Page 62 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Late in the day he had met Selby on the stairs and stopped her, which he had not meant to do.

“How is she?”

“Quiet, Your Grace. She took a little broth at noon, when Lady Augusta sat with her. She has not wept that I have seen, and I would rest easier if she had.” Selby’s face did not change. “She asked me one thing only, this morning.”

“What did she ask.”

“Whether you were very angry with her.”

The question went into him sideways, like a blade slid between two ribs to find the gap on purpose. “And what did you tell her.”

“That it was not my place to say what His Grace felt, since His Grace has never once told me, nor anyone, in all my years in this house.” A pause, and something almost gentle crossed the severe face. “If you will forgive the liberty, Your Grace, it might be the one thing in the world worth the telling, just at present. To her, I mean. Not to me.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Selby. That will be all.”

He did not go up, though he stood at the foot of the stairs a long while after she had gone, and the not-going was the single hardest thing he had done all day.

After midnight, with the fire down to embers, he let himself think about what he had held off since dawn.

He should have taken the man’s life in the folly. It would have been the simplest sum in the world. He thought it without heat, the way he thought of drainage and notes of hand, and turned it over, and put it down.

He would not grant Vance the mercy of a quick dispatch. A sudden end was a privilege, and he had no pity for a man who had attempted to destroy her reputation for mere wages. He would ruin the lieutenant slowly instead, and the earl who hired him slower still, by inches, over months, in ways no court would trace to a duke who had been quietly at home in the country the whole while.

The thought gave him no satisfaction. He sat with it until the fire was out, and it did not warm him, and it did not leave him, and somewhere above him, three floors up, his wife was sitting at a dark window believing herself despised by the only man in England who would have burned the world down to keep her from harm.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“You’ve not touched the toast, Your Grace, nor the soup, and the soup was the white one you favor. Cook made it special.”

“Thank you, Bess. Leave it. I am not hungry.”

“You weren’t hungry yesterday either, my lady, if you’ll forgive me.” But Bess left it, because there was nothing in the duchess’s voice to argue with, no temper, no grief, nothing at all, only a flat quiet that frightened the girl worse than weeping would have, and she went out and closed the door softly and told the others below that Her Grace was no better.

There were messages, too, every day, carried up by the maid in a careful voice. His Grace hoped Her Grace had rested. His Grace begged she would not trouble herself about the household, which was in good order. His Grace asked whether there was anything she wished sent up, a book, a higher fire, the physician if she would see him. Ellen received each of them lying still, and sent back each time that she wanted for nothing and was very well, and the maid carried the falsehood down and brought up the next day’s message in its place.

The small daily traffic of it, his asking and her refusing across three floors of a silent house, was, that week, the whole of the matrimony, conducted by a frightened girl with a tray who did not understand a word of what she carried.

Ellen did not weep, in those days, and she did not rage. She simply stopped.

She stopped going down to breakfast, and trays came up and went down again barely touched. She stopped walking to the stables, and Heather stood in her box and was exercised by a groom and turned her head toward the yard gate each morning at the hour her mistress used to come, and gave it up, and Hibbert said nothing to anyone but had a hard look about the eyes.

She stopped walking the kitchen garden. The weeds came back among the cleared beds, slowly, the way they do. The stillroom inventory she had been compiling sat half-finished on the desk in her sitting room with the ink dried on the quill.

The Burtons’ roof was thatched that week, clean and whole before the hard frost, exactly as she had ordered it through Crewe the afternoon of the folly. She did not know it had been done. No one thought to tell a woman who had stopped asking about anything, and so the one good and lasting thing she had set in motion went up over a poor family’s heads without her ever learning that it had.

The kitchen sent up the things she liked without being asked, the pear preserve and the white soup and the thin dry toast, and most of it came down again, and the cook took it as a personal grief and made more.

Once, Bess brought a message up from the stables along with the tray. “Hibbert asks, Your Grace, was the mare to be kept to the paddock or took over the south ride as usual. He says she’s gone off her feed, and stands at the yard gate of a morning, and he didn’t like to settle it without your word.” A small pause. “He says, begging pardon for the saying of it, that they go like that, the clever ones, when they’re used to a person and the person stops coming. He says a turn out over the ridge might mend her quicker than any paddock would.”

“Tell Hibbert to do as he thinks best,” Ellen said, to the window, and Bess went away, and it did not once occur to her, that whole day that Hibbert had not truly been asking about the mare at all.

She sat at her window.

The window gave on the park, and she sat in the chair beside it with her hands in her lap and watched the light cross the grass and the rooks go up off the home wood at dusk and come down again, and she thought, in slow circles that always came round to the same three places. Her brother, who had sold her across a desk to clear his gaming debts.

The lieutenant, who had written her a letter in a warm false hand and led her into the dark to be ruined for a fee. And her husband, who had been there, who had ridden out of the trees and seen the whole of it, the held hands and the weeping and the embrace, and who had brought her home and had not spoken to her since.

The circle always closed on him. That was the part she could not get past. A man who loathed her could have made use of the folly. A man who wished to be rid of her had been handed the perfect means. He had used none of it. He had wrapped her in his own coat and walked her home and asked nothing and reproached nothing and simply withdrawn, and she did not know what to do with a mercy she could not understand and felt she had not earned, and so she did the only thing that was left, which was nothing.