A pause. Then Benjamin’s voice, low and carefully controlled.
“The legal requirements have been fulfilled. The clause in my father’s will is satisfied. The estate is secure.”
“That is not precisely what I meant, Your Grace.”
Another silence—longer this time. Eleanor pressed herself against the wall beside the door, her pulse beginning to quicken. She should not remain. She should not listen. Yet her feet seemed fixed in place, her body refusing the urgent commands of her reason.
“The marriage was necessary.” Benjamin’s tone was flat, the measured neutrality he adopted when speaking of matters he found personally uncomfortable. “You are aware of my circumstances. I required someone who would not expect—who could endure—”
He broke off. Eleanor heard the creak of a chair, the faint shift of movement within the room.
“Endure what, Your Grace?” Mr Carroway prompted gently.
“My scars. My silences. The… difficulty of sharing a life with a man who has forgotten how to live amongst others.” Another pause. “I required a practical arrangement. A wife who would not anticipate romance or sentiment. Someone willing to accept what I could offer and not demand what I could not give.”
Eleanor felt the blood drain from her face.
A practical arrangement. Someone who would not expect. Someone willing to accept.
The words echoed through her thoughts, each one striking with cold, deliberate precision.
“And the Duchess has answered this requirement satisfactorily?” Mr Carroway asked.
“She has been—” Benjamin halted again. When he resumed, his voice sounded altered—rougher, stripped of some of its careful restraint. “She has been more than satisfactory. She has been… everything I did not know I required. And that is precisely the difficulty.”
“The difficulty, Your Grace?”
“I fear I shall injure her.” The words escaped in a rush, as though long restrained. “As I injure everything entrusted to my care. I have destroyed everyone who ever depended upon me—my men, my mother, all whom I was meant to protect. I am cursed, Carroway. Or broken. Or simply incapable of—”
His voice faltered.
“It would be better if she did not—”
Eleanor did not remain to hear the rest.
She was already retreating down the corridor, her translated documents clutched against her chest like armour, her thoughts scattering beneath the fragments she had overheard.
The marriage was necessary.
I required a practical arrangement.
A wife who would not anticipate romance or sentiment.
I fear I shall injure her.
It would be better if she did not—
She required no conclusion to that unfinished sentence. Her mind supplied it readily, assembling a dozen merciless possibilities from the pieces she carried away.
It would be better if she did not expect anything.
It would be better if she did not exist in my life at all.
***
She reached her chambers before the tears came.
They rose without warning—great, shuddering sobs that tore through her like a storm, years of carefully maintained composure collapsing beneath the weight of what she had heard. She pressed her face into her pillow to muffle the sound, terrified someone might hear, that a servant might come to inquire, that she might be forced to explain why the Duchess of Thornwood wept like a child in the middle of the afternoon.
