Chapter 33 – Eleanor and Her Father

Eleanor always glanced down at the gap along the bottom of the door whenever she approached her father’s study. It was late, and the room was dark, so she assumed it would be empty and opened the door without knocking.

The duke was sitting at his desk, holding a glass with the remains of a dark amber drink. The faint light of the reading lamp beside him was made fainter by the creamy white glass of the lamp shade.

“I’m sorry, Father,” Eleanor murmured as she went to close the door.

“It’s all right,” he said. “You can come in.”

Eleanor stepped back into the room. “I only came for some paper.”

The duke nodded to the bookshelf where his selection of paper was kept.

Eleanor went over and pulled some out.

As she was leaving, she heard her name, spoken softly.

She looked over her shoulder.

“Eleanor,” her father said, “what would you have done if I had left you alone?”

Eleanor’s hands trembled, but she finished turning around. “What do you mean?”

The duke motioned with the glass. “Everything. I mean…everything. What would you have done if I had never tried to set up those matches? What—what would you have done if I had accepted your answer?”

Eleanor wandered toward the desk. “I don’t know.”

His voice rose. “You don’t know?” But then the volume subsided. “So what’s that? I don’t know either, I suppose.” He finished off his drink and stood up. His first two steps were unsteady, but he made it to the liquor shelf and refilled his glass.

Eleanor watched him without a word.

“Helena says it’s my fault, that if I hadn’t interfered, none of this would have happened.” The duke returned to his desk and sat down again.

Eleanor had heard them arguing earlier that evening and wondered what it was about. Volume and vitriol had poured out from around the closed door, but the words were caught behind the wood. Eleanor decided she wasn’t curious enough to listen in and made herself scarce for a few hours.

Stolen novel; please report.

“I think she’s wrong,” Duke Aubrey-Serrs announced. “I’ve been trying to figure out what else I could have done, but I can’t.”

Eleanor smiled as she remembered the first time she’d ever met Haley. “Most people find it difficult to imagine themselves acting outside of their own character.”

She sat down in a nearby chair. “If you had never arranged a match, I suppose I would have had to court the way other women do. Go to parties. Talk to gentlemen. Then if one of them had liked me, they would have gone to you to ask permission.”

“You think that would have worked?”

“It works for a lot of other people.”

“You are not a lot of other people.”

“Father, are you saying it wouldn’t have worked because of me or because of you?”

Aubrey-Serrs’ glass halted halfway to his mouth. It clinked when it returned to the desktop. “Maybe both.”

Eleanor gazed at the paper in her hand.

The duke frowned. “What is it you want, Eleanor?”

“I only came in for paper—”

“That’s not what I meant. Why did you fight me?”

It was hard for Lady Serrs to shrug. It felt as if fifty-pound weights had been tied to her shoulders. “Everyone only wants to be happy.”

He scoffed.