Chapter Four
“Miss Finch. A word, if you please.”
Eleanor had been preparing to retire for the evening—had, in fact, been counting the minutes until she could escape to her small guest room and stop performing a composure she did not feel—when the Duke of Thornwood appeared at her elbow like a particularly well-dressed apparition.
She turned, and found herself closer to him than she had been during their earlier conversation.
Close enough to notice that his eyes were not merely dark, as she had first thought, but a deep brown flecked with amber near the pupils.
Close enough to detect the faint scent of something clean and masculine—sandalwood, perhaps, or cedar.
Close enough that her traitorous heart faltered in her chest before she could command it to behave.
“Your Grace,” she said, and was gratified by the steadiness of her voice. “I was just retiring.”
“This will not take long.” He glanced about the drawing room, where the remaining guests were engaged in cards and conversation and the gentle social warfare that passed for entertainment among the aristocracy. “Is there somewhere we might speak privately?”
Privately.
The word landed between them with weight it should not have carried. Eleanor was acutely aware of the impropriety of the request—a young woman (well, youngish; nine-and-twenty was hardly ancient, whatever Aunt Georgiana might insist) alone with an unmarried duke would set tongues wagging for weeks.
But she was equally aware that refusal would be… difficult. One did not refuse dukes, particularly not dukes who regarded one with an expression so difficult to interpret.
“The small parlour off the east corridor, perhaps,” she heard herself say. “It is unlikely to be occupied at this hour.”
He inclined his head once, sharply. “I shall join you there in a moment.”
Eleanor inclined her own head in acknowledgement, then crossed the room with deliberate composure. Only when she reached the corridor did she allow herself a glance backwards before she continued toward the small parlour, trusting that the Duke would follow at a suitably discreet interval.
***
The small parlour was, as Eleanor had predicted, empty. It was a modest room by the standards of Lady Rutledge’s house—a single settee, two armchairs, and a fireplace allowed to burn low—but it offered something the drawing room did not: silence.
Eleanor positioned herself near the window, maintaining a careful distance between them. The Duke remained standing near the door, his scarred face half in shadow, his posture that of a man preparing for battle rather than conversation.
What could he possibly wish to discuss? she wondered. We spoke for five minutes. He cannot—surely he cannot—
“I will be direct,” he said, cutting through her spiralling thoughts. “I find directness saves time, and I have little patience for the alternative.”
“I appreciate directness, Your Grace.”
“Good.” He paused, and something flickered across his expression—hesitation, perhaps, or discomfort. It vanished before she could name it. “I require a wife.”
Eleanor blinked.
Of all the openings she might have anticipated, that had not been among them.
“I… see,” she managed.
“The requirement is legal rather than personal,” he continued, as though he were discussing crop yields or tenant disputes rather than matrimony.
“My father’s will contains a clause stipulating that I must marry before my thirty-fifth birthday or forfeit a significant portion of the estate.
I am four-and-thirty. My birthday is in eleven months. ”
“That is… an unusual clause.”
“My father was an unusual man.” The words were flat, devoid of affection. “He anticipated, correctly, that I would resist marriage. He merely ensured that resistance would prove costly.”
Eleanor found herself oddly grateful for his bluntness.
It was clarifying in a way social niceties rarely were.
He was not here to court her. He was not here because their earlier conversation had moved him, or because he had perceived in her something others had missed.
He was here because he required a wife, and she was… what? Convenient? Available?
Desperate enough, her mind supplied. A woman in your position.
“Why are you telling me this?” she asked carefully.
“Because I am proposing to you.”
The words fell like stones dropped into still water. Eleanor felt the ripples spread through her—shock, confusion, and beneath them both, something perilously close to hope, which she crushed at once.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I am proposing marriage,” he repeated, as though she had simply failed to hear him the first time.
“I have observed you over the course of this evening. You are intelligent, composed, and evidently accustomed to managing difficult situations. You do not appear to require excessive conversation or social performance. You are—” He paused, and again that flicker of something crossed his face. “You are practical.”
Practical.
Eleanor very nearly laughed. But the sound caught in her throat, tangled among too many conflicting emotions to emerge cleanly.
“Your Grace,” she said, when she trusted her voice, “we have been acquainted for approximately three hours. You cannot possibly—”
“I can, and I am.” He took a step forward, then appeared to reconsider and halted.
“I am not proposing a love match, Miss Finch. I am not capable of offering romance or… sentiment. What I offer is a practical arrangement. Financial security. Independence within the marriage. A household to manage, if that appeals to you. And my word that I will never make demands you are unwilling to meet.”
The fire crackled in the silence that followed. Eleanor could hear her own breathing, too loud in the quiet room, and she concentrated upon steadying it.
He is offering security, she told herself. He is offering a home. He is offering everything you have spent the past seven years pretending you did not want.
And he is offering it because you are practical. Because you are useful. Because you will not expect anything more.
The realisation ought to have wounded. Perhaps it did, somewhere beneath the numbness spreading through her chest. But Eleanor had spent too many years armouring herself against disappointment to allow it to show.
“What are the expectations?” she heard herself ask. “Specifically.”
Something shifted in his expression—surprise, perhaps, that she had not refused outright.
“You would manage the household. Handle correspondence and accounts, should you wish, though staff exist for such purposes. Appear with me at social functions when absolutely necessary, though I avoid them whenever possible.”
“And heirs?”
The question emerged steadier than she felt. It was the question a practical woman would ask—the question that must be asked, given the nature of his proposal.
“Eventually, yes. The estate requires an heir.” His jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly. “I would not… I understand that such matters require consideration. I would not rush you, or press you beyond what you were willing to offer.”
What you were willing to offer.
As though she would be granting him a favour. As though her participation in the most intimate aspect of marriage were a concession rather than a requirement.
It was, Eleanor realised, the most consideration anyone had ever shown her regarding her own body and its uses.
“Would I be required to appear in society often?” she asked.
“No. I myself prefer solitude. The estate is remote, and I have no intention of returning to London more than strictly necessary.”
“And my family? My relatives?”
“You may see them as often or as seldom as you wish. I have no interest in controlling your associations.”
Eleanor considered this. Question by question, he was sketching the outline of a marriage that was… not unpleasant. Not what she had ever imagined, certainly—not the union of souls romantic novels promised—but neither the gilded cage her mother had endured.
He is offering freedom, she thought. Within limits. Within duty. But freedom nonetheless.
And what is the alternative? More years in the Cheswick household, translating correspondence and performing drawing-room amusements until you are too old to be of use?
At least this would be your own invisibility. Your own household. Your own quiet obscurity, rather than a borrowed one.
“I should tell you something,” she said, before she could lose her nerve.
He waited.
He had offered her terms. Circumstances.
Expectations. All with admirable clarity.
Yet he had not asked what she liked, or feared, or preferred—and she found, suddenly and irrationally, that she wished him to leave this conversation knowing at least one small truth about her.
Something that belonged to herself alone.
She searched for it—and discovered, with faint unease, that she possessed very little practice in offering herself as anything other than useful.
“I have a fear of cats,” she said at last, the admission emerging with more haste than grace. “It is a childish thing, I know. But I have never been comfortable in their presence. If there are many upon the estate—”
His expression shifted. Just for an instant, so swiftly she might have imagined it, something crossed his face that might have been surprise, or dismay, or simple acknowledgement.
“There are… none within the house,” he said.
It was not, she noticed, a denial that cats existed upon the property. It was a careful distinction—within the house, rather than elsewhere—that suggested there was more to the matter than he chose to reveal.
But he had not lied to her. He had offered a truth, even if it was not the whole of it, and that was more candour than most men would have extended.
She drew a steadying breath.
“Then I accept,” Eleanor said.