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 7

She put the paper on his table, face down, and did not push it toward him.

“Your mother came to my sitting room three days ago and told me that a marriage which has never been consummated can be challenged for nullity if incapacity is alleged and proved,” Eleanor said. “Not divorced. Annulled — held never to have existed, so that the settlements made upon it may fall, including the one that paid my father’s debts in the spring. She told me she asked Mr. Carden about it in the summer, hypothetically, as one does. She told me she has no intention whatever of using it, and I believe her entirely, and I want that said before anything else, because I am not here about your mother. She told me Carden knows, and Carden’s clerk knows, and that in some years there will be a cousin in Northumberland with a son and a direct financial interest in the succession, and that a dispute over that succession could put the validity of this marriage and any alleged incapacity into litigation.”

Adrian had gone very still. “Eleanor —”

“I have not finished. Sit still.”

He sat still.

“Now I am going to tell you what I have worked out in three days,” she said, “and I want to say first that none of it is a complaint against you, and none of it is an accusation, and if you take it as either, we shall get nowhere, and I shall have wasted the only nerve I have got.” She drew a breath. “You have kept your word since April. Every single day. Not once in six months have you said one word or given one look I could have called pressure, and I do not believe there are four men in England who could have managed it. I know exactly what it has cost you, because I have watched you at breakfast. But here is the thing you do not know. You have believed, since the night we were married, that there were two courses in front of you — that you could take what was yours, or you could wait, and that waiting cost nobody anything. It has cost me everything I have got.”

Adrian said nothing at all.

“Every week this marriage stands unconsummated,” Eleanor went on, “I remain a woman whose position could one day be challenged if incapacity were alleged. Not because an interested heir could simply annul the marriage himself — but because a future dispute over the succession could drag the validity of the marriage, and any allegation of incapacity, into litigation. There are already three men in England who know the facts from which such an allegation could be made. And if such a suit ever succeeded, I do not lose a husband. I lose the whole of it. The settlement falls. My father’s debts come back. There are four children in that house who are not yet grown. And I go home at four-and-twenty as a woman whose marriage was set aside — which is not the same as a widow, and not the same as a girl who was jilted, and which nobody in a small county has ever once managed to explain away. That is what your kindness has been buying me since April. And you did not know it. I am not blaming you for not knowing it, because you are two-and-thirty and a duke, and there has never in your life been one hour in which you were obliged to think about what happens to a woman when a marriage ends. I have thought of nothing else since I was sixteen. It is the only subject I have ever been an expert in.”

Adrian put both hands flat on his table. “Then why in God’s name have you not told me?”

“Because I could not,” Eleanor said. “Think about it properly for four seconds and you will get there — because you are the cleverest man I have ever met, and it took me two months, and only because I was standing inside it. If I had come to you in June and said, Adrian, I should like to be your wife properly — what would you have thought?”

He opened his mouth. Stopped.

“You would have thought — she is frightened,” Eleanor said. “You would have thought a woman with no money, whose father’s debts I had paid, had worked out that she had better secure her position, and you would have been extremely kind about it, and you would have refused, and you would have been right to. That is what I have been standing inside since the seventh week. There was nothing I could say to you that a frightened woman would not also say, and you would have heard the frightened woman every time. You gave me a choice in April, and it was the finest thing anyone has ever done for me, and I have not stopped being grateful for it a single day — and it was not a choice. A choice offered to a woman with nowhere else to go is not a choice. It is a test, and I have been sitting an examination in this house for six months, and there was no possible answer that would have been believed.”

The estate room was entirely silent.

“There is one thing more,” Eleanor said, “and it is the hardest, and I am going to say it standing up.” She rose. “I have been in love with you since the seventh week. It was the bridge, and the drowned horse, and the nine hundred pounds, and I have the date written down, and I have not been able to say a word of it to you or to anyone in four months, for exactly the reason I have just given you. I am not saying it now to be answered — I want that understood. I have not come in here for an answer, and I shall not have one today, and I would rather you did not give me one. I am saying it because I have worked out that if I go on not saying it, then in some years I shall be a woman who spent her entire marriage managing her own husband for her own safety. I have watched my father do that to my mother, in a smaller way, and I will not do it. That is all. That is the whole of it, and I have finished, and you may say whatever you like.”

Adrian sat behind his own table for what Eleanor afterward reckoned was the better part of a minute and a half.

“May I read that paper?”

She turned it over and pushed it across. He read it twice, in full — four parts, and the correction at the bottom, in a hand that had gone unsteady.

“You wrote — he will not believe me, and he will be right to.”

“I did.”

“And underneath, three days later — he does not know what it costs.”

“Yes.”

Adrian set the paper down very quietly. “I have made you write out the arithmetic of your own destruction on a sheet of paper in my own house, and I have made you do it alone, at five in the morning, while I sat in this room being proud of myself.” He stood, and went to the window. “I want to tell you what I thought I was doing, because you have just been extremely honest with me for a quarter of an hour, and you are owed it. I thought I was refusing to be my brother. That is the whole of it. I watched Henry and his wife be perfectly civil to each other for three years, and I decided, at six-and-twenty, that I would never in my life be in a room with a woman who was making the best of me. And when you stood in that bedroom in April and said, I do not know you, I thought — here it is. Here is the thing I have been afraid of since I was six-and-twenty, and I am going to refuse it. And I have spent six months refusing it and being extremely pleased with myself about it. And not once — not a single time in six months, Eleanor — did I sit down and work out what the waiting was doing to you. Because I have never had to. You said that, and it is exactly right, and it is the worst thing anyone has said to me in eight years.”

He turned round.

“So I am going to do two things,” he said. “And I want to be clear that neither of them is an answer to what you said last, because you asked me not to give you one today, and I am going to respect that, though it is costing me a good deal. The first is Carden. He will be here inside the week, and I am going to settle money on you — on you, Eleanor, not on the marriage — irrevocably, in trust, in your own name, so that it does not fall. If this marriage ended tomorrow, for any reason whatsoever, you would walk out of that door with an income of your own for life, and your father’s debts would stay paid, and there would not be one person in England who could touch you.”

Eleanor stood in the middle of that room.

“Adrian — that is —”

“It is not generosity,” he said. “I want that understood before you thank me for it, because you are going to, and I could not bear it. It is the only way I can think of to make the thing I told you in April actually true. I said you would choose. You have just stood in my estate room and proved to me that you could not, because there was nothing to choose between. A man who offers a woman a choice while holding the whole of her livelihood in his hands is not offering her anything at all. He is simply enjoying being generous. So I am going to put it out of my own hands entirely. And then you may choose — and if you choose to go, I shall not stop you, and I shall not ask you why.”

He drew a breath.

“And the second thing is my mother,” he said. “And it is a great deal less pleasant, and I am going to do it this afternoon.”