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 6

Eleanor found she had one more question, and that she was going to ask it. “Ma’am — why did you not tell him?”

Beatrice stopped with her hand on the door. “Because he would not have heard it. That is the honest answer, and I have sat with it for months. If I go to my son and say, Adrian, that girl is in danger, he hears his mother interfering in his marriage — which she has done fourteen times in eight years, and which he has refused every single time — and he would have been perfectly civil to me, and thought about it for four minutes, and concluded I was managing him again. And he would have been half right.” She met Eleanor’s eyes. “Telling you is a great deal worse for me, and a great deal better for you. He will find out I told you inside a month, because you are not a woman who keeps things, and I do not want you to be. And when he finds out, he will be angrier with me than he has been about anything since Henry died, and he will be entitled to it, and I shall very likely spend the rest of my life at the far end of a long table. But he will listen to it from you. There is exactly one person in England he will hear this from, and she is sitting in that chair, and she did not know it until four minutes ago.”

The door closed. Eleanor sat in her own sitting room for the better part of an hour, and what she noticed first, before anything else, was that she was not angry with the woman who had just left. She turned that over a long while and could not make it come out any other way. Beatrice Vale had sat in that chair and told a girl of four-and-twenty the worst thing she knew, having prepared for months to be able to do it, and had done it kindly, and had not threatened her once, and had then gone downstairs and asked about the gardens. And Eleanor, who had run a bankrupt household since sixteen and knew precisely what it cost to say a true thing that helps nobody, found that what she felt was closer to recognition than to anything else. She is the only person in six months who has told me exactly what I am standing on.

She got out a sheet of paper, because that was what she had always done instead of talking to anyone, and worked it through in order.

If I say nothing, she wrote, the marriage goes on as it is. I am safe as long as Beatrice lives, and no longer. Carden knows, and Carden’s clerk knows, and in some years there is a cousin in Northumberland whose interest in the succession could turn that question into litigation — and by then I am nearer thirty and have nothing.

If I tell him, he will be horrified, and angry with his mother, and he will do exactly what he has done since April — refuse to press me — and the position will be precisely the same on Friday as it was on Monday, except that he will now be carrying it too.

She stopped here for the better part of an hour, because this was the one she had been walking round for two months.

And he will not believe me. He cannot. I have known that since the bridge, and it has not improved with thinking. A woman with no money, whose father’s debts he has paid, who has just been told by his own mother what an annulment would do to her, goes to her husband and says she has fallen in love with him. There is not one man in England who would believe that, and he is a great deal cleverer than most. If he thinks for one instant that I have come to him because I am frightened, then I will have taken the one thing he has actually given me — that he has never once made me perform anything — and I will have spoiled it, and there will be no getting it back.

Underneath, in a hand that had gone unsteady: So there is nothing. That is the answer, and it has taken me four hours to reach it.

She sat with that for two days. They were, without question, the two worst days of that marriage, and neither of them was a quarrel. She came down to breakfast on both mornings and was perfectly ordinary. She sat in the small drawing room with four books she did not open and answered him when he spoke and said nothing whatever beyond it.

On the second morning Adrian set down his pen near noon and said, without preamble, “Eleanor. Is something wrong?”

“No.”

It was the first lie she had told him since April, and she knew it the moment it left her, and it went into her like a splinter. She sat another hour afterward and could not read a single word, because what she could not do — she worked at it that whole afternoon from four different directions — was find any way at all to begin the sentence, Your mother has told me this marriage could be undone. Because he would ask what she wanted done about it, and there was only one thing to say, and the whole of the difficulty was that it was the same thing a frightened woman would say.

She tried it nine times in her own head over those two days, and it came out wrong every time.

Beatrice said nothing further about any of it that week. On the third morning after their conversation, Eleanor rose near five and read her own paper again, and understood at last where she had made her error. Not in the first part. In the second.

If I tell him. She had written that he would be horrified, and angry, and would refuse to press her, and that the position would be the same on Friday as on Monday — and that was wrong, and she saw exactly why with a cold cup of tea beside her at five in the morning. She had been thinking of it as a thing she would tell him. It was not that. It was a thing he did not know.

Adrian Vale had spent six months being scrupulous with her, believing entirely that the alternative to pressing her was doing nothing — that there were only two courses, one to take what was his, the other to wait, and that waiting cost nobody anything. It was not true. Waiting was costing her everything, quietly, at a rate she could now put a figure to, and he did not know it, and would not have believed it if she had told him so in April. He was not being kind to her. He was being kind to a woman he had invented in February and never once revised — a nervous bride who wanted a gentle man and had all the time in the world.

He does not know what it costs, she said aloud, in an empty room, and understood that this was a different problem entirely, and that it had a solution.

She dressed. She went down to the estate room at nine in the morning and took the sheet of paper with her — deliberately, having decided while dressing that she was going to do this the only way she had ever done anything well in her life: on paper, in order, with the arithmetic showing.

Adrian was at his own table and looked up, and she saw his face change, because she had never once come into that room in six months.

“I want a quarter of an hour,” said Eleanor Ashworth Vale, “and I want the door shut, and I want you to let me reach the end before you say a word, because I have got it in order and I shall lose it if I am interrupted.”

He got up and shut the door himself, and came back, and sat.

“Go on.”