The dining room was another magnificent, heartless space, its walls covered in dark, faded tapestries depicting brutal hunting scenes. A long, polished mahogany table stretched for what felt like miles, set for two at opposite ends.
The Duke and his new duchess.
They were two small, solitary islands in a vast, dark sea.
The Duke did not speak. He ate with a remote, mechanical precision, his gaze fixed on some point in the middle distance.
Helena ate what was put before her, the food tasteless in her mouth. The only sounds were the clink of silver on porcelain and the soft, ghostly movements of the footmen.
The silence was not peaceful.
It was a living thing, a pressure that pressed in on her, making it difficult to breathe. It was filled with everything that was not being said.
She studied him from her distant outpost.
She saw the tension in his jaw, the way his hand clenched around his wineglass. He was a man locked in a fortress of his own making.
The reports had said his younger brother, Edward, had died six months ago. A fall from a horse here on the estate. The Duke had been inscrutable before, they said, but since the death, he had become a recluse, a ghost in his own home.
He had needed a wife to secure the succession, an heir for the Blackwood line, but he had not wanted a companion.
He had wanted a functionary.
A womb.
The thought sent another shiver of cold through her, a cold that had nothing to do with the drafty room.
After the meal, which she could not wait to end, he rose.
“I have work in my study,” he said, the first words he had spoken in over an hour. “You may retire or use the drawing room as you see fit.”
He did not wait for a response.
He simply turned and left her there alone at the vast, empty table.
Helena did not go to the drawing room.
She went back to her rooms.
The maid Agnes, a young girl with frightened rabbit eyes, had unpacked her trunks. Her few simple gowns looked forlorn and out of place in the cavernous wardrobe.
The days that followed fell into a rigid, silent pattern.
Breakfast was a solitary affair in a small, cheerless morning room. Hours were spent in her rooms, or wandering the cold, echoing corridors of the house, feeling more like a specter than a resident. Lunch was alone again.
Dinner was another silent ordeal at opposite ends of the world.
The Duke was a phantom. She would catch glimpses of him crossing the hall or riding out toward the fells, a dark figure on a dark horse, moving fast as if to outrun something only he could see.
He never spoke to her beyond a curt nod or a formal “Your Grace” if they happened to pass in a corridor.
She was utterly, completely alone.
But Helena was not one to succumb to despair.
It was not in her nature.