Page 14 of Two Blessings For His Duchess
She could not understand why he was looking at her with such relentless focus. Was he angry because she hadn’t swooned with gratitude when he offered her his hand? Was he trying to read her face to see if she was currently regretting her decision? Or perhaps he was the one regretting it? Was he simply trying to intimidate her into submission before the vows even began? It was completely unnerving.
She silently pleaded for him to look away, even just for a second, but his gaze never wavered. Not when she reached the halfway point, and not even when she finally took the last few steps to stand directly in front of him.
Up close, it was considerably worse. She was aware of the height of him, the stillness… the air between them felt charged and too thin. Euphemia desperately wanted to lean in and whisper a sharp jab under her breath, perhaps demanding to know if he intended to blink at any point during the ceremony.
But she restrained herself. She recalled the last time that they spoke. How they immediately ended up arguing about everything, and standing before the clergyman on her wedding day was definitely not the correct time to start another verbal sparring match.
So, she forced a tiny, compliant breath into her lungs and decided she would simply have to deal with the scrutiny.
“Dearly beloved…” the vicar started. “… we are gathered here in the sight of God and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in holy matrimony.”
Euphemia tried her best to focus on the clergyman, but Nathaniel’s eyes simply would not leave her. He was still staring. It was a relentless, unwavering gaze that made the small hairs on the back of her neck stand up.
She could feel it. She refused to turn her head, refused to acknowledge it, kept her eyes fixed on the vicar absolutely listening to every word and pretending to not be aware of the person standing in front of her.
“…Which is an honorable estate…” the vicar continued. “…instituted of God in the time of man’s innocence.”
Euphemia forced her gaze ahead, but her mind began to run completely wild. As the vicar’s voice droned on and Nathaniel remained locked in a silent, tense staring competition. She began to wonder if her conclusion from earlier that morning had been dangerously naive. Living with this man was not going to be easy at all. The dark, intense way he was looking at her suggested that he might have specific plans for her existence that she had entirely failed to anticipate.
‘I should have asked more questions,’Euphemia thought, a sudden spike of panic piercing through her stomach.
She shouldn’t have just accepted the marriage proposal with a submissive nod. What if he was far worse than a cold, work-obsessed recluse? What if he was like the dark, manipulative characters she had read about in her novels? She recalled a particularly terrifying story where a brooding nobleman married a woman entirely to isolate her at his crumbling northern estate as punishment for a family slight.
Had she rushed into a trap? Was this rushed marriage the greatest mistake of her life?
She had read a considerable number of books. It was generally considered a virtue. What nobody had mentioned was that a well-stocked literary mind in a state of moderate panic was a liability of the first order.
Mrs. Radcliffe had a great deal to say about powerful men and remote estates. Dark, intense men with significant looks, large houses with locked wings and portraits that watched you.Euphemia had read all of Mrs. Radcliffe with great enjoyment and the comfortable certainty that it was fiction.
She was now standing next to a dark, intense man who was given to significant looks. Since she was about to move to a large estate she had never seen, she found herself revising that certainty with some urgency.
He was a widower. His wife had died under circumstances nobody had explained to her because she had not asked, because she had been too busy being practical about her own scandal to enquire into the details of his. There was the Gothic novel Seraphina had spoken about in which the husband had locked the heroine in a tower. Euphemia had said at the time that seemed an overreaction.
She was not sure she thought that now.
The staring was doing this to her. If he would simply stop looking at her she could be rational, but he would not stop, and her mind had been alone with the collected works of Gothic fiction for too long, and —
“Miss Vane?”
The vicar’s soft voice broke through her spiraling thoughts, pulling her back to the altar. Euphemia swallowed hard, the words of the vow washing over her. When the clergyman finally paused and gave a gentle nod, indicating it was her turn to answer, she had to force the air back into her lungs.
“I will,” she whispered.
After that, the rest of the ceremony passed in a complete blur. She vaguely felt the cold metal of the ring being slid onto her finger, heard the final blessing, and signed her name in the registry with a hand that shook so violently she could barely recognize her own penmanship.
Before she could even fully process the fact that she was now a duchess, she was being led out of the chapel and toward the waiting carriage.
The carriage door stood open, and Euphemia sat inside, watching her sisters hurry to her side to say their goodbyes.
Seraphina reached her first. “I told you so,” she said, her arms crossed tightly over her chest as she glared at the carriage. “I told you we should have never come to London. Now look at what has happened. You are getting married to a man you do not even know, let alone love, and for what? To satisfy the gossip sheets? You should have listened to your eldest sister. I’ve always said love was a secondary consideration, and now you are proving me entirely right in the most dramatic way possible.”
“Oh, do hush, Seraphina,” Leonora interrupted, nudging her aside with an elbow. She leaned over the carriage frame. “Love is entirely irrelevant now. Euphemia is a duchess, which means she has strict structural duties to perform.” Leonora opened a small book she had produced from somewhere on her. “As a duchess, you will be expected to oversee a household of no fewer than fifty staff. The housekeeper manages the female servantsand reports directly to you. Do not underestimate her. If she decides you are not worth her loyalty, the entire household will know it within a week, and the cook will put too much salt in everything indefinitely.”
“Where did you get that book?” Euphemia asked.
“The circulating library. I thought it might be useful.” She turned a page. “You should also familiarize yourself with the estate accounts as soon as possible. Dukes are notoriously uninterested in domestic management and if you do not take it in hand immediately someone else will and that someone will not have your interests at heart?—”
“We should never have come to London,” Seraphina stressed and crossed her arms. “I want that noted. I said it before we left and I am saying it now and I want it on the record.”
