Chapter Four #2
The words fell into the silence like stones dropped into deep water. She watched his face for some reaction—relief, perhaps, or the quiet satisfaction of a task completed—but found none. His expression remained carefully neutral, betraying nothing.
“Very well,” he said. “I shall set the necessary arrangements in motion. We may marry within the month, if that is agreeable.”
“Within the month.” She repeated it numbly. Four weeks to transform from spinster companion to duchess. Four weeks to leave behind everything she knew—meagre as it was—and step into a life she could scarcely imagine.
“Unless you require more time.”
“No.” The word came quickly, instinctively. More time would invite more doubt. More doubt would invite more fear. And Eleanor had learnt, long ago, that hesitation was a luxury she could not afford. “Within the month will suffice.”
He inclined his head. Then, after a pause that stretched just a fraction too long: “Thank you, Miss Finch.”
Thank you. As though she had done him a kindness. As though her acceptance were a gift rather than a transaction.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” she replied, and the words tasted strange upon her tongue.
He turned to leave, and something compelled her to speak again before she could prevent it.
“Your Grace.”
He paused at the door.
“Why me?” The question emerged before she could consider whether she wished to hear the answer.
“There are a dozen women here this evening who would accept your proposal. Women with dowries. With connections. With—” Beauty, she did not say, but the word lingered between them nonetheless. “Why choose me?”
He remained silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was quieter than before—almost, she thought, uncertain.
“Because you quoted Dante when they asked for romance,” he said.
“Because you did not flinch when they called it a parlour trick. Because when I asked whether usefulness had comforts, you told me it was the only answer you possessed.” He paused.
“And because when you looked at me, you did not look away.”
Eleanor’s breath caught.
“Those are not practical reasons,” she whispered.
“No,” he agreed. “They are not.”
And then he was gone, the door closing softly behind him, and Eleanor was left alone with the dying fire and the echo of words she did not yet know how to interpret.
***
She did not sleep that night.
She lay in her narrow guest bed, staring at the ceiling, and catalogued every moment of their conversation with the precision of a scholar dissecting a text.
He chose me because I did not look away.
The words circled in her mind, refusing to settle into meaning.
She had not looked away because… because looking away would have been discourteous.
Because his scars were simply scars, not curses or contagions.
Because she had spent her entire life being overlooked, and she knew—knew in her bones—how it felt to be the thing people avoided seeing.
She had not looked away because it had never occurred to her that she should.
Was that remarkable? she wondered. Was that worthy of a proposal?
Or was she reading too much into a practical man’s practical reasoning?
Perhaps ‘you did not look away’ merely meant ‘you were not visibly repulsed, and that is sufficient’.
Perhaps the poetry and the drawing-room performances were simply evidence that she was the sort of woman who would endure her circumstances without complaint.
Endure.
The word from her mother’s fate. The word that meant tolerating without joy, surviving without thriving.
Is that what he is offering? Is that what I have accepted?
Eleanor pressed her palms against her eyes until colours bloomed in the darkness.
She had accepted a proposal from a man she scarcely knew, on the strength of a five-minute conversation and a litany of practical considerations. She had committed herself to a marriage without love, a household without warmth, a life defined by the absence of expectation.
It was, she supposed, no worse than what she possessed already. And in many respects, considerably better.
But somewhere beneath her careful reasoning, beneath the armour she had spent years constructing, something ached.
Something wanted—foolishly, impossibly—to be more than practical.
To be chosen for reasons that had nothing to do with usefulness or composure or the ability to withstand casual cruelty without flinching.
Because when you looked at me, you did not look away.
She turned the words over in her mind, searching for hidden meaning, for subtext she might have overlooked.
And despite everything she knew—despite every lesson Edmund Hale had taught her about the dangers of hope—she found herself wondering whether the Duke of Thornwood might have meant something more than he had said.
***
Benjamin stood at the window of his own guest chamber, watching the moon rise above Lady Rutledge’s immaculate gardens, and attempted to persuade himself that he had done the right thing.
Miss Finch had accepted. The marriage would proceed. The legal requirement would be satisfied, and the estate would remain intact.
Business concluded, he thought. Duty fulfilled.
Yet the satisfaction he had anticipated—the relief of a difficulty resolved—refused to materialise. Instead, he found himself replaying their conversation with uncomfortable precision.
He had been practical. Direct. Efficient. He had outlined the terms of their arrangement with the clarity he might have applied to a business contract, and she had responded in kind, asking sensible questions regarding expectations and appearances and heirs.
Heirs.
His hand tightened upon the windowsill. He had told her he would not hurry her, and he had meant it. But he had not told her why the thought of such intimacy caused his stomach to tighten with something perilously close to fear.
He had not told her about the nightmares. About the manner in which his scars ached when he was anxious. About the years he had spent persuading himself that he was better alone because, alone, he could not harm anyone.
He had not told her that he fed stray cats because they expected nothing from him, and that expectation—the simple, reliable certainty that he could not disappoint a creature that desired only food—was sometimes the only thing that rendered the day bearable.
He had not asked what she wanted.
The realisation struck him with uncomfortable force.
He had catalogued her qualifications like entries upon a ledger—intelligent, composed, practical—but he had not once asked what she desired from a marriage.
What she hoped for. What she might wish for herself, beyond security and household management.
He had offered her a transaction, and she had accepted it, and neither of them had pretended it was anything more.
Because it is not, he told himself. It cannot be. You are not capable of offering more. You know this.
Yet another part of his mind—the part that had noticed the catch in her breath when he explained his reasons, the part that had seen the flicker of something in her grey eyes that might have been hope—whispered that he was deceiving himself.
She did not look away.
It had been the truth. It had also been an understatement of staggering proportions.
She had looked at him—truly looked, without flinching or pity or the carefully averted gaze—and for one disorienting moment, he had felt like something other than a monster pretending to be a man.
Do not make this into something it is not, he commanded himself. She accepted a practical proposal. She expects a practical marriage. Give her what you promised, and nothing more.
But as the moon climbed higher and the house settled into sleep around him, Benjamin found himself thinking of grey eyes and Italian poetry and the way a woman had stood alone by a window, absorbing cruelty with the quiet dignity of someone who had learnt, long ago, that the world would offer her nothing kinder.
I did not ask what she wanted.
The thought refused to leave him.
Perhaps, whispered something dangerous in the recesses of his mind, you should.