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 4

“May I ask you something else?” Eleanor said.

“Yes.”

“What were you going to do, before you came in? You said you had nine things arranged to say.”

He gave a short laugh with nothing in it. “I had a speech. About four minutes long. I had been working on it since the middle of the wedding breakfast, and the substance of it was that we should get to know one another, that there was no hurry, that I would not press you.” He shook his head slightly. “I was going to say the whole of it, and then I was going to stay — because I had assumed, without once looking at the assumption, that a woman of four-and-twenty being married to a duke would have been prepared for this by somebody, and would simply be nervous, and would want a kind man to be gentle with her. That was my picture. I have had it since February. It took me one minute in this room to learn it was entirely wrong.”

“It was not an unkind picture.”

“It was a comfortable one,” he said. “That is worse. I have had eight years of comfortable, and I know precisely what it does.” He gestured, briefly, toward the far door. “Now — the other room. I want to say one thing about it before you decide, because I have watched you look at that door twice, and I believe you are doing arithmetic about what it means to use it. You are thinking that if you go through it tonight, this house will know by breakfast, and there will be a great deal of trouble. You are entirely right, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. There are ninety servants in this building, and about four of them will know by seven o’clock.” A pause. “So I will tell you what I intend to do about that, and then it is yours to decide. I am going to say nothing to anybody — not my mother, not my man, not the housekeeper — ever, about what does or does not happen in these rooms. And if anyone in this house ever asks you a question about it, however delicately, you will tell me, and I will end it inside a day.”

Eleanor stood with that for a moment.

“I shall stay in this room,” she said.

“Eleanor — not for that. I want to be extremely clear, because I have known you four hours, and I am not going to begin by being misunderstood.”

Her hands were folded in her lap now, and steady. “I shall stay in this room because if I go through that door tonight, then I have got to come back through it some night, and every day I do not will be a harder one. I know exactly how that works, because I have watched my father not go into the estate room for six years. And because you have just told me nothing is going to happen, and I find that I believe you — and if I do not act as though I believe you, then it was not worth your saying.”

Adrian looked at his wife for a long moment.

“Then I shall have the chair,” he said.

“That is absurd.”

“It is completely absurd, and I shall be extremely uncomfortable, and it is what is going to happen, and I would be obliged if you did not argue with me about it, because I have had a very long day.”

So the Duke of Vale spent his wedding night in a chair by his own fire, and slept perhaps three hours, and was awake by five. At some point in the middle of the night — Eleanor never established exactly when, and he never told her — he laid his own coat across her shoulders, because the fire had gone down and she had not brought a shawl, and had not liked to ask anyone for one. She woke near seven with a man’s coat over her and did not move for a considerable time.

The house learned within four days that something was different, and never learned what. That was Adrian’s doing entirely, and it was the most competent thing he did in the whole of that first month. He came out of the room at his ordinary hour. He was seen at breakfast with his wife. He gave orders about her horses and her rooms and her allowance in front of the housekeeper, on the second morning, in the same flat voice he used for everything — and there was nothing in any of it a servant could carry downstairs and make something of.

What he actually did was reshape the whole of Eleanor’s life inside a fortnight, mostly without telling her he was doing it.

The library came first. She had gone in on the third day, because she had been given the freedom of the house and had not quite believed it, and had gotten perhaps nine feet inside before she stopped. Adrian found her there a minute later, standing in the middle of the floor, touching nothing.

“You may read whatever you like.”

“Your grace, there must be four thousand books in this room.”

“Six thousand. Half of them have never been opened, and I could not tell you what is in any of them. My grandfather bought them by the yard.” He nodded at the nearest shelf. “Take what you want. Do not put them back if you don’t want to.”

Eleanor stood in that library and could say nothing at all. She had not read a book that was not a household ledger or a devotional in six years. She had read to her brothers and sisters. She had read letters and bills and the better part of four hundred pages of her father’s correspondence with men who wanted money. She took four volumes down that afternoon and carried them upstairs and did not open one of them for two days, because she could not shake the feeling that someone was going to come and ask her what she thought she was doing.

The household came next — delivered, in front of the housekeeper, at breakfast in the second week, in nine words: “Mrs. Pryor, the Duchess will have the ordering of this house whenever she wishes it. Not before. Ask her.” And then he was gone, and Eleanor sat at that table understanding exactly what had just been done — that he had given her a house without giving her a duty, done it in front of the one person who could make it real, and then removed himself so she was never obliged to say a single word about it to him. She took the household in the fourth month, when she was ready, and Mrs. Pryor never once mentioned the wait.

The third thing was that he began to be in rooms.

Adrian Vale had spent eight years in the estate room from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon. In the second week of his marriage he began doing half of it instead in the small drawing room, at a table by the window where his wife happened to be sitting with four books she had not yet opened. He did not talk to her. He came in, said good morning, sat at the far end of the room, and worked. Once an hour, roughly, he said something about a farm or a road or a man called Fathergill, and Eleanor answered, and then there was nothing again for an hour. It went on for six weeks before either of them said one word about it directly.

There were four things she noticed in those weeks, and she wrote every one of them down, because writing things down was what Eleanor Ashworth did instead of talking to anyone.

The first was that he never once asked what she was reading, though she had braced for it, had spent a fortnight preparing an answer because she was working her way through a great deal of extremely undistinguished poetry and had expected to have to account for it. He never asked, and she understood by the fourth week that this was deliberate, and that it was the single kindest thing anyone had done for her since she was sixteen.

The second was the stable boy — a boy of about twelve who had been kicked, whom she saw from the drawing-room window sitting on a mounting block in the wet, and the Duke of Vale crouched in front of him in the mud for the better part of four minutes, one hand on the boy’s shoulder. She could not hear a word of it. What she saw was that the boy was laughing by the time Adrian stood, and that Adrian never once looked up at any of the four windows overlooking that yard.

The third was that he went out on the second Sunday of every month and came back near four o’clock, extremely quiet for the rest of the day. It took her until the third month to ask Mrs. Pryor about it.

“Lord Henry’s grave, your grace. His late brother’s. He has gone the second Sunday since he came into the title, and he has never once said so to anybody, and I should not have told you, and I am extremely glad you asked.”

And the fourth was the way he was with money — the one that undid her, in the end, though it took her two months to see the shape of it, because she had braced herself for generosity, and it was not that. He had paid her father’s debts that spring, the whole of them, without comment, and had never once mentioned it — not at dinner, not in argument, not once since the wedding. She wrote it down in the seventh week, in a single line, and sat looking at it a long time. He has paid four thousand pounds for me and has not spent one shilling of it since the wedding, and I have been waiting since April to be reminded, and I have just understood that I am going to be waiting for the rest of my life.

She fell in love with him over a bridge, which she was always faintly annoyed about afterward.