No Family, No Friends, No Mercy: The Paralyzed Duke Waited for a Bride Who Never Cried Off

Chapter 10

They stayed another hour.

Adrian spoke to old acquaintances, because it was expected, and because he had decided by then that he would spend the evening behaving like a man who had every right to be in the room. He endured their condolences — I was so sorry to hear — such a terrible thing, the hunting — you look wonderfully well, really — and answered in a voice that was pleasant and completely uninformative.

Two men he had thought friends looked through him as though he were a window. A woman he had once danced with three seasons running came over and talked to Lenora for ten minutes about hothouses and never once looked at him. An elderly general shook his hand with both of his own and said, very quietly, “It is good to see you out, Ellsworth. Damned good,” and Adrian had to look away for a moment.

Lenora deflected the worst of it with that weapon of hers — the untroubled smile — and when deflection failed she simply let the words slide off her like rain on glass, and by eleven o’clock she had been introduced to eleven women who had not called on her, and had been gracious to all eleven, and had left each of them faintly uneasy without any of them being able to say why.

It was as the hour grew late and the room began to thin that Philip Draycott finally came across the floor.

He came through the crowd with the unhesitating confidence of a man who has never been made to feel unwelcome anywhere in his life. People stepped aside for him. He was smiling that wide, false, golden smile.

“Ravenwood,” he said, stopping before the chair. “How good it is to see you out in society again. I had heard you had become quite the recluse.”

“You heard wrong,” Adrian said flatly.

“Evidently.” Draycott’s eyes turned, unhurried, to Lenora, and lingered on her with a slowness that made the heat rise up the back of Adrian’s neck. “And this must be the new Duchess. I have heard a great deal about you, madam.”

Lenora’s smile did not waver by a hair.

“And I about you, my lord,” she said.

“All good things, I hope.”

“All true things,” said Lenora Vale, “which is rarely the same.”

Something flickered behind Draycott’s eyes — irritation, quickly suppressed and swallowed down behind the smile. He took a sip of his champagne.

“I understand your wedding was a very quiet affair,” he said. “A shame. I would certainly have attended, had I known.”

“You were invited,” Adrian said.

“Was I?” Draycott’s eyebrows rose, exquisite and amused. “The invitation must have gone astray. These things do happen, with houses in such — disorder.” He turned back to Lenora, and his voice dropped into something softer, more intimate, and infinitely worse. “But perhaps it was for the best. A ceremony of that kind, under the circumstances — it might have been uncomfortable for everyone involved. One does not like to see a woman of quality made a spectacle.”

The implication went into the air around them like poison dropped into a well. Two gentlemen nearby stopped talking. A woman’s fan stilled.

Adrian felt his control going — felt his hands close on the carved arms of the chair hard enough to grind, felt the words crowding up behind his teeth, say it again, say it in front of me, I will have you out of this house — and knew, with the cold clarity of a man watching himself from above, that this was exactly what Draycott had come for. One public scene. One blow struck by the cripple, and tomorrow the story would be the Duke of Ravenwood’s madness, and not Lord Draycott’s crimes.

He opened his mouth.

And Lenora laughed.

It was a light, carrying, musical laugh, pitched exactly to reach the four people nearby who were pretending not to listen, and it stopped Adrian’s words dead in his throat.

“Uncomfortable, my lord?” she said, quite warmly, quite loudly. “I cannot imagine why.”

She turned, unhurried, so that her back was half to Draycott and her face was toward the little cluster of onlookers.

“The church was beautiful. The vows were sincere. And His Grace,” she said, “was the most magnificent thing I have ever seen in my life — waiting for me at the altar, with four hundred chairs laid out for the guests who had promised to witness our marriage.” She paused, and her smile did not so much as tremble. “The only thing missing, I suppose, was the company. But one cannot force people to keep their word. Some of us keep it. Some of us do not. It is a great comfort to know the difference before one has wasted an invitation on them.”

Silence.

Draycott’s expression went rigid — the smile still on his face, but dead behind the eyes, like a mask forgotten on a chair.

“You speak boldly, Duchess,” he said, low.

“I speak truth, my lord. It is a habit I acquired during difficult years, when I had very little else.” She inclined her head, impeccably. “Now, if you will forgive us — I believe our carriage is waiting, the hour grows late, and His Grace and I have a great deal to discuss.”

She took the handle of Adrian’s chair — a liberty no one in that room would have dared, and which told every watching person exactly who she was and exactly what she thought of them — turned it, and walked him out of the Wexford ballroom through a lane of staring faces.

Behind them, Lord Philip Draycott stood alone in the middle of a silence he had made and could not escape.

In the carriage, with the door shut and the lamps swinging and the noise of the ball fading behind them, Adrian let out a breath he had been holding for a quarter of an hour.

“He will not forget that,” he said.

“I hope he does not.” Lenora pulled off her gloves, one finger at a time. “Let him remember. Let him see how many people heard him humiliate himself.” She paused. “A man like Draycott makes mistakes when he is angry, Your Grace. And he is angry now. Very angry.”

Adrian looked at her across the dark interior of the carriage as they passed under a street lamp; the light swept across her face and showed him the fierce, clear beauty of her expression, and the small white flowers still in her hair.

He had never met anyone like her. He was beginning to believe she did not exist anywhere else in the world.

“I am glad,” he said slowly, “that you came down that aisle.”

She turned to him, and in the dimness he saw her smile — not the public one; the private one. The one that was only his.

“So am I,” she said. “More than you know.”

The carriage rolled on toward Ravenwood, and the city slept around them, unaware that a war had been opened that night — and that neither side intended to lose it.