The metal was warm from his pocket. It slid onto her finger with unexpected ease, as though it had been waiting there all along.
“…with my body, I thee worship…”
His voice faltered, almost imperceptibly, upon the wordworship. Eleanor felt her own breath hitch in response.
He does not mean it, she told herself.It is ritual. Words that must be spoken regardless of their truth.
Yet his hand still trembled against hers, and he had not yet released it.
“…and with all my worldly goods, I thee endow.”
The vicar pronounced them married. Someone applauded—Lady Rutledge, Eleanor suspected, though she did not turn to confirm it. The sound seemed distant, muffled, as though it belonged to another room entirely.
Benjamin released her hand.
For one strange, suspended moment, they stood side by side at the altar, neither looking at the other, and Eleanor thought:This is it. This is my life now. This man. This silence. This careful distance we have agreed to maintain.
It ought to have felt like a prison. It ought to have felt like the closing of a door.
Instead, absurdly, it felt like standing upon the edge of something vast and unknown—terrifying, yes, but not entirely without hope.
***
“You look quite pretty, really.”
The comment came from Lady Vance, who had materialised beside Eleanor during the modest reception that followed the ceremony. Her tone suggested she found the fact surprising, possibly even suspicious, as though Eleanor had concealed attractiveness all along as part of some obscure stratagem.
“Thank you,” Eleanor said. The practised smile. The meaningless words. The armour she had worn so long it scarcely felt like armour at all.
“Such a fortunate match. I confess, when I heard the Duke was seeking a bride, I did not imagine—” Lady Vance caught herself, though not quite swiftly enough. “Well. One never knows where such things may lead, does one?”
You did not imagine he would choose someone like me,Eleanor finished silently. Someone plain. Someone past her prime. Someone useful but not decorative.
“Indeed,” she said aloud. “One never knows.”
Lady Vance smiled—the smile of a woman who had said precisely what she intended and knew she would suffer no consequence—and drifted away to greet someone she considered more worthy of her attention.
Eleanor stood alone in the centre of the small reception, surrounded by people who were not her people, in a gown that was not her gown, wearing a ring that still felt unfamiliar upon her finger.
Duchess of Thornwood.
That was who she was now. A title. A position. A role to be performed. No longer Miss Finch, the spinster linguist. No longer the useful dependant who managed correspondence and filled empty chairs.
She ought to have felt transformed. Elevated. Something.
Instead, she felt only the same hollowness she had felt that morning, gazing into her reflection and finding nothing worth adjusting.
***
The carriage journey to Thornwood Park would occupy most of the day.
Eleanor settled into her seat—the forward-facing one, which the Duke had indicated for her without comment—and arranged her skirts with more attention than they required. Opposite her, Benjamin sat in rigid silence, his gaze fixed upon the window, his scarred profile stark against the morning light.
The carriage lurched into motion.
Neither of them spoke.
Eleanor watched the landscape drift past—Lady Rutledge’s manicured gardens yielding to open countryside, the world beyond the window shifting from cultivated beauty to something wilder and less governed. She attempted to imagine the estate that awaited her at the journey’s end. Tried to picture the roomsshe would oversee, the servants she would direct, the life she would build in a place she had never seen.
