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 5

Count Vulkoff arrived at three and was shown to the main drawing room, where the Duke and Duchess of Ashford received him together — which was not what he had expected, and which produced, in his practiced diplomat’s face, a fractional expression that might have been approval.

He did not waste time on pleasantries.

“I will speak plainly,” he said, once tea had been poured and set aside untouched. “Sorokin’s consortium has been offered a partnership by a Prussian house twice already this year. Both times he refused, because he trusts the timber and does not trust the Prussians to deliver what they promise. He does not know your husband.” A glance at the Duke. “He does not need to. He knows you. That is the arrangement’s entire foundation, and I would ask that neither of you pretend otherwise for the sake of appearances.”

“I have no interest in pretending otherwise,” the Duke said. “I read the folder. I understand precisely how little of this belongs to me.”

Vulkoff’s eyebrows lifted, very slightly. “That is a more honest answer than I expected from a duke.”

“I’ve had a difficult week,” the Duke said, “and it has been instructive.”

The meeting lasted two hours. It was not simple, and it was not comfortable. Vulkoff had his own interests, his own conditions, his own idea of what a satisfactory arrangement looked like — and none of it matched precisely with Eleanor’s, which in turn didn’t match precisely with her husband’s. He pressed on delivery timetables through the winter months. He raised, delicately, the question of what would happen to the arrangement if the political tide between London and St. Petersburg turned again, as it had turned twice already in the last decade. He wanted assurances Eleanor could not fully give and would not falsely promise.

“I can tell you what I would do if the tide turned,” she said. “I cannot tell you what my husband’s government would do, or what Sorokin’s would demand of him in turn. I would rather give you an honest uncertainty than a comfortable lie.”

Vulkoff considered that for a long moment, and then, unexpectedly, laughed — a short, genuine sound. “Sorokin said you would say something like that. He said it was the reason he trusted you before he trusted your terms.”

By the time Vulkoff rose to leave, the outline of an agreement existed — not yet a document, but a shared understanding specific enough that Voss and the Duke’s solicitors could begin drafting from it the following week. It was more than had existed on Thursday, and considerably more than the Duke had believed possible when he’d sent an invitation meant only to settle a wager with Lord Pembury.

Vulkoff bowed to Eleanor first. Then to the Duke. The same full bow as the night before.

The order was not lost on either of them.

When his carriage had gone, the Duke and Eleanor stood together in the drawing room in the unfamiliar way of two people who have just shared something they hadn’t expected to share.

“Voss will need to work with my solicitors starting Monday,” the Duke said.

“He’s accustomed to solicitors who initially underestimate him. He manages it.”

“I imagine he does.” A pause. “The trust. Your father set it up knowing I might not — ”

“He set it up because he’d watched enough marriages in our circle to know that a husband’s good opinion is not a foundation anything should be built on. It wasn’t a judgment of you specifically. It was a judgment of the arrangement itself.” She paused. “Though I understand, now, why he thought it necessary.”

He absorbed that without arguing it.

“I would like,” he said, “to see where it was built. If that’s something you’d allow.”

She studied him. “The west wing.”

“Yes.”

She led him there herself, that evening, instead of sending word ahead — something she had never once done in four years of marriage. He stood in the doorway of the room that held her desk, her drawer, her folder, now considerably thinner than it had been, its contents already dividing themselves between two studies instead of one.

He looked around — modest, ink-stained, entirely unremarkable by the standards of the rest of the house — with something that was not quite embarrassment and not quite wonder.

“You built all of this from here,” he said.

“I built all of this from here because it was the one room in this house that was mine,” she said. “I want you to understand that clearly. Not because the room itself is special. Because it was the only place I had.”

He didn’t answer immediately. When he did, his voice had a different register than she had heard from him before — not the precision he used to manage a room, but something closer to the man underneath it.

“I would like there to be more than one room going forward,” he said. “If that’s something you would want.”

“I would want to know what that means, precisely, before I agree to anything.”

“Precise,” he said, almost to himself, and this time the almost-smile reached further than it had before. “Yes. I imagine you would.”

It was not, either of them would come to understand, a single conversation that changed anything between them. It was the accumulation of many, over the weeks that followed — arguments over wording, disagreements over risk, long afternoons that stretched past supper because neither of them wanted to leave a problem half-solved. He learned, slowly, that his wife did not concede a point simply because he was a duke. She learned, slower still, that he could in fact be argued with, and that disagreement cost her nothing with him the way it had once cost her with her father’s more traditional friends.