“She’s Thirty and Still Unwed,” Her Aunt Laughed—The Duke Replied, “So Am I. I Waited for Her” - S2
“She’s Thirty and Still Unwed,” Her Aunt Laughed—The Duke Replied, “So Am I. I Waited for Her”
Part 1
“And of course, there is our dear Eleanor,” Lady Harriet Crane said, lifting her glass of claret so that the candlelight caught it and turned it the color of a ruby. “She’s 30 and still unwed. We have quite given up hope for her, I’m afraid. But she is very useful with the household accounts, and the children of the parish adore her, so one must count one’s blessings.”
For a moment, the long dining table at Crane Park was quiet. Then the laughter came, the way laughter always comes at a dinner, when the hostess has made a joke and everyone is anxious to show they enjoyed it. Mrs. Pomfrey tittered behind her fan. Sir Gerald Hollis gave a short, hearty bark. Young Clarissa Crane, who was 19 and newly engaged and wearing a gown of white silk with silver thread, laughed loudest of all and leaned toward her intended, Mr. Edmund Fairley, to whisper something that made him laugh, too.
At the far end of the table, below the salt, in a gray dress she had turned and mended twice, Miss Eleanor Whitmore lowered her eyes to her plate and smiled. It was the smile she had perfected over 12 years. It said: I am not hurt. It said: I understand that this is the price of my place at your table.
It said: Please, let us all move on. She had heard her aunt say such things a hundred times. In the drawing room, at church, in the shops of the village.
“She’s a good, sensible girl, but of course, no fortune. She’s rather past it now, poor thing. She’ll make some elderly widower a very practical companion one day.”
Eleanor had long ago learned that the only way to survive these remarks was to let them pass through her like wind through an open window. So, she picked up her fork, and she waited for the laughter to die. But, it did not die naturally. It was cut off. Because at the head of the table, in the place of greatest honor, sat the most important guest Crane Park had received in a generation.
His Grace, Alexander Thorne, the Duke of Ashford. He had come to the county only a fortnight before to take possession of Ashford Abbey. He was 34 years old, tall and dark with a soldier’s straight shoulders and a quiet, watchful face. Every mother in the county with an unmarried daughter had sent an invitation. Lady Harriet had been the first accepted.
The Duke had not laughed. He set down his glass. He turned, not toward his hostess, but down the long length of the table, past the silver epergne heaped with hothouse grapes, past the candles and the crystal and the startled faces, until his gaze came to rest on the woman in gray at the very end. And in a calm, clear voice that carried to every corner of the room, he said,
“So am I, Lady Harriet. 34 and still unwed, and I have been waiting for her.”
The silence that followed was so complete that everyone heard it when Lady Harriet’s silver spoon slipped from her fingers and fell with a bright, sharp ring onto the edge of her plate.
No one moved. No one breathed. Clarissa’s mouth had fallen open. Mr. Fairley had frozen with a piece of pheasant halfway to his lips. Old Lady Margaret Vane, the dowager who sat across from Sir Gerald, and who was rather deaf, leaned toward her neighbor and said, much too loudly,
May you like
“What did he say? Did he say he was waiting for Eleanor?”
At the end of the table, Eleanor Whitmore did not look up. She could not. Her hands had gone cold, and the fork in her fingers was trembling against the china, making a tiny shameful tapping sound that she could not stop.
