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

Chapter 4

The rain followed them the whole way out of London, and by the time the carriage turned onto the long drive of Ravenwood Hall the sky had gone the color of old pewter and the trees on either side were streaming.

It was a monstrous house. Three generations of Ellsworths had built it with more ambition than taste: a great gray stone block with a colonnade they had no business affording, windows cut narrow to save on glass, and a roofline bristling with chimneys that smoked badly in any wind. Adrian had grown up in it. He had ridden his first pony across the park when he was four. He had run the length of the gallery a thousand times as a boy, bare feet on cold marble, his brother’s breath hot at his neck.

Now he looked at it from behind wet glass and felt nothing but the old, exhausted calculation: how many steps to the door, how many to his study, how many servants would be watching.

“You are angry,” she said suddenly, “because I am not weeping.”

His head turned.

“You expected a bride who would flinch at the sight of the chair,” she went on, quite evenly. “Instead you find yourself married to a woman who smiles, and you cannot trust it. You would like me to be either pitiable or pitiful, and I am neither, and that unsettles you more than the chair ever could.”

“You are presumptuous,” he said.

“I am accurate. You may decide later which one you dislike more.”

The carriage stopped. The door opened. Rain, footmen, the chair lifted down, the long wet walk up the steps under an umbrella held by a footman who would not meet his eyes.

Ravenwood Hall took its new duchess in without a single cheer. The servants lined up in the hall with their hands folded and their eyes down — a housekeeper whose face was a sealed envelope, a valet with gray at his temples, a row of maids all studying the floor as though the pattern had just been discovered. Adrian read the room the way he had once read a regiment: not with hostility, but suspicion; not with pity, but the particular wariness people reserve for a house that has been ill for a long time.

“Mrs. Wren,” he said, “show Her Grace to the east chambers. Fire in both rooms. Dinner at eight.”

“Your Grace.” The housekeeper inclined her head — to him, pointedly, and only then, a beat later, to the woman beside him.

Adrian saw Lenora see it. He saw her notice, and file it away, and smile her radiant, terrible smile at the housekeeper, and thank her by name.

Within the hour he had shut himself in his study with a decanter, which was the coward’s version of what he actually wanted, which was to be left alone with the wound of the day and to drink it down to the lees.

Dinner was served in a room built to seat forty.

He sat at the head of the table, at the exact angle he always took now, so that he could see the door and the windows and not have to turn his head too far. She took the place at his right — not the far end, not a decorous half-acre of mahogany away, but at his right hand, near enough that when she reached for her glass he could have touched her elbow without moving.

The food was excellent. The cook, God bless him, had made an effort — clear soup, a raised pie, a dish of braised celery that must have cost the kitchen three days’ notice. The candles stood in a pair of silver candelabra that had not been lit in a year.

The silence was enormous.

“I will not apologize for the house,” Adrian said abruptly, setting down his spoon before he had used it. “It is what it is.”

“I did not ask you to apologize.”

“You are too agreeable.”

Her eyebrows rose. “Would you prefer me disagreeable, Your Grace?”

“I would prefer you honest. If you find Ravenwood cold, say so. If you regret what you did today, say it now, while there is still time to find a way to undo it.”

She set down her own spoon. Deliberately. The small click of silver on silver rang around the vaulted room like a dropped coin.

“Do you wish to undo it?”

The question sat between them. Adrian’s eyes, pale gray as February sky, narrowed.

“I wish to know what I have brought you into.”

“You have brought me into nothing.” She rose — and for one rough second he thought she meant to walk out, and the shame of that rose in his throat like bile; but she only crossed to the sideboard and poured herself a glass of water. When she turned back, her face was unguarded in a way he had not seen before. “I walked in of my own accord, Your Grace. Nobody dragged me down that aisle. I am not a girl who was sold, and you are not a man who bought me. If you insist on seeing yourself as my ruin, you will have to do it without my help.”

“You talk like a solicitor.”

“I talk like someone who has spent five years watching lawyers circle her father’s estate like crows on a hedge.”

Adrian said nothing. She came back and sat down and squared her back against the tall chair.

“You are angry that I am not weeping,” she said again, softer, “and you cannot understand why I smiled in that church. So I will tell you. I have stood in drawing rooms where no one would speak to me. I have watched my mother be cut dead by women who dined at her table for twenty years. I have smiled at creditors while they carried the library out of the house in crates. I learned early that a woman’s smile is a weapon, Your Grace — the only one most of us are permitted to carry. I smiled at those men. I am smiling at you. But not for the reason you think.”

“Then for what reason?”

“Because for the first time in five years,” Lenora Vale said, “I have a chance to build something instead of losing it.”

The fire cracked. Rain hammered the long windows. Somewhere deep in the house a door closed, and the sound traveled the corridors like a footstep in an empty church.

Adrian looked at her across the length of the table — at the high cheekbones, the determined mouth, the hands that were perfectly still in her lap — and felt a sensation he had not felt in months. Not hope; he distrusted hope. Something smaller and more dangerous. Interest.

“You will find,” he said slowly, “that I am not an easy man to live with. I do not sleep. I have nightmares. My temper is bad in the morning and worse at night. I drink more than I should and I smoke more than is good for me. I despise pity, and I will bite your head off when you offer it, even if you do not mean to.”

“I do not offer pity,” she said. “I offer partnership.”

He laughed — one hard, short sound, entirely without mirth. “Partnership. You speak as though we were opening a shipping house.”

“Is a marriage not a kind of house? Two people pooling their capital toward a common end.”

“And what end is that?”

Lenora leaned forward. The candlelight caught the honey in her eyes and turned it to something like gold.

“Survival,” she said. “That first. And then — perhaps — something beyond it.”