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

Chapter 20

The child came at the end of the following April.

It was a bad night — a long one, with the physician twice, and Mrs. Wren weeping openly in the corridor, and Bates standing in the hall for seven hours without sitting down, because he had carried his master off one field and did not intend to fail on this one.

Adrian Ellsworth spent that night in the corridor outside his wife’s room, in the chair, because sitting was still easier than standing and there was no point in being a martyr about it at three in the morning.

He was not a praying man. He had stopped, for a while, after the accident; not out of anger exactly, but because he had gotten out of the habit of thinking that anything was listening. Somewhere around four o’clock in the morning, in the dark corridor, with the fire burnt low and a small green-and-gold bird in a cage at the end of the passage singing its absurd heart out in the middle of the night, he found that he had started again — silently, without words, the way a man puts his hand out in the dark to find a wall.

At ten past six, the door opened, and the physician came out with his sleeves rolled and his face tired and said, “A boy, Your Grace. And the Duchess is well.”

Adrian got himself into the room by degrees and sat down beside the bed. Lenora was propped on the pillows, gray with exhaustion and radiant — that same terrible, steady, victorious smile she had worn down the aisle of St. Bride’s, four years and a lifetime ago.

“A boy,” she said.

“A boy.”

“I have already named him.” She turned her head on the pillow. “Edmund Philip. After my father. And — ”

“And?”

“And the second name is for a man who was kind to my family once,” said Lenora Vale, “before he became something else, so that when our son is grown and asks why he has it, he will be told the whole story and be warned by it.”

Adrian sat very still. Then he laughed — a real laugh, the kind that came out of him now and then these days, entirely unexpectedly, like water out of a rock.

“That is the most thoroughly Lenora thing you have ever said.”

“I have been saving it.”

The christening was in September, in the little church at Ravenwood village — not St. Bride’s in London, which was a building he never intended to enter again as long as he lived.

They filled it. Not four hundred; the church holds one hundred and ten. They filled it twice over, and there were people standing at the back, and men in the porch, and it rained, and nobody minded. The general came with his rheumatism and stood by the font. Lady Fenton came and cried throughout. Mrs. Wren came, and Bates, and old Cade the gardener, in a coat forty years old. Polly came, with her sister, who had left Draycott’s service four years earlier and gone into a milliner’s shop in Cheapside and was now, Lenora had learned, the person the shop could not do without. The Dowager Duchess sat in the front pew with her back very straight and was heard, loudly, to say that the child had the Ellsworth nose.

Nathaniel Ellsworth stood as godfather with one arm still stiff and a captain’s pay and a very bad opinion of French hospitals.

And afterwards, in the hall at Ravenwood, in the middle of the noise and the wet coats and the mulled wine, Lenora came and found her husband standing by the window — standing, with a cane, alone, looking out at the rain coming across the park.

“What are you thinking about?” she said.

“The church.”

“Which church?”

“The other one.” He turned his head. “All those chairs. I have been trying for four years to work out why you came.”

Lenora leaned against the window frame beside him.

“I told you,” she said. “I made a promise.”

“You made a promise to a man who could not walk, on behalf of a father who was drowning, in a transaction arranged by two families who had other reasons.” He looked at her. “That is not why you came. I have had four years to think about it, and there is one thing that has never made sense to me. When you walked down that aisle — before you even reached me — you were smiling. Like a woman who had already won something. And you could not have known that I would ever be useful to you. Not then. Not really. I was a wreck in a chair with an empty church and no friends, and you looked at me as though you had taken a fortress.” He paused. “Tell me the truth. You have never once lied to me. Do not start now.”

Lenora was quiet for a moment. Outside, the rain moved over the lime avenue that Cade’s father had planted, and the trees bowed, and beyond them the conservatory stood full of light in the gray afternoon.

“I saw you at the Leominster Assembly,” she said at last, “four years before the accident.”

Adrian blinked. “I have never been to the Leominster Assembly.”

“You were. In eighteen twelve, in September. You came down for the hunting.” She was smiling now, the private smile. “I was seventeen, and I was standing at the back with my aunt, because we could not afford the subscription and my aunt had got us in as a favor. And you came in with about nine other men, and the room just — turned. Everyone. I watched the whole room turn.” She looked at him. “And then, halfway across the floor, you stopped, and picked up a glove some girl had dropped and did not notice, and followed her for four or five steps to give it back, and she did not even thank you properly, and you did not mind. And I thought: that is the kind of man who is careless with everything except being decent. And I remembered it for four years.”

Adrian stared at her.

“That cannot be why you married me.”

“It is not the whole reason.” She turned and put her hand flat on his chest. “It is not the reason I told the solicitors when they asked whether I consented. I gave them the sensible reasons; they were true as far as they went. But when my father told me the name of the man who had offered for me, and then told me the name of the man who had offered for me second, I said yes before he had finished the sentence. He was so surprised he had to sit down.”

“You never told me this.”

“You did not ask for four years.” Her grin was entirely without shame. “And it is a bad thing to tell a man at the beginning. He becomes insufferable. Whereas now,” she said, “you are already insufferable, and it can do no harm.”