Chapter 18 #2
She leaned forward just a fraction, her eyes searching his face. “I know so very little about her, Nathaniel, and I wish to understand. Will you be willing to talk about her? What did your friend, His Grace, mean when he asked if you had told me about the late Duchess?”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop instantly. Nathaniel froze, the tenderness from moments before vanishing. He looked down at his hands as he contemplated if he wanted to even answer her at all.
When he finally spoke, his voice was so low it barely carried across the bedchamber.
“Her name was Eleanor.” He did not look up.
“Our marriage was not like this, Euphemia. It was a much colder arrangement, born of a union where she did not want me, and she never once pretended otherwise. It produced two daughters, and very little else.”
Euphemia shifted slightly against her pillows, the bleakness in his tone pulling at her chest. “You say it was not like... ours? Even though it was an arrangement too?”
“Yes,” Nathaniel replied. “When I was younger, every minute of my life was accounted for by my father. Everything. My education, my duties, and eventually, my marriage. Eleanor was the daughter of a Viscount, one of my father’s closest friends.
She had been told from a very young age that she would marry the future Duke of Greymoor, and she had spent her entire life preparing to be the perfect Duchess.
We married because it was expected. There was no affection between us. ”
Euphemia watched his face. “Did you know her before the wedding?”
“We had met. At various functions over the years.” He paused. “We did not know each other.”
“But you married anyway.”
“We married because it was arranged. There was no love. Neither of us pretended otherwise. We understood what the marriage was and we proceeded accordingly.”
“Did you both... learn to love each other overtime then?” she asked and swallowed, unsure if she wanted to hear his answer. “I mean... how did it work out? You have two beautiful daughters. That must mean that during the honeymoon phase you must have... succeeded in...”
Nathaniel turned his head fully toward her. He did not answer immediately. He simply looked at her, his gaze moving over her face unhurriedly, and after a moment, something altered at the very corner of his mouth.
“Euphemia,” he said calmly, squinting his eyes. “Are you asking me whether we... managed to make... love?”
She held his gaze. Her cheeks were warm but she did not look away. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I am.”
He was quiet for a moment. His eyes narrowed, just slightly, as if he was trying to establish exactly how much the person seated in front of him understood before he decided how to proceed.
“Have you...” he said carefully. “...determined yet what that means?”
She let out a small sigh. “Not quite,” she admitted.
Nathaniel lowered his head. His chest rose and fell with a breath that was slow, and he studied the coverlet for a moment as they sat in that silence.
“There was pressure for an heir,” he finally spoke.
His voice had returned to its even register.
“My father made his expectations very clear from the earliest years of my life. A son. A title to be carried forward. An estate to be secured. Eleanor understood this before we had ever spoken more than a handful of words to one another. She had been prepared for it.” He paused.
“She took it on as a duty. More seriously, even, than my father had intended. It became the whole of her purpose. The whole of her measure of herself.”
Euphemia’s eyebrows furrowed. “Oh, that must have been difficult.”
“It was,” he answered. “The pressure was relentless. But when the time came, Eleanor gave birth to twins. Our daughters. But she was never happy, Euphemia. I do not speak to the girls about their mother because how could I possibly tell two innocent children that she was entirely discontented with them? She did not want daughters. She believed her only worth lay in providing the succession.”
Euphemia’s breath caught, her heart aching for the little girls downstairs who had no idea of the shadow surrounding their birth. “But surely she knew it was not her fault? Did you not try to comfort her, to tell her it did not matter?”
“I did,” he said, finally raising his eyes to meet hers.
“I tried to tell her the pressure from my father did not dictate our lives, but Eleanor was even stricter than he was when it came to duty. She was entirely duty-bound. She had been schooled to believe that the only way to secure her position and her marriage was to give me a son. She refused to settle for being anything less than the ideal Duchess, so she demanded we try again immediately.”
“Immediately after childbirth?” Euphemia asked, a look of horror crossing her face.
“Barely a month or two after the twins were born,” Nathaniel said flatly.
“I refused her. She was frail, but she insisted she was fine and kept pretending the birth hadn’t broken her health.
We were never friends before our marriage.
We had no foundation of kindness to rely on, and so we fought.
We fought bitterly over it. She kept hiding how ill she truly was, and a few months later, she passed away. ”
The room was very quiet.
Euphemia looked at her hands. She did not know what to say to that. For some reason, she felt sad for Eleanor. She had read of women like her. Their stubbornness wasn’t always entirely their fault.
“Thaddeus knew her, and he disliked her intensely because she made no secret of her disdain for him,” Nathaniel explained, a faint, humorless twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“He watched us tear each other apart for months. So, when he asked earlier, if I had told you about Eleanor, he wanted to talk to you about how much we fought, and how much he did not like her. He thought I would have told you about the numerous... ridiculous things that she did when she was duchess.”
Euphemia raised her head. “Things like what?”
Nathaniel scoffed and shook his head. “Well, she dismissed three housemaids in a single week for folding the table linens in the wrong direction.”
Euphemia stared at him. “The wrong direction?”
“There was apparently a correct direction. Eleanor knew what it was. The housemaids did not learn quickly enough.”
Euphemia’s eyes widened. “That is a thing?”
“Not really.” He chuckled, then looked at the ceiling briefly. “Also, she had the dining room chairs reupholstered four times in one year because she could not settle on a color that adequately communicated the correct degree of authority she wanted.”