The Duke Invited His “Uneducated” Wife to Dinner Hoping She’d Embarrass Herself — Then the Russian Ambassador Rose, Bowed to Her, and Revealed the Secret She’d Hidden for Three Years

PART 4

The folder contained three years of work.

The timber correspondence had been the beginning of it — but over time, it had become the surface of something considerably larger. Eleanor had grown up watching her father manage the Wexford estate’s northern holdings, and had understood, from about the age of sixteen, that the real value of the timber wasn’t the timber. It was the relationships the timber created — with the merchants who moved it, the ships that carried it, the markets that received it, the governments that taxed it.

She had inherited those relationships when her father’s health failed, along with something else: a marriage settlement, drawn up before her wedding at her father’s insistence, that placed the Wexford holdings in a trust separate from the Ashford estate, with Mr. Voss named as trustee and Eleanor as the party whose direction the trust was bound to follow. Her father had not trusted the Duke to value his daughter’s inheritance. He had trusted the law of trusts to protect it regardless of what the Duke thought of her. It was, in its quiet way, the single most useful gift he had ever given her — because it meant that whatever the Duke assumed about a wife’s standing under the law, the timber, and everything built from it, answered to Eleanor first.

The folder held a detailed proposal as well — financial projections she and Mr. Voss had built together, and a legal framework he had drafted, for a trading arrangement between the Wexford holdings and a consortium of Baltic merchants who had spent two years looking for the right English partner. Vulkoff wasn’t party to the proposal. Mikhail Sorokin was. And Sorokin’s closeness to Vulkoff was, as Eleanor had known for some time, precisely the reason the proposal had stayed alive through a difficult diplomatic year.

The Duke read the folder in his study until two in the morning.

At eight the next day, his secretary carried a note to the west wing.

Come to my study when it’s convenient. There is a great deal I would like to understand.

She went at nine.

The conversation that followed lasted four hours, and was, by any measure, the most substantive exchange the Duke and Duchess of Ashford had had in the whole of their marriage. He asked questions. She answered them. He pushed back on assumptions in her projections. She defended some, conceded others.

“The Wexford holdings sit in trust,” he said, at one point, tapping the relevant page. “Not in your name outright.”

“No. In Voss’s, as trustee, acting on my direction.”

“So legally, it’s his signature that matters. Not yours.”

“Legally,” she said, “yes. Practically, he has never once directed the trust against my wishes, and I’ve never given him cause to consider it. That is the difference between what the law permits and what actually happens in that room.” She met his eyes. “You may find that distinction unsatisfying. I’ve had three years to make my peace with it.”

He was quiet a moment. “Why Voss? My father’s solicitors were available to you.”

“He’s the best commercial lawyer I know, and he had no reason to treat me as an inconvenience to be managed until a more important client arrived. Your father’s men would have listened to me for exactly as long as it took to find you and ask what you actually wanted done.”

“That’s not entirely fair.”

“It’s entirely accurate,” she said. “Which is not always the same as fair, but I find it more useful.”

He looked at her for a long moment, the particular look of a man recalibrating an assumption he hadn’t realized he was making.

“The arrangement,” he said. “The Baltic proposal — you need my name on it.”

“I need the Ashford estate’s guarantee behind it. The Wexford holdings alone can supply the timber. They can’t provide the financial security the consortium requires without a peer’s estate standing behind the shipments if a season goes badly. The Ashford name provides that.”

“And what do I receive?”

“Thirty percent of net returns on the trading arrangement for the first ten years. After which the terms are reviewed and renegotiated to reflect the actual balance of contribution.”

“That’s not generous.”

“It’s precise,” she said. “I wasn’t trying to be generous. I was trying to be accurate.”

He looked at the folder, still open between them.

“You’ve been building this three years.”

“Two and a half, in earnest. The first six months were spent learning enough about the trade itself to know what was worth building.”

“From the west wing.”

“From my desk,” she said. “Yes.”

He was quiet a long moment.

“I invited you to that dinner,” he said finally, “to win an argument with Pembury that I should never have started.”

“I know. Your intentions aren’t the interesting part of what happened.”

“What is?”

“What you do now,” she said.

He looked at her. “Count Vulkoff will be calling this afternoon. He sent a card this morning.”

“I know. I received one too.”

Another silence.

“Eleanor,” he said. She waited. “I have conducted this marriage very badly.” It came out with the difficulty of a man saying something true he has spent a long time avoiding. “I am not certain what the correct remedy for that is.”

“Neither am I,” she said. “But I think reading the folder was the right first step.”

He almost smiled — the closest she’d seen him come to it in four years.

“What’s the second step?”

“Receiving Count Vulkoff together,” she said. “Not separately. Not with me kept to my own rooms while you discuss what he’s going to want to discuss in yours.”

He looked at the folder, then at her.

“At three,” he said. “I will be ready.”

“So will I.”