I have never once been able to forget the way his wife said, Of course, my dear. The second is that I have refused fourteen women in eight years and told nobody why — and the why is that I could not work out how to marry any of them without doing that to them. The third is that I was going to have to marry regardless, because of a clause in a settlement drawn up by careful men before I was born. I sent for my mother in the spring and told her to make the arrangements, and I did not ask a single question about who it might be.”

He looked up.

“And the fourth is that you asked me in the library whether I had chosen you, and your aunt talked over it, and I let her. I have thought about that perhaps four hundred times since. I am going to answer it now. No. I did not choose you. I did not know your name until I signed something. Your father told you otherwise. I have known since about a fortnight after the settlements were signed that he had, and I did not correct it — because I could not think how — and that is the shabbiest thing I have done in six years.”

Eleanor stood very still in the middle of that room.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You are thanking me for that.”

“I am thanking you for that,” she said, “because I have carried it for four months, and it has been the one thing making the whole business bearable, and I have half known it was not true since the library. And being lied to comfortably is a great deal worse than being told the truth badly.” She drew a breath. “And now I should like to say something to you, and I am going to say it standing up.”

“Say it.”

“I have not been told anything,” she said. “My mother died when I was nine. My aunt came for three weeks and talked about the linen. Last night she sat on the edge of my bed and told me to do as my husband wished, and that it would all be quite all right. That is the whole of it, your grace. That is everything I have been told by anybody, ever. So when you came through that door tonight, I was not frightened of you. I was frightened because I have no idea what happens next, and there has not been one person in my life in fifteen years who would tell me.”

The fire moved in the grate. Adrian Vale sat in a chair in his own bedroom on his wedding night and found that he was, for several seconds, too angry to trust himself to speak — and that not one particle of it was aimed at the woman standing in front of him.

He got up. He went to the window and stood with his back to the room, which Eleanor understood perfectly, and was grateful for.

“They sent you here,” he said to the glass, “at four-and-twenty, to a man you had met once, in a house you had never seen, and not one person undertook to tell you what would be expected of you. Not your father. Not your aunt. Not the four women who came about the clothes. And every single one of them will tell themselves it was delicacy.”

“My aunt is not a cruel woman.”

“No. I don’t suppose she is.” He turned round. “That is the part I cannot get past. Nobody in this business has been cruel to you. Your father has been weak. Your aunt has been squeamish. I have been careless. And among the three of us, we put a woman in a room at ten o’clock at night to find out by having it done to her — and there is not one of us who could be made to answer for it.”