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

Chapter 19

He was standing when the Court of Chancery delivered its finding.

Not for the whole of it. Not for the reading of the eleven pages. But when they rose, and the room turned to the Duke of Ravenwood’s chair out of sheer habit — four hundred people in a public room, turning to look at the cripple — Adrian Ellsworth put his hands on the arms of the chair and stood up, and Bates was beside him with the ebony cane, and he took two steps and stood, and then sat down again, and the room applauded for a full minute while he sat with his jaw set and his eyes bright with something he would not have called tears if asked under oath.

Dr. Murray’s promise had been nothing. No certainty in it. It will hurt. Someone standing behind you.

It had hurt. It had hurt for eleven months — every day, twice a day, in the long gallery at Ravenwood with Lenora’s arms around his ribs and Bates at his left side and the chairs pushed back against the walls, one step, two steps, a stick, then two sticks, then one stick, then the cane. He had fallen more times than he would ever admit. He had twice thrown the cane across the gallery in a rage and once through a window, and Lenora had said nothing about the window and had gone and got the cane back and stood in front of him with it, holding it out, saying nothing, until he took it.

By the spring he could cross the gallery. By the summer he could take the terrace steps. By the following winter he could walk down the drive to meet a carriage, slowly, with a stick, which he did in November of eighteen nineteen when his brother came home.

Captain Nathaniel Ellsworth had been in Portugal and then in France and then, for eleven months, in a French prison hospital, which was why there had been no reply to the letter about the wedding, and why nobody at Ravenwood had known whether he was alive.

He came up the drive in a hired post-chaise with one arm in a sling and a face ruined by sun and dysentery and eleven years of war, and he saw the man walking down the steps to meet him with a stick in his hand, and he stopped the chaise, and got out, and stood in the road.

“Adrian.”

“Nathaniel.”

“You’re walking.”

“Badly.”

“God.” The captain came up the drive at a run, which he was not supposed to do with an arm in a sling. “God. They told me — Mother wrote to me in the hospital that you were — she said the doctors said you would never — ”

“Mother was told a great many things by a man who was paid to tell them.” Adrian stopped and stood, with the cane, and looked at his brother, and for a moment the two of them simply looked at each other the way brothers do when there are eleven years and a war and a lie and a parapet between them. “Welcome home.”

Nathaniel Ellsworth hugged him, awkwardly, one-armed, on the drive, and Adrian Ellsworth stood up and took his weight.

The Dowager Duchess came in September.

She had not written for three years, and she had not visited since the wedding, and she came up the drive in her own carriage with her own maid and her own opinions, and she was shown into the drawing room, and there she found her elder son standing by the fireplace with a cane in his hand and her daughter-in-law sitting in a chair with a book.

She stood in the doorway for a long moment.

“Adrian,” she said.

“Mother.”

“I was told — ”

“I know what you were told.”

The old woman came into the room with her back very straight. She looked at the cane, and at the standing man, and then, unexpectedly, at Lenora — who had risen, and was watching the whole thing with a still, courteous, entirely unreadable face.

“You are the one who wrote to me,” the Dowager said.

“Four times, ma’am,” said Lenora. “You did not reply.”

“No. I did not.”

“May I ask why?”

The Dowager Duchess of Ravenwood looked at her for a long moment. Then she did something that Adrian had not seen her do in thirty years, which was to sit down without being invited, and to put her hand over her eyes.

“Because I could not bear it,” she said. “Because I had a son who could ride anything and dance with anybody and hold a room, and I was told he was gone, and I did not want to come and look at what was left.” She took her hand down. Her eyes were dry. “That is the whole of it. There is no excuse in it and I will not pretend there is. I was a coward, and I stayed away, and I have spent three years knowing it.” She turned to Lenora. “And you married him anyway.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“With four hundred empty chairs.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The old woman nodded slowly.

“Then I have been shown up,” she said, “by a girl I did not think worth a return letter. I shall send you an apology in writing, and I shall come to dinner every Tuesday, and you may both enjoy the spectacle of me trying to make amends, which will be uncomfortable for everyone.” She paused. “And I will want to be introduced to the gardener. I am told the conservatory is worth the journey.”