It was not enough on its own to erase every debt Blackwood Court carried. But it was enough, Alexander told Eleanor, seated once more in Lady Featherstone's cluttered study—with the door left properly ajar this time for propriety's sake—to buy the estate three years of breathing room. And three years, managed carefully, might well be enough to set the whole of it right.
"I have come to ask a favor, Miss Marsh," Alexander said. "And I confess I have very little right to ask it given the manner of our acquaintance."
"You may ask, Your Grace. I make no promises about the answer."
"I have three years, perhaps, to untangle a set of accounts my father hid from me for the better part of two decades. I have a solicitor who is honest, but not, I think, especially clever, and a new steward who is clever, but has not yet earned my full trust. And I have discovered in the space of one evening that I am married to a woman who does not exist, in the sense that I have no wife at all, and eleven thousand acres that badly need one who can read a ledger the way you read a cipher."
He paused, and for the first time since Eleanor had met him, he looked genuinely uncertain of himself, the cold, brittle armor entirely absent.
"I am not asking you to marry a stranger out of gratitude, Miss Marsh. I would think considerably less of myself if I believed that was what I was doing. I am asking because I have spent four days thinking of almost nothing else besides the way you sat at that little table by the fire and solved in fifty minutes a puzzle that had haunted me for a year. And I find I would very much like the chance to know the rest of what is in that remarkable head of yours, for a great deal longer than one evening allows."
Eleanor was quiet for a long moment, turning the offer over with the same careful, methodical attention she had given his father's cipher.
"I have no dowry, Your Grace. No family of consequence, no beauty the ton would trouble to remark upon, and a temperament your own solicitor would likely describe as insufficiently deferential."
"I have eighteen months of proof that deference has done my estate no particular good," Alexander said. "I would rather have a wife who tells me the truth of my own ledgers than one who tells me I am charming at dinner."
"Then you had better understand, Your Grace, precisely what you are asking for," Eleanor said, and there was something almost gentle beneath the bluntness now. "I will read every account book on that estate before I sign my name to anything, and I will tell you exactly what I find in them, whether it flatters you or not. I do not know how to be a decorative duchess. I only know how to be useful, and I have found over three years of being neither wanted nor useful in equal measure, that I would very much rather be the second."
"Then be useful, Miss Marsh," Alexander said, and something in his voice had gone warm in a way that had nothing to do with gratitude, and everything to do with something considerably more dangerous to both of them. "Be exactly as useful and exactly as blunt as you please, for the rest of both our lives, if you will only agree to do it as my wife, rather than my hostess's poor relation."
They married six weeks later in a small ceremony at the parish church nearest Featherstone House, with rather more guests than either of them would have chosen, since Lady Featherstone had, in the intervening weeks, transformed herself thoroughly into the proud architect of a match she had done absolutely nothing to encourage until the moment it became fashionable to claim credit for it.
Eleanor wore a gown of deep blue silk, chosen and paid for by Alexander over her own mild protests about the extravagance. And when the clergyman asked if she took Alexander Kestrel to be her lawfully wedded husband, she said yes in the same flat, unhurried voice she had used to read his father's dying letter aloud. And Alexander found, watching her say it, that he had never in his life heard two words spoken with such complete and steady certainty.
There was no wedding breakfast large enough to satisfy Lady Featherstone's newly rediscovered pride, but Alexander, mindful of exactly how little celebration Eleanor had known in her adult life, arranged a small private dinner afterward at Blackwood House in town—just the two of them, and a table set with more courses than either of them had any real appetite for.
He gave her that evening a small, leatherbound notebook, blank but for a single inscription on the flyleaf in his own hand: For the keeping of whatever cipher we invent together. Eleanor kept it, in the years that followed, closer than almost anything else she owned.
The trouble, when it came, arrived some four months into the marriage, in the shape of Mr. Silas Kestrel, a distant cousin of Alexander who had spent the better part of the previous eighteen months quietly positioning himself as heir presumptive against the very real possibility that Blackwood Court might collapse into bankruptcy before Alexander ever produced a son to inherit it.
Silas was a lawyer by training, sharp-featured and soft-spoken, the sort of man who smiled a great deal without ever once seeming genuinely pleased. And he arrived at Blackwood Court on a wet March morning with a solicitor of his own, and a challenge that made Eleanor's blood run cold the moment she understood its shape.
"The trust is a forgery," Silas announced, seated across from Alexander and Eleanor in the great hall's small receiving room, his voice pitched with the particular reasonable calm of a man who believes he holds every advantage. "Or if not a forgery outright, then a misreading. A convenient misreading, one might say, produced by a woman with every incentive to invent a fortune that benefits her own new husband. I have consulted with Mr. Blythe's own former clerk, who assures me the sixth duchess left no such instructions on record in any ledger he ever handled. And I intend to bring the whole matter before the Court of Chancery, where I expect a judge will take a rather dimmer view than my cousin has of a hastily married duchess conveniently discovering hidden fortunes in her own husband's father's private papers."
The accusation hung in the room, ugly and calculated, and Eleanor felt Alexander go rigid beside her, his hand closing hard around the arm of his chair. She laid her own hand over his—a small, steadying pressure before he could speak.