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 5

It was estate business, in the seventh week — a stone bridge on the northern property condemned by a surveyor, and a tenant named Reedy who had put in a claim for a horse that had gone through the parapet and drowned. Adrian had the whole of it spread across the table by the window and had been at it since ten that morning, saying perhaps four sentences in as many hours. Near two o’clock, without looking up, he said, to no one in particular, “The surveyor is wrong about the bridge.”

Eleanor lowered her book.

“He has taken the parapet as the cause, and it is not the cause, because the parapet is at the north end and the beast went in on the south — and I have spent three hours working out why that kept bothering me, and it is that Reedy is a careful man who has farmed that ground nine years and would not have taken a loaded cart over a bridge he did not trust.”

“Then what?”

“Then the road is bad on the south approach, and has been for two years, and the bridge is a great deal easier to blame than the road, because the bridge is the county’s business and the road is mine.” He sat back. “So the surveyor is not lying to me. He is simply looking where everyone looks, and the answer has been sitting under my own name for two years — which means Reedy gets his horse, and I am going to have to find nine hundred pounds for that approach before winter, and I had about four other things I wanted that money for.”

Eleanor sat with the book still in her lap. “You are going to pay for it.”

“Of course I am going to pay for it.”

“You could have taken the surveyor’s report. It was in front of you at ten this morning, signed, and it said the parapet, and no one in England would ever have looked at it again.”

Adrian glanced across the room at his wife. “Yes,” he said. “And you have just watched me spend four hours finding a reason to be nine hundred pounds worse off. That is what the work is.” He picked his pen back up.

Eleanor sat in that room the rest of the afternoon and did not read a single page, and by five o’clock understood, with the particular cold clarity that had gotten her through everything since she was sixteen, exactly what had happened to her. She had married the coldest man in England eight weeks before, and she was in love with him, and she had arrived there by watching him do arithmetic about a drowned horse — and there was not one thing in the world she could do about it, because he had told her on their wedding night that nothing would happen until she chose it, and he had meant it, and had kept the promise for eight weeks without one word or one look that could have been mistaken for pressure.

She wrote it that night in the book she had kept since sixteen, in six lines. I have no money. I have four brothers and sisters and a father whose debts he has paid. If I go to that man tonight and tell him what I feel, he will not believe me, and he will be right not to. There is nothing whatever I could say that a frightened woman with no money would not also say. He has given me a choice, and I am the one person in England who cannot make it.

The Dowager Duchess of Vale arrived that autumn and stayed six weeks, and she had known since about the second week of the marriage. That was the part Eleanor found hardest to forgive, and eventually did forgive, because it turned out not to be malice, but something a good deal more ordinary. Beatrice Vale was one-and-sixty and had been mistress of that house thirty-four years, and there was nothing that happened in it she did not hear about within a week from someone who did not know they were telling her anything. A housemaid had mentioned, the way servants mention things, that his grace’s man had asked for the fire kept up in the little dressing room the first night, and that she thought it very romantic. Beatrice heard that in the second week, said how pleasant, finished her letter, and waited nearly six months before coming to Vale House herself.

She was pleasant to Eleanor for four days — extremely pleasant, which Eleanor had not been prepared for, having braced for a cold woman, a critical one, a woman who would ask pointed questions about the family. What came instead was a charming person of one-and-sixty who remembered the names of all four of Eleanor’s siblings and asked, on the second evening, whether she was happy.

Eleanor said that she was.

“I am extremely glad,” said Beatrice Vale. “And I shall tell you something now that I have not told my son — that I was against this marriage in the spring, and I have been wrong about it. I do not say that about many things.”

She began the campaign properly on the fifth day, at dinner, in front of an old friend of the family brought specifically, Eleanor understood by the second course, to serve as a witness. “When may I expect to be a grandmother?” the Dowager asked, over the fish.

Eleanor set her glass down. Adrian did not.

“Mother,” he said. “My marriage is not a matter for household discussion.”

“It is not a household matter. It is a family matter, and I am the only other member of this family living, and I am one-and-sixty.” Beatrice’s voice remained entirely pleasant. “You have been married six months. I am not asking for an announcement. I am asking a perfectly ordinary question that any mother in England would ask, and I should like an answer to it at this table.”

“You are not going to have one.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is not yours,” said Adrian, “and because Mrs. Fain is sitting at this table, and you knew perfectly well I would not answer in front of her, which is precisely why you have asked it now.”

A silence of perhaps four seconds. Then the Dowager Duchess turned to Eleanor with the warmest voice she had used all week. “My dear, you must forgive us. We are a family that has always argued at dinner, and we shall never be cured of it. Do tell me about the northern gardens — I hear you have taken them in hand.” And Eleanor, understanding she had just been used as the end of an argument, said something about the gardens.

Beatrice came to Eleanor’s own sitting room four days later, alone, in the morning, and shut the door behind her.

“My dear, I am going to be honest with you, because I think you are a great deal cleverer than my son believes, and because I have not the patience to do this any other way. Nothing has happened between you.”

Eleanor sat very still. “That is not a question I intend to answer, ma’am.”

“You have just answered it,” said Beatrice Vale, not unkindly. “And I have known since the second week, and I did not come here to catch you out. Sit down. I am going to tell you something nobody has told you, and when I have finished you will understand why it has taken me months to arrange saying it.”

Eleanor sat.

“A marriage that has never been consummated can be challenged for nullity if incapacity is alleged and proved,” said the Dowager Duchess of Vale, and the room went very quiet. “Not divorced. Annulled — which is a different thing entirely, and wants no act of Parliament. It wants a suit in the ecclesiastical court, and evidence of incapacity, and it is unpleasant, and slow, and it happens perhaps four times in a generation, and I have seen it done once. What it means, if the suit succeeds, my dear, is that the marriage is held never to have existed at all. Not ended. Never to have been. Every settlement made upon it may fall. Your father’s debts were paid from the Vale settlement last spring. If such a suit ever succeeded, that money could be claimed back, and your father does not have it, and I should think the whole of it would be in the courts inside a year.”

Eleanor could not, for a moment, hear anything at all.

“And you would go home,” Beatrice went on, “at four-and-twenty, to a house with four younger children in it and no money whatever, as a woman whose marriage was set aside. I want you to understand exactly what that word means in a small county, because I do not believe you have had occasion to learn it. It is not the same as a widow. It is not the same as a girl who was jilted. There is no version of it that anybody has ever managed to explain away.”

“You are threatening me.”

“No,” said the Dowager Duchess, with a flat certainty Eleanor believed before she had even finished thinking about it. “I am not, and I want that said plainly before you decide what you think of me. I asked Mr. Carden a question this summer — he is the family’s man in London, and has been for thirty years — hypothetically, as one does, what the position would be if a marriage had never been consummated and incapacity were later alleged. He told me exactly what I have just told you. I came here and spent four days finding out whether my son is happy. He is. He is happier than I have seen him since Henry died, and I have watched him since I arrived, and I know precisely what I am looking at. So I am not going to raise it against you, and I am not going to help anyone else do so. I want that said out loud in this room, and you may hold me to it for the rest of my life.”

“Then why have you told me?”

Beatrice sat back. “Because I am one-and-sixty, and because Carden knows, and his clerk knows, and because in four years there will be a cousin in Northumberland with a son of his own and a direct financial interest in the succession — and if that succession is ever disputed, he will have every reason to put the validity of this marriage and any alleged incapacity into the hands of lawyers who will not have spent a fortnight watching my son at breakfast.” She stood, and went to the door, and stopped. “One more thing, and then I shall not raise it again while I am in this house. My son has done a very fine thing, and I am prouder of him than I have been in eight years — and it is going to destroy you. Both of those are true. He has given you a choice no woman in your position has ever been given, and every week he goes on giving it, you are standing closer to the edge of something you cannot see. And he does not know it. He is two-and-thirty, and he has never in his life had to think about what happens to a woman when a marriage stops. I am one-and-sixty, and I have thought of very little else since my husband died.”