The Duchess Watched Her Husband Give Her Mother’s Harp to His Mistress Before Two Hundred Guests—Then She Crossed the Ballroom, Drove Her Heel Through It, and Made the Woman Plotting Her Imprisonment Realize She Had Chosen the Wrong Victim.

PART 4

The Dowager Duchess took Eleanor aside the morning after the wedding.

She was a tall woman with steel-colored hair, rigid posture, and opinions about everything from table settings to tenant relations. She gave Eleanor a tour of the house that was less instruction than territorial marking, less welcome than warning.

“That is his study. Do not enter without knocking, and do not expect your knock to be answered with enthusiasm. That is his bedchamber. Do not enter at all unless summoned, and do not expect to be summoned often. That is the east wing. Do not redecorate it. Do not rearrange it. Do not imagine it is yours to alter.”

Eleanor listened to every word and learned.

She learned that Ashworth House had been managed by neglect for the better part of a decade, while the Duke pursued pleasures in London and his mother pretended nothing was changing, because change was beneath her notice. She learned that the tenants had not been visited in three years, that their requests for repairs had been ignored, their rents raised without any corresponding improvement to their conditions. She learned that the housekeeper, Mrs. Graves, had been keeping the estate together through sheer stubbornness and a locked drawer full of records the Duke had never asked to see and the Dowager had never bothered to examine.

She learned that no one expected her to do anything except exist decoratively, produce an heir at the earliest possible convenience, and avoid causing scandal.

Eleanor had never been decorative. Her mother had raised her to be useful.

Within the first month of her marriage, she had memorized the household accounts, met every tenant on the northern parcels, identified three leaking roofs and a disputed fence line, and introduced herself to the village doctor, vicar, and blacksmith. She visited the coal mine and asked questions until the foreman stopped condescending and started answering honestly about production levels, equipment failures, and safety concerns. She ordered repairs to the miners’ cottages that the estate had been ignoring for years.

She did not tell the Duke any of this. He did not ask.

Their arrangement settled into a pattern. He was polite at meals when they dined together, which was perhaps twice a week. He was distant in company, introducing her to his friends with a vague gesture and a murmured “Her Grace,” as if her actual name had slipped his mind. He came to her bedchamber once a month with the regularity of a man paying a bill, and left without a word of tenderness.

Eleanor told herself she did not need tenderness. She had work.

The harp stayed in the music room where Eleanor had placed it, positioned near the window that overlooked the south garden, catching the afternoon light, beautiful even when silent. Sometimes, when the Duke was riding and the Dowager resting, Eleanor would close the door and sit at the harp and play the songs her mother had taught her. Simple melodies. A lullaby her mother had composed during Eleanor’s infancy. No one heard her play. It was the one private thing she allowed herself.

Two years passed this way. Two years of competent silence, of ledgers balanced and tenants visited, roofs repaired and fences mended. Two years of watching her husband treat her with the careful indifference one reserves for furniture that came with the house.

Then, in the spring of the third year, things began to change.

Eleanor noticed the changes the way she noticed everything — through attention rather than announcement. A scent on his coat when he returned from riding, floral and musky and not hers. New cufflinks on his dressing table, gold with sapphires, that she had not purchased. A letter on his desk addressed in a hand she did not recognize, elegant and feminine, sealed with violet wax.

Small things. Scattered things.

But Eleanor had been trained by her mother’s illness to watch for scattered things, to track the small signs that indicated a larger drift, to recognize the early warnings of a household moving toward disaster.

She said nothing. She watched.

The woman’s name was Arabella Crane. She was the widow of a minor baronet, a woman of thirty with auburn hair that caught the light like fire, green eyes that promised secrets, and a laugh that carried across ballrooms. She had arrived in the county that spring to visit her cousin, and had been introduced to the Duke at a dinner party Eleanor herself had organized.

Eleanor remembered that introduction with painful clarity now. She remembered how her husband’s posture had changed when Arabella entered, how he had straightened from his usual slouch, how his eyes had sharpened with interest for the first time in Eleanor’s memory. She remembered how his voice had warmed when he greeted Arabella, how he had smiled at her with genuine pleasure.

She had told herself it was nothing. Men smiled at beautiful women.

But the smiles multiplied. The Duke began riding past the cousin’s estate. He began going to London without Eleanor, claiming business that required no wife.

The first heirloom vanished in June. Eleanor’s mother’s silver brush set, the one she had used every morning since childhood. She asked Mrs. Graves about it.

“I believe His Grace moved it, Your Grace. I could not say where.”

A week later, Eleanor saw that brush set in a watercolor of Arabella Crane’s new house, carelessly left in the Duke’s study. The brush set on the vanity. A portrait above the mantel that resembled her husband. The quality of the furnishings, purchased from accounts that were supposed to be hers.

She did not confront him. Instead, she went to Mrs. Graves.

The housekeeper was waiting for her.

“Sit down, Your Grace. There are things I should show you.”