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 6

Nearly a year passed before the first real threat to the arrangement arrived — a year of the two of them learning, slowly and with real friction, how to occupy the same house as something other than strangers who happened to be married.

The trouble, when it finally came, did not come from Vulkoff, or from Sorokin, or from the consortium.

It came from the Board of Trade, by way of a customs officer who had spent eleven years watching for exactly the kind of arrangement Voss had drafted, and who was not, on principle, inclined to believe that a peer’s estate and a Russian merchant house had assembled a trading route through the Baltic without at least one eye on the wartime restrictions still nominally governing commerce with the Continent.

The letter arrived at Voss’s office in the second week of February — a formal notice of inquiry, polite in its language and entirely serious in its implications, requesting documentation to confirm that none of the proposed shipments would touch ports still subject to the blockade regulations left over from the war. It named the Ashford estate specifically. It named Eleanor by title, though not, pointedly, by any acknowledgment that she had done the work behind the arrangement — the inquiry addressed itself entirely to “the Duke of Ashford’s commercial undertaking,” as though the three years in the drawer had never happened.

Voss brought the letter to Ashford House himself.

“It isn’t a serious accusation,” he told them both, spreading the papers across the Duke’s desk. “The routes we’ve mapped never come near the restricted ports. I can prove that in an afternoon, with the shipping charts alone. But an inquiry of this kind, once opened, has a way of finding its way into conversation before it finds its way to a resolution. And there are men in London who would be glad to have something to say about this arrangement besides how well it’s performing.”

“Sir Gerald,” the Duke said.

“I don’t know that for certain,” Voss said. “I know that Sir Gerald has said, more than once, in rooms where it was certain to travel, that a peer’s estate ought not to be so publicly entangled with a matter his wife arranged from her own writing desk. Whether he wrote to the Board of Trade himself, or simply said enough to the right people that someone else did, comes to very much the same result.”

Eleanor read the inquiry twice. “If this drags on, the consortium will hear of it before we’ve had the chance to answer it. Sorokin is careful. He won’t wait through a formal government inquiry to find out whether his English partners are about to be investigated for smuggling.”

“No,” Voss agreed. “He won’t.”

The Duke was quiet for a long moment, reading the letter a second time himself.

“What does answering it properly require?”

“The shipping charts, the customs manifests we already have on record, and a formal statement from the estate confirming the routes and the parties involved,” Voss said. “That part is straightforward. The part that isn’t straightforward is what you do about the version of this that’s already circulating at your club, where nobody’s asking about shipping charts. They’re asking whether it’s wise for a duke to let his name be used this way at all — whether the sensible thing, now that there’s official scrutiny, is to quietly step the estate back and let the Duchess’s arrangement stand or fall on its own.”

“And if I do that,” the Duke said slowly, “the estate’s guarantee disappears. Sorokin’s consortium loses the financial security they need. The whole arrangement collapses before the inquiry is even answered.”

“Yes,” Voss said.

“And if I don’t step back — if I answer the inquiry as the Ashford estate, publicly, with my name attached exactly as it’s attached now — ”

“Then you’re a duke who let an inquiry from the Board of Trade become public knowledge rather than quietly withdrawing from an arrangement people are already gossiping about,” Voss said. “Some of your circle will admire it. Sir Gerald and men like him will treat it as confirmation of everything they’ve been implying since March — that you’ve let your wife’s ambitions become your own liability.”

The room was quiet.

“There’s a third option,” Eleanor said, and both men looked at her. “I withdraw from the correspondence publicly. Let it be known that the Duke conceived and directed the arrangement, that the trust was simply the mechanism, that I had no meaningful role beyond what any wife might have. The inquiry answers itself more easily if there’s no complicated question of a duchess running trade negotiations from her own desk. The estate’s guarantee stays intact. The gossip dies for lack of anything interesting left to say.”

“You would disappear from something you built for three years,” the Duke said.

“I would protect the thing I built,” she said. “Those aren’t the same, but I understand if you don’t yet see the difference.”

He looked at her for a long time.

“No,” he said finally. “I understand the difference perfectly. I’m asking whether you actually want to do that, or whether you’re offering it because you assume I’d prefer it.”

“I’m asking you the same question,” she said. “You’ve spent a year defending this arrangement in rooms where it costs you something. I don’t know how much more you’re willing to spend.”

He picked up the inquiry letter again, read the closing line — a request for a response within the fortnight — and set it back down.

“I will answer it as the Ashford estate,” he said. “With both our names attached, exactly as they’ve been attached from the start. If Sir Gerald wants to make something of it at his club, he can make something of it to my face. I am done letting other men decide what this marriage is permitted to look like.”

Voss allowed himself the smallest measure of relief. “Then I’ll have the shipping charts ready by Thursday. We’ll want a formal statement drafted before the end of the week — and I’d suggest, Your Grace, that the statement carry the Duchess’s name alongside yours, not beneath it. If we’re answering honestly, we may as well answer completely.”

The Duke looked at Eleanor.

“Completely,” he agreed.