Chapter 3
Part 4
Eleanor had sat very still. Then she had thanked her aunt and gone upstairs to her small room at the top of the house and closed the door and sat on the edge of her narrow bed with the silver ring in her hand until the sun went down. She did not cry. She thought she would, but the tears would not come. It was as though something inside her had simply stopped, like a clock whose spring has broken.
Later, she read in the newspapers that Lord Charles Thorne, heir to the Duke of Ashford, had been killed in a riding accident. Two years after that, the old Duke died, and the new Duke chose to remain with his regiment. Over the years, his name appeared in the dispatches from the peninsula. Wounded at Talavera. Mentioned for gallantry at Badajoz.
Present at Waterloo. She did not read the society pages to see whether he had married. She could not bear to. She put the silver ring in a small wooden box at the bottom of her trunk. She did not take it out again, and the years passed.
Life at Crane Park was not cruel, exactly. Eleanor was not beaten or starved. She had a room and food and a seat in the family pew at church. But she understood very quickly that the room and the food and the pew were not gifts. They were wages, and she was expected to earn them.
She kept the household accounts because her aunt found figures tiresome. She taught Clarissa her letters, her French, her pianoforte because a governess was an expense and Eleanor was free. She wrote her aunt’s letters and mended her aunt’s lace and carried baskets of broth to the sick of the parish so that Lady Harriet might be praised for her charity without ever leaving her sofa. And always, always, there were the little remarks.
“Eleanor, do sit at the end of the table tonight. The Pomfreys are bringing their nephew and we need the place.”
“Eleanor, you needn’t come to the assembly. You know you don’t dance, and someone must stay with the dogs.”
“Eleanor, that gray suits you. It’s so sensible. A woman of your age and situation shouldn’t call attention to herself.”
Twice, kind men came calling. When she was 22, a shy curate named Mr. Hobbs began to sit beside her at church and walk her home. When she was 26, a widowed gentleman farmer asked her uncle for permission to court her. Both, after a private word with Lady Harriet, stopped calling.
Eleanor never knew what was said. She did not grieve for either of them. Her heart, she sometimes thought, had been spent all at once in one summer under an apple tree in the rain. And there was simply nothing left to give.
So, she became what her aunt wished her to be. Useful, quiet, invisible. The woman at the end of the table in a gray dress who smiled when she was laughed at and never ever asked for anything. Until the night the Duke of Ashford came to dinner.
When Eleanor learned that the new Duke had returned to England and taken up residence at the Abbey only 9 miles away, she felt the ground shift under her feet. She told herself very firmly that it meant nothing. He had forgotten her long ago.
May you like
He would not come to Crane Park. And if he did, she would stay upstairs with a headache. But Lady Harriet would not hear of headaches.
“There are 14 at table and Clarissa’s engagement to celebrate. I need you to manage the servants and keep Lady Margaret’s glass filled. You’ll be at the bottom of the table, of course. His Grace will hardly notice you.”
