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

Chapter 8

The conservatory at the west end of Ravenwood had been built by a duchess three generations back — a long, iron-ribbed glass palace with steam pipes beneath the flagstones and a domed lantern at its center, designed for a woman who had wanted oranges in December and had the fortune to insist upon it.

She had been dead seventy years. The orange trees had died with her. Afterwards, the glass had gone gray with dust, and the pipes had rusted, and the whole vast structure had settled into the long, quiet ruin of things nobody any longer needs.

Lenora took it as her first campaign.

Within a month there were gardeners in it — three of them, and a glazier, and a man from the village who knew a great deal about drainage and nothing about society. Broken panes were replaced. The flagstones were scrubbed. New pipes were laid. The earth in the long beds was turned over and fed, and the first green shoots came up through the dark in fat, improbable curls, and sunlight — real sunlight — began streaming through clean glass in long yellow bars.

Adrian came every morning.

He told himself it was the warmth. Glass holds heat; the conservatory was the warmest room on the estate, and his legs had ached all winter, and a man in a wheeled chair is entitled to seek the sun. He came rolling down the newly widened path — she had had the gravel paths in the garden widened in March, without asking, in the same way she did everything, by announcing it — and he would sit among the seedlings with a newspaper he did not read and watch her work.

She did not garden for show. She directed, and consulted with the head gardener about soil mixtures and shade and the sloping of the beds, and then, when she could not stop herself, she would kneel in her gray-blue wool frock with her hair pinned back and her hands in the dirt, planting something herself.

“You are staring again,” she said one morning, without looking up from a tray of seedlings.

“I am observing.”

“You are staring. It is not the same thing.”

He did not deny it.

The light fell across her face in that particular way that made her look younger and less armored. He had learned by now to read her two smiles: the public one, bright and perfect as lacquer, which she deployed in doorways and drawing rooms like a standard on a pole; and this one, small, absent, entirely unconscious, which appeared when she was thinking about soil. He had come to collect the second one the way a man collects coins in a strange country.

“Your gardeners say you have a gift,” he said.

“My gardeners are kind. I pay them well.”

“That is not kindness. That is loyalty.”

She looked up. Something in her face softened at the edge.

“Loyalty is not bought, Your Grace,” she said. “It is earned.”

The conservatory’s small stove ticked. Water dripped somewhere in the pipes with a sound like a slow, patient clock. He wheeled himself nearer, over the smooth new stones; he had stopped noticing the ramps, which was itself a kind of noticing.

“You have changed things here,” he said. “The house. The gardens. The staff.”

“Is that a complaint?”

“It is an observation.” He paused. The next word cost him more than a mortgage. “I am grateful.”

Lenora set down the seedlings and did not smile, which he was grateful for too. She simply nodded once, gravely, and let the word lie where it had fallen.

“Draycott has been asking questions about you,” she said, after a while. “My father wrote yesterday. He called at Vale House last week and demanded to know where I had gone.”

“He did not know?”

“He knew. He did not believe it.” She wiped her hands on her apron and began, with great care, to straighten a row of small clay pots. “He told my father that I should come crawling back soon enough. That a cripple would not hold my interest a season. Those were his words.”

Adrian felt the familiar heat rise in him and, for the second time in his life, banked it deliberately.

“He means to provoke you,” he said.

“He means to provoke you. He wants a public scene, so that he may play the wronged party. He has been telling London that the marriage is a sham, that your affairs are in ruins, that I have been sold like a heifer to save my father from the poorhouse.” Her hands were steady on the pots. “He is building a story, Your Grace. And the story he wants is that the Duke of Ravenwood is a bitter recluse with a bought wife, hiding in the country while his creditors circle.”

“Then we will give him a different story.”

Lenora looked up, interested.

“There is a ball at the Wexfords’ next month. The opening of the season.” Adrian’s hands tightened on the wheels. “I have not appeared at a public assembly since the accident. I intend to attend.”

The words came out level. Inside him, something turned over like a horse refusing a jump; the memory of a hundred ballrooms crossed at the head of a crowd, a thousand eyes following him because he was the Duke of Ravenwood and the Duke of Ravenwood was the most graceful man in any room he entered.

That man was gone. What remained would have to walk in through the service door and be carried up four stairs.

“You cannot be serious,” Lenora said quietly.

“I am entirely serious.”

“They will stare. They will whisper. There will be some who are cruel — deliberately, with pleasure. And they will do it most to you, because you are the one they cannot forgive for surviving.”

“I know.”

“You may be hurt.”

“I have been hurt.”

She stood, then, and came to him, and knelt beside the chair as she had in the library, and took his hand. He was beginning to expect it now. That was itself worrying.

“If you do this,” she said, “I will be beside you the whole evening, and I will not leave your side for a minute, and if anyone dares to say a word within my hearing I will take it out of their hide in front of the whole room.” She said this with perfect composure, as though reading out a recipe. “That is not a courtesy, Your Grace. That is a promise. Do you understand me?”

Adrian looked at her, kneeling there with dirt under her fingernails and fire in her face.

“I understand you,” he said.

He raised his hand — slowly, because he had not touched a woman’s face since before the accident, and the gesture had ceased to feel like something he was allowed — and laid his fingers against her cheek.

She did not flinch. She leaned into it, and closed her eyes for just a moment, and something between them shifted weight, like a floorboard settling in an old house.

“Helena,” he said — no; he said, “Lenora,” and her name in his mouth felt new, less like a formality and more like a door left ajar.

“Yes.”

“I want to say something to you and I do not know how.”

“You may take your time.” She opened her eyes. “We have a great deal of it. Three weeks to the ball. And the rest of our lives, if we are careful.”

Adrian let his thumb trace once along the line of her jaw, and then dropped his hand, because if he had not, he would have said something he was not yet ready to be held to.

“Then we should begin planning,” he said. “Tell me what you intend to wear.”

Lenora rose, and smoothed her skirts, and the private smile came back with all its teeth in it.

“Something scandalous,” she said. “I intend to give the ton something else to talk about.”