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

Chapter 9

The Marquess of Wexford’s ballroom held four hundred people, and on the night of the fifteenth of May it held four hundred and six.

Candlelight ran in long yellow rivers down from six chandeliers. The floor had been chalked and polished until it rang under the slippers of the dancers. The air was a thick compound of beeswax and orange water and hot silk and the particular sourness of a great many people pretending to be delighted to see each other. Music came in gusts from the gallery — a string band, two dozen strong, sawing out a country air while the wings of the room stirred like a pond.

Adrian Ellsworth entered by the service stairs.

There were four of them, stone, narrow, and wet from the evening’s earlier rain, and four footmen carried his chair up with the practiced blankness of men who had been instructed to look neither at him nor at each other. Lenora went ahead of him, up the same stairs, and at the top she stopped and waited and did not turn to watch the carrying, which he understood to be deliberate, and appreciated more than he could say.

They came into the ballroom through a side door at the far end, past the card room, and the announcement of their names fell into the room like a dropped glass.

“His Grace the Duke of Ravenwood and the Duchess of Ravenwood.”

The dancing did not stop. Not quite. But it faltered — a beat missed here, a pair out of step there, and then a spreading silence, wave after wave, as heads turned and voices dropped to that particular low hum that carries farther than any shout ever written.

Adrian had prepared himself. He had spent three weeks preparing himself — for the stairs, the humiliation, the whispers, the swift, pitying glances that slid away, the men who would shake his hand and then step back a pace too quickly. He had rehearsed the faces he would make.

Preparation, it turned out, was worth nothing at all. The reality arrived as a physical weight: four hundred people looking at him at once, and every one of them thinking the same thing, which was that is what is left of him.

He kept his chin level and his hands still on the arms of the chair.

And then Lenora Vale stepped forward.

She moved a half-pace ahead of him, so that she stood slightly in front of the chair — deliberately, so deliberately that he nearly laughed aloud, because it meant that when a man looked at the Duchess of Ravenwood he would have to decide whether he was also looking at her husband, and most of them, being cowards, would simply look at her.

She was dressed in crimson.

Not the pale, blushing pink of the marriageable or the lavender of the widowed. Crimson — deep, saturated, blood-dark red silk, cut with a severity that made every other gown in the room look fussy: a high collar, sleeves to the elbow, a bodice as plain as a court sword, and no ornament except a single strand of pearls that had been her mother’s and had been bought back from pawn by her father eight years later. Her dark hair was coiled high and threaded with small white flowers. Her cheeks were flushed. Her eyes were bright as a fencer’s.

No unmarried woman in that room could have worn that color. Every woman in that room knew it.

She walked into the Wexford ballroom the way a woman walks into her own dining room, and the crowd parted.

Adrian followed in the chair, and the whispers came at him in fragments as he went — the crippled Duke — there he is — the March girl that nobody would have — they say no one went to the wedding at all — and he felt his hands tighten on the wheel rims, and he kept pushing, and his jaw was set, and he did not look left or right.

Near the refreshment table, golden head bent over a glass of champagne, stood Lord Philip Draycott.

He looked up as they passed. He was still handsome — that was the first, insulting fact — in the polished, sunlit way that had always drawn people to him, the easy smile and the excellent tailoring and the eyes that knew exactly how much they were worth. But there was something harder in his face than there had been at Eton. The charm had been laid over the cruelty so many times, varnish upon varnish, that a stranger might not see it. Adrian saw it.

Their eyes met across forty feet of polished floor.

Draycott raised his glass — one small, mocking tilt, a salute to an old friend — and drank, and smiled, and turned back to his companions.

Adrian did not respond.

“There,” Lenora said at his shoulder, quietly, for him alone. “Now they have all seen us. Shall we make them see something else?”

“What did you have in mind?”

She leaned down, so that her lips were near his ear and her perfume — lavender and something green — briefly replaced the smell of the room.

“Dance with me,” she said.

He turned his head and stared at her.

“I cannot dance.”

“I know,” said Lenora Vale. “But I can.” She straightened, and extended one hand — not to him, but to the empty floor beyond him, in a gesture that took in the whole bright expanse of the ballroom. “Watch me.”

And she walked out into the middle of the floor, alone, and began to dance.

It was not a waltz; she had no partner for a waltz. It was a country figure, the sort the band had been playing all evening — one of the old ones, with the little hop in the third bar and the turn on the outside — and she danced it by herself, with a joyful, exact precision, her crimson skirts swinging, her chin up, perfectly and deliberately and gloriously out of place.

The dancers around her stopped, uncertain.

Then a young ensign, drunk enough to be brave, stepped forward and offered his hand. Lenora took it, and they moved together through the figure, and she laughed — he heard her laugh from across the room, over the music, and something inside his chest went hot and tight.

He watched from the edge of the floor and forgot, for a full minute, to breathe.

She was claiming the room. Inch by inch, note by note — not in spite of the whispers but out of them, turning humiliation into spectacle so skillfully that by the time the figure ended and she curtsied to the ensign with a flourish that would have done credit to a courtier, half the room was applauding, and had not decided whether it was on her side or merely amused by her.

She came back to him with her cheeks pink and her eyes blazing.

“There,” she said. “Now they have something else to talk about.”

Adrian reached for her hand, and she gave it without hesitation, and he held it a moment longer than the room required.

“You are extraordinary,” he said.

Her smile softened at the edges.

“I am doing only what I told you I would do, Your Grace,” she said. “Surviving.”