Page 28 of A Bride for the Ruthless Duke

Theodore sat opposite her and watched her profile reflected in the glass. Ellen had not once looked at him directly, neither at the altar, nor on the church steps, nor now.

Then, as the carriage rolled away from St George’s, her eyes moved to the window.

She was searching.

The movement was slight but unmistakable, a glance toward the street, another toward the crowd they were leaving behind, one final look before the church disappeared from view.

The face she sought was not there.

Theodore understood whom she had hoped to see without being told. He found himself irritated, which was not jealousy, whatever it wished to call itself, only the dislike of being measured against a man who had abandoned her once already.

Ellen’s hands folded more tightly in her lap as the carriage turned a corner and the church vanished from sight.

At last she stopped looking.

The silence stretched.

Theodore turned toward his own window, prepared to grant her the privacy of disappointment.

Then her voice broke the quiet.

“So this is to be my life now?”

CHAPTER FOUR

A fortnight wedded, and Theodore had learned the exact sound of his wife avoiding him.

It was a quiet sound, which was the trouble with it. A door easing shut a beat before he passed it. A step on the stair that stopped, reconsidered, and went back up. She had a gift for being just leaving whatever room he entered, managed so smoothly that a less attentive man would have called it coincidence, and he had spent his life being the most attentive man in any room he stood in, and it had never once brought him less joy than it did now.

He took his breakfast at his desk, as he always had, and told himself it was habit and not avoidance of his own. Through the half-open door of the morning room he could see the corner of the table where she sat, a single place laid, the footman by the sideboard with nothing to do but watch a duchess move food about a plate. She ate almost nothing. He had the reports of it without asking, in the careful way the staff had of telling him things they thought he ought to know, and he did not act on them, because every action he could think of would require him to walk into that room and sit down across from her, and he had seen what his sitting down did to her face.

That was the part he could not get past. The face.

He had entered into matrimony with a woman who cast her gaze to the floor when he came into a room. She did it without seeming to know she did it, her eyes going down and to the side, her whole self-drawing in by some fraction as though to take up less of the air he might want. The first time, on the morning after the wedding, he had thought it grief, and granted it. By the end of the week he understood it for what it was, which was fear, the particular braced civility of a creature that has been handed from one owner to another and is waiting to learn the temper of the new one. She recoiled from his courtesy as though courtesy were a thing that came with a bill attached.

He met her twice that week in the ordinary traffic of the house, and made a poor business of both.

The first was in the hall, where he was drawing on his gloves and she came down with a shawl, and he found he had nothing to say to her that was not either a fabrication or too true to be uttered before a footman. He inclined his head. He told her he hoped the house was comfortable, that she had only to ask the housekeeper for anything wanting, and he heard the words leave him with their backs already turned, the polite nothings a man offers a guest he would rather not detain. He saw them land. He saw her take the shawl a little closer about her, and arrange her face into the smooth attending blankness she kept for him, and he went out into the square with the door shut behind him and was angry the length of two streets without being able to name a single person to be angry at but himself.

The second time she did not know he saw her. He was in the passage to his study and she was on the landing above, and for the space of a held breath she looked at him, openly, the guard down because she believed herself unobserved, and what was in her face was not fear and not blankness but a kind of grave careful weighing, as though he were a sum she had been set and could not make come right. Then a board gave under his boot and her eyes came up and the shutter came down with them, and she withdrew, and he went into his study and shut his own door and sat for some time over a letter he did not read.

***

The door between their rooms had not been opened since the wedding night.

It stood in the panelled wall, and the handle answered as readily to her side as to his, and every night it remained closed, and he had decided, with the cold completeness he brought to all his decisions, that he would not be the one to open it. He had bought her, plain and simple; no amount of polite fiction could alter the truth of the transaction. He could at least decline to collect, could leave her the one square foot of choosing in a life that had been spent for her over a card table by a brother who should have been horsewhipped for it. He told himself this was decency. He suspected, on the worse nights, that it was cowardice wearing decency’s coat, and that the difference between the two was the one sum he had never been able to do.

So when Augusta arrived to dine, and the table was laid for three for the first time since the wedding, he took his place at the head of it with the grim sense of a man who had agreed to be examined and the certainty that he would be found wanting, and watched his wife come in with her face already arranged, and prepared to say as little as the evening would let him.

Then the soup came, and his aunt looked down the length of the table, and the evening began.

“You are not eating, child. We may be a cold family, but we have never been a thin one. It alarms the servants.”

Lady Augusta said it down the length of the table without troubling to lower her fork, and Ellen, who had been moving a piece of turbot from one side of her plate to the other for several minutes without committing it anywhere, looked up and ate a forkful of it to be obliging.

“There.” Augusta turned across the table. “Theodore. Your wife is being managed by an old woman at her own dinner, and you sit there like a portrait of yourself. Have you nothing to add?”

“You manage everyone, aunt. I gave up objecting before I was breeched.”