“Yes, Papa. He saved your life.” She smiled indulgently, hardly thinking that he was serious; meaning to attach her forever to this man she barely knew, a man that she had never had any reason whatsoever to like. “I’m sure you’re very grateful to him.”
The captain came over and knelt down in front of his little girl, reaching out a hand to gently take hers in his own. To Eleanor’s fright, she saw that his eyes were serious; not a hint of teasing in those dark depths.
“Elsie, I meant what I said all those years. I’m not just grateful to him—I wish to honour him forever by offering his son the thing that is most precious to me. I would not consider it if the boy had turned out to be boorish or a lout, but he has a remarkable endowment as well as a career in the East India Company ahead of him, and he’s kind and honourable as far as I can tell.”
Eleanor blinked, realizing for the first time how far her father was willing to take this little hope he’d always harboured of the two children joining together in matrimony.
“But, Papa …” she ventured carefully, not wanting to come across as frantic or dramatic, two things that her father found quite unsavoury, “I don’t understand … you would have me marry forever this gentleman that I hardly know? He may well be a suitable match, and perhaps he is honourable as well, but I would have to move so far away from you and Mama; I would have to leave everyone I know, I don’t even …” she paused, but her father guessed the rest of her sentence.
“If you’re going to protest that you don’t have marked affection for the gentleman,” he said soberly, “then I would urge you to reconsider your motivations. Not everything is epistolary novels and the like. Some things are primogeniture and honour and a respectable lineage.”
Eleanor blushed suddenly and lowered her gaze. She hated to disappoint her father; hated above all else for him to think her the sort of girl who would shrink from her rightful duty, and she wasn’t like those lasses who took one look at Blake’s poems and then decided that all care and comfort should be thrown to the wind for bluestocking quips and an expansion of their own interests.
No, she understood loyalty to family, and she understood marrying for propriety’s sake; at least, she understood these things in theory. In practice, she shrank away from the thought of being with that thin, pale young man she’d seen twice before at social gatherings with his eyes looking faraway and his manners nearly as distant.
Eleanor blinked away the memory of that sunlit garden and the first realization she’d truly registered that her father’s plans for her life were going to set aside forever all her girlish ideas of marrying for love. How silly she had been to giggle about such things with Kitty under the willow tree; to talk endlessly about how handsome and wonderful their husbands were going to be, when in reality, Eleanor had none of the glamour and enchantment of true love. She had an empty house and an empty life.
She reached over and pulled Kitty’s letter out of the envelope. It was written, as all Kitty’s letters were written, with galloping, over-eager handwriting. Eleanor had practiced her own stately penmanship endlessly as a little girl, desperate to impress her father with her letters to him while he was at sea; even more desperate to show her mother that she had attained to the level of a fine lady, but Kitty had always been more relaxed about such things. Perhaps it had worked out for her in the end, for here in the letter was all the joyous news Eleanor had been both hoping for and dreading.
“My dearest friend,” the letter began, as they always did, “you will not believe the good luck I have had—and no, this has nothing to do with that tailored pelisse I bought in London last month; don’t be so dreadfully materialistic—as much as I want to drag out the telling of it, I shall be as direct as I can manage and spare you my usual remunerations. Oliver and I are engaged at last. Yes, I ought still to call him Mr Garvey; my mother is always saying so, but I do so love his given name … don’t you? He arranged everything with the inheritance and his father in due time, and then assured his situation with me after our time in Bath last weekend with my parents. We came out of the Assembly Rooms, and you must know that I’d already suspected, but then he put the question to me as simply as if we were discussing the price of mutton in the square, which you know, I never do on principle. Of course, that may not sound quite as romantic to your lovely ears, but I trust you will allow that I am very happy, and all other detestables can fall by the wayside in the face of such delight.”
The letter was signed with a rather over-elegant, “Miss Katherine Swire” and annotated with a “soon to be Mrs Garvey” penned coyly atop the signature. Eleanor smiled sadly, folded the letter, and tucked it into the little basket where she kept all the things that required her attention and response. She looked around the room, resting her eyes and centring her thoughts. Kitty talked to her so openly because Kitty thought she was just as happy, or at least would be just as happy when her husband was back at home. He’d left his new little wife behind in a gorgeous gilded cage.
The room where she sat was evidence enough of the fact: high vaulted ceilings such as could be found all about the great house, enormous windows, elegant and exotic decorations, more rooms than Eleanor could keep account of, and sprawling grounds all about. She herself was sitting in a morning dressing gown that was made of gorgeous silk and trimmed with fine lace, finer than she ever would have imagined for herself, but she still felt quite empty. She stifled the pang of jealousy that crept into her heart after reading Kitty’s delighted words. In the face of such delight. And she didn’t know what that kind of delight was.
In the end, she’d agreed to marry Miles Fitzroy, sometime in the future when the two were older and wiser and, hopefully, after his first tour with the East India Company. In a secret part of her heart, Eleanor knew that she had put all these precautions in hoping that the illustrious Miles Fitzroy would think better of the arrangement during his absence and set her free from her responsibility. Then, one day, all of a sudden, things had changed.
It started when Eleanor’s father had come down with what looked to be an illness of the lungs. He was sent home on temporary leave, but after a few weeks had passed without result and, on the contrary, with a deepening of the rattling cough in his chest and a weakening of his usually strong physique, the doctors began to get genuinely concerned. It was in this state that he called Eleanor to his side.
She could still remember the conversation as though it had occurred yesterday instead of two years ago. Her father, laying in the bed with his head propped up on goose down pillows; her mother, standing nearby and sniffing into a handkerchief; the way her father’s wind-roughened hands, so strong in battle and on the high seas, had looked weak and helpless laying palms down on the coverlet next to him.
“My dearest daughter,” he had said, his voice scratchy and thin. “Come closer.”
“What is it, Papa?” She could still remember the fear she’d felt; the uncertainty. Even with a father who she rarely saw due to his career in the royal navy, Eleanor had learned to love her kind, honourable father with all her heart. “You sound a bit better today.”
“That’s hardly true,” he had said with a weak laugh that led at once into a vicious coughing fit. When he had, at last, gained control of his breathing, he spoke in quiet, short sentences. “I want to speak with you about Miles Fitzroy.”
“I know, Father,” she had said, thinking that he had forgotten their earlier conversations on the subject in his illness and delirium. She took his hand in hers. “I promise that when his first tour is over, and he is quite ready, I will marry him as I have promised.”
“No,” he had said hoarsely, desperately. “No, I am not long for this world.”
“Papa, don’t speak that way.”
“It is no good for me to pretend otherwise, and I have affairs to set in order. It is my desire to see this singular promise I made to Lieutenant Fitzroy all those years ago fulfilled now, in my presence, before I die.”
“Papa—”
“Would you now deny me this one ask in the hour of my death, child?”
And so she had promised him, tears streaming down her cheeks. Then there were frantic letters sent, a confusing time convincing the parson to perform the marriage without the customary reading of the bans, the arrival of Miles Fitzroy with his face exactly as hollow and pale as Eleanor had remembered, and a brief, hurried wedding at the foot of her father’s sickbed. There was such a whirlwind of emotion, solemnity with an affair that should have been joyful; smiles when in Eleanor’s heart she wanted to weep, and mostly, the feeling that everything was very strange, even her groom.
There was nothing normal to cling to. There wasn’t even time for all the little trappings of marriage that girls normally clung to: Eleanor wore an old dinner gown her mother had trimmed with seed pearls, and she had her auburn hair in a simple twist against the nape of her neck. Miles hardly looked at her during the ceremony, and when he did, his fine eyes flitted away before they really found a place to rest. At the end of the ceremony, Eleanor leaned over and kissed her father’s fevered brow; Miles stepped forward and took his hand gently.
That night, a time that should have been reserved for joyful, tentative consummation of marriage, had been a cold one. The couple parted ways at Eleanor’s door, and she spent her first night as a married woman asleep alone in her bed. It was the way these things were done sometimes, she told herself as she hugged the coverlet close and wept silently into the feathers. She tried to tell herself that she would be alright, that she was crying for her father, but beneath the shell of propriety she had built up around her heart Eleanor knew that wasn’t true—she was crying for the dream of love that had been lost.
Miles Fitzroy left a day later. He dressed up in his crisp navy uniform, kissed Eleanor neatly on the top of her hand, and then, with a few proper phrases that she couldn’t now remember, he had climbed onto his mount and disappeared down the lane. Eleanor couldn’t remember much about him at all; not that she had known much to begin with, but what bothered her the most was that outside of a basic idea cast by stylized paintings about the grand Fitzroy mansion, she had very little idea what her husband even looked like anymore. She couldn’t think of his face, not unless she walked downstairs and stood beneath the painting of him standing with a hunting party, and even that was such a bare approximation of Miles’ demeanour that she had to squint to even get a glimpse of his true nature.
She sighed and stood now from her writing desk to walk to the window. It overlooked the gorgeously-kept gardens in the distance, and if she peered very carefully through the fringe of woods, she could just make out the modest manor house where Lieutenant Laurence Fitzroy had retired to on the event of his son’s marriage. She felt silly, moving into this grand estate all on her own while the great owner of the house went to live at a distance, but she knew that it was the way things were done in this part of England, and besides that, the elder Mr Fitzroy was still commissioned in the navy, and a widower to add to it—he had little reason to come home, even to the small manor house on the hill.
She was sad about it, for while she knew the man’s son very little, she did have some affection for his father, who tried to visit her when he could and had the sparkle of mischief buried deep in his ageing blue eyes. Miles was his only child, and as Eleanor now lived far from her own mother and friends from back home—for her father had passed away mere days after her wedding—she felt sorely the lack of family and community.
She shook her head as though to clear it.
“This is dangerously close to self-pity, my love,” she said to herself, copying the phrase that her mother used to say to her when she was a little girl nursing sadness over her father’s absence. “You’ve hands and a brain; you should keep yourself busy.”
With that thought bolstering her for the moment, Eleanor was nearly ready to quit her chambers in search of the freshly-laid tea in the parlour when her eyes fell on the smattering of letters and she noticed, amid the few from her mother and friends from home and of course Kitty’s message, there was an unusual missive wrapped in brown paper and besotted by a more sturdy seal than was England’s wont.
She walked over and pulled it out, turning it over with interest. It was addressed to “Mrs Eleanor Fitzroy” and looked quite official—perhaps an invitation of some sort, but then again it was penned on a rather garish brown paper, quite practical for postal travel, perhaps, but hardly the thing a fine lady of the county would use to invite someone to a ball or dinner party. She opened it, eager to examine the contents, and was shocked to see the signature at the bottom of the page: Mr Miles Fitzroy. In the two years that Miles had been gone, the pair had exchanged exactly one letter each. He had written to say that he was safely in India, and she had responded to say that she was established at his estate; neither letter had been very detailed, and neither writer seemed to feel it necessary to embellish with turns of phrase or commentary on what had passed between them during the marriage ceremony. Now, she saw that this letter held to the same rigid standard, written simply; only a few lines in total.
“Mrs Eleanor Fitzroy,” it began in a formal tone, “I am writing on the occasion of my imminent return from our trading post in India. I will be leaving on a frigate marked for English shores in a matter of days, and though I wish to give you some warning with this missive, I imagine it only precedes my return by a few weeks. If all goes well, I will likely be stopping along the return route for a brief bit of business off the coast of Africa, but aside from that, I cannot give you a more exact return date. Please make the house ready as you will, and I look forward to our meeting in the future.”
She read it twice over, looking for any hint of affection or love, and when she found none, she felt a pang of loneliness followed almost at once by a sensation that she had been rather silly to hope for anything bordering on emotion from the gentleman. He had never shown such feeling before, during, or after their marriage. Why it should suddenly arise now would have been a question indeed; and even if it had, Eleanor admitted to herself, it was not as though she would have been in a position to return that affection in any proper way.
She realized with a blush that her thoughts had been unrolling while she was twisting the letter in her hands nervously, and she quickly smoothed it out again and made her way down to the kitchen. It was with her as it had always been with her mother; no time to think about what would happen when Miles Fitzroy returned home and declared himself master of the house—she must distract herself with preparation, food, sending word to her mother and to Lieutenant Fitzroy himself; airing out Miles’ old chambers that had been covered over with clothes and drapes for two years now, preparing another stall in the stable—everything that she needed to focus on instead of the one thing that was haunting her every step: that the man who would be walking in that door would be a stranger.
Chapter 2
Eleanor sat at her dressing table, watching as Laura put the final touches on her hair, which had been twisted and plaited until it sat atop her head in one of the latest French fashions. All she was missing were the faint curls around the face, having settled for soft waves instead, and Laura still hadn’t forgiven her, fussing as she was over every last detail.
“I’m only saying that all the other young ladies wear curlers to bed, My Lady.”
“It’s never suited me,” Eleanor said softly. Her mind was elsewhere. In fact, it was out on the road from London at this moment, riding ever nearer. That rider was the reason why the downstairs was so full of activity; why the smells of a feast were drifting upstairs, why her mother had arrived two days ago in a flurry of delighted excitement; why Miles’ friends from the regiment were downstairs at present beginning to pour the libations, and why she was wearing this fine green gown with the pearled trim and the emerald pendant around her neck—all for him. Another post had come just a week ago stating the exact day that her husband was to arrive and Eleanor had thrown together the event in an attempt to make him feel we
lcomed.
A soft knock came on the door, and Laura, twisting a final pearl pin into her lady’s hair, went to open it. Eleanor’s mother, Mary Egerton, was standing in the doorway. She still wore black, more out of habit now than mourning, Eleanor often thought, and she’d aged quite a bit since her husband’s death. Her once brown tresses had iced over into a regal grey, and she wore them under a wimple that was edged with fine French lace. She came into the room and bowed her head slightly.
“Are your rooms comfortable, Mama?” Eleanor asked.
“Quite.” Mrs Egerton peered at her daughter. “I only came to alert you that most of the guests have now arrived. I understand wanting to make an entrance, darling, but you’re encroaching on impropriety at this point.”
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