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

Chapter 3

He held it up. She extended her left hand before he asked. The touch of her fingers was brief and warm, and he slid the ring home with a steadiness that cost him more than the whole ride down the aisle would have.

“With this ring,” the rector said, “I thee wed. With this body I thee worship. And with all my worldly goods I thee endow.”

“And with all that I am,” Lenora said.

The rector blinked. The words were not in the book. The organist’s foot slipped off the swell pedal and a note wandered loose into the rafters. Fifty feet above them, the man in the brown coat paused on the gallery stairs and did not move again.

Adrian felt something turn over in his chest, like a key in a lock with the wards worn down.

“With all that I am,” he repeated, because it was that or say nothing, and saying nothing suddenly seemed worse.

She did not smile at that. She only held his eyes, and something in her face — something underneath the composure, underneath the untroubled mouth — was so ferociously resolved that he understood, all at once, that this was not resignation. This was not sacrifice. This was not the soft, sad sainthood of a woman martyring herself out of pity.

She wanted something. And she had decided he was how she would get it.

The organist seized on the recessional as a drowning man seizes a plank. Lenora turned from the altar and gave Adrian a look that was almost a question: You, or I?

He understood it exactly. He would not be wheeled down the aisle like a parcel for the amusement of an empty church. But neither would he sit at the altar while his wife walked away alone, the whole nave behind them witnessing which of them was cargo.

His hand found the wheel. A hard, practiced turn — the chair swung smooth, the years of muscle memory in his shoulders doing what his legs could not — and he began the long descent.

She matched his pace from the first step. Not slower, not faster. Beside him, the train of her gown whispered over the flagstones, and her hand rested at her waist, and she kept her chin level and her eyes forward, and by the time they reached the doors they moved like a procession of two.

Rain had come. Thick, gray, roaring on the churchyard gravel. The carriage waited at the bottom of the steps with its lamps lit and the horses stamping and steaming, and the coachman ran forward with an umbrella, his face red — as though the weather were something he had personally arranged and botched.

Adrian stopped at the threshold.

Steps. Seven of them, wet, shallow, sloping. Unremarkable steps. Steps a child could take at a run.

He stared at them, and rage went through him like a shot, so sudden and so hot that for a moment he could not see.

“The ramp,” he said.

The word came out clean and clipped. It was one of the small, unbearable words he had taught himself in the months after the accident — words that let him ask for help without asking.

The coachman and a footman fetched a wooden ramp from behind the carriage and laid it over the steps. It took less than a minute. It took a year. The rain darkened the boards, and Adrian set his hands to the wheels and pushed, and one wheel slipped on the wet wood and the whole chair lurched sideways before the footman caught it from behind.

He did not look at her. Not once, not during any of it. He fixed his eyes on the open door of the carriage, the dark leather inside, the dry air, and he climbed into it like a man climbing out of a pit with his teeth.

She did not help. She did not fuss. She did not do any of the thousand small, well-meant, unbearable things that people did. She stood in the rain in her ivory silk, the hem going dark and heavy, and waited with the patience of stone.

Then she climbed in ahead of him, settled her skirts with a practiced hand, and folded her hands in her lap, and the footmen lifted his chair into the carriage with all the smoothness of a maneuver long rehearsed, and shut the door, and the world became a close, leather-scented box with rain drumming on the roof.

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

“You are angry,” she said at last.

“You are perceptive, Duchess.”

“I would be a fool not to notice. You have barely looked at me since the vows.”

He turned his head toward the streaming glass. He was angry at the empty church. At the bodies who had not come. At his own two useless legs and the entire grinding machinery of a city that had already filed him away under tragedy and moved on to the next amusement.

“The weather,” he said.

She laughed — a soft, unhurried sound, entirely without mockery, which somehow made it far worse and far better.

“The weather,” she agreed. “I see.”

And she took her glove off, laid her bare hand over the back of his on the arm of the chair, and said, “Your Grace — let us be honest with each other. We are going to have to be, if we are to survive the next year.”