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

Chapter 6

The invitations went out three weeks after the wedding.

Lenora wrote them herself in a decisive upright hand, eleven of them, addressed to eleven of the first families of London, and to Lord and Lady Fenton, whose table she had never sat at and whose daughter-in-law was, she had determined, exactly the sort of woman who could be leveraged into attending a dinner for the sheer pleasure of being able to describe it.

There was a date. There was a menu settled with the cook. There was the great dining room polished, the good china unpacked, the hothouse stripped of its best blooms, and the twelve places set at eight precisely, with the decanters filled and the candles standing tall and unlit, waiting for the hour.

Not one reply came.

By the fourth day Adrian had stopped asking. By the seventh he had stopped mentioning it. The footman who had carried the invitations into London returned with no letters, no cards, no notes of regret — which was itself an answer of a kind so final it did not even require words. It was not neglect. It was a decision, taken collectively, quietly, in drawing rooms he was no longer invited into.

On the night itself, he found her in the dining room at eight o’clock exactly, standing beside the long table, adjusting the angle of a fork by a quarter inch.

The candles were lit. All twelve of them.

“Nobody is coming,” he said from the doorway.

“I know.”

“Then — ” He stopped. He wheeled himself forward over the threshold and out into the open plain of polished floor. “Then why light the candles? Why prepare the food? Why stand there with a fork in your hand and put yourself through the farce?”

Lenora set down the fork.

“Because it matters that we kept our word,” she said, turning. Her smile was level and shining and did not falter. “We invited them. We prepared for them. We made ourselves ready to be gracious to them. If they chose not to come, that is a reflection upon them. Not upon us.”

“It is a humiliation.”

“Humiliation is only effective if one agrees to be humiliated.”

She walked toward him, her gown — deep green silk, chosen, he understood now, to look like a challenge — rustling over the floor.

“I have been humiliated before, Your Grace. I have stood in drawing rooms where nobody would speak to me and watched the hostess’s eyes go straight through me to someone worth talking to. I have watched my mother be cut dead by women she had known for twenty years. On one particular evening I stood in the corner of a card room for three hours holding a glass of ratafia I did not want, and not one person of the forty in that house said a word to me, and I held my head up the whole time and I smiled, and when I got into the carriage I was so tired that I slept with my eyes open.” She stopped, close to him, and put out a hand to the carving on the arm of his chair — not touching him, but resting there. “I survived that evening. I will survive this one. The difference tonight is that I am not alone, and neither are you.”

Adrian looked at her for a long moment.

“Sit with me,” he said.

Her smile changed. It went warm at the edges, and became — for the first time in his sight — absolutely private.

“At the head of the table,” she said. “Yes.”

They dined together, the two of them, in a room built for forty, while the footmen in their Blackmore livery moved through the empty chairs and served course after course to nobody, and the candles burned down, and outside the long windows the rain came on again. Soup, fish, a saddle of mutton, a lemon syllabub. The cook had outdone himself and wept, reportedly, in the kitchen.

And slowly, grudgingly, Adrian Ellsworth began to talk to his wife. Not the guarded exchanges of the past three weeks — the small coin of courtesy — but something nearer the bone.

“You said there were men who would see your family destroyed,” he said, when the third course had been cleared away. “Who?”

She turned her glass by its stem.

“There is one in particular. A man who lent my father money when every other door in London was shut in our faces — and at terms that seemed generous. We were grateful. My father cried, when he read the papers. It was eighteen months before we understood that the terms had been written by a man who intended from the first day to own everything we had.”

Adrian’s hand tightened on his wine glass.

“His name,” Lenora said, “is Lord Philip Draycott.”

He did not move.

“You know him.”

“I knew him.” The words came out of him hard and level, like iron out of a mould. “We were at Eton together. He was the nearest thing to a brother I ever had, for fifteen years. When my father died he sat up with me two nights running. When I was thrown, he came to the house once. He stood at the foot of my bed and looked at me as though I were already in the ground, and I ordered him out, and I have not seen his face since.”

“Then you did not know,” Lenora said, “that in the last year he has bought the debts of half the families in London. He offers help to men who are drowning. Then he calls in the notes at the worst possible hour, and takes the estate, the pictures, the silver, the house, and calls it commerce.” Her voice did not waver. “He took our library in crates. He took my mother’s pearls off her dressing table. And then he came to my father with a proposal.”

“What proposal?”

“He offered to forgive the debts entire — every shilling — in exchange for my hand in marriage.”

The room was very quiet. The candles had burned low and the shadows had come in close.

“I refused him,” Lenora said. “My father refused him, and it cost him the last of his health. Two months later, the Duke of Ravenwood’s solicitor approached my father with a very different offer. A marriage between our families. A settlement, a jointure, an alliance.” She lifted her eyes. “It was a rope thrown to a drowning man, Your Grace. I took it.”

Adrian stared at her. Then he looked down at the table — at the twelve plates, ten of them untouched; at the empty chairs where the ton should have been sitting; at the ruin of his house’s standing laid out in silver and crystal and unlit company.

“Draycott was invited,” he said slowly. “He did not come.”

“He would not. He would not give you the satisfaction.”

“He will have told the others not to come.” Adrian’s voice had gone flat. “He will have told them it would be a farce. He will have told them that the Duke of Ravenwood is finished, and that his wife is a fortune-hunter’s daughter who took a cripple because nobody else would have her.”

“Very likely, yes.”

“And you sit there smiling.”

“I am not smiling at you.” Lenora leaned forward across the corner of the great table, and there was no softness in her face at all now — only the sharp, honed edge of a woman who had been ground down by five years of losing and had come out of it with an edge on her. “I am smiling because he has made a mistake. He believes I am a pawn he failed to buy. He believes you are a wreck he has already finished with. He is wrong on both counts, and the beautiful part, Your Grace, is that he does not know it yet.”

She reached across, and took his hand — an unthinking breach of every rule he had built around himself — and he did not withdraw it.

“He has left a trail,” she said. “Ledgers. Promissory notes. Letters. He is arrogant, and arrogance leaves paper behind it. My father kept copies of everything — he was careful, even at the end. If we can gather the proof of what he has done, we can finish him.”

Adrian looked down at their joined hands. His thumb moved once, involuntarily, across her knuckles.

“You have thought about this a great deal,” he said.

“I have thought about nothing else for two years.”

“Then we will need a plan.”

Lenora’s smile came back, bright and dangerous as a drawn blade.

“I have already begun one,” she said. “There is a man coming to call on us tomorrow morning, Your Grace, and I should tell you about him before he arrives. His name is Mr. Pryce. And he is going to tell you something about your own father’s estate that will make you very, very angry.”