Page 58 of Two Blessings For His Duchess
“There was pressure for an heir,” he finally spoke. His voice had returned to its even register. “My father made his expectations very clear from the earliest years of my life. A son. A title to be carried forward. An estate to be secured. Eleanor understood this before we had ever spoken more than a handful of words to one another. She had been prepared for it.” He paused. “She took it on as a duty. More seriously, even, than my father had intended. It became the whole of her purpose. The whole of her measure of herself.”
Euphemia’s eyebrows furrowed. “Oh, that must have been difficult.”
“It was,” he answered. “The pressure was relentless. But when the time came, Eleanor gave birth to twins. Our daughters. But she was never happy, Euphemia. I do not speak to the girls about their mother because how could I possibly tell two innocent children that she was entirely discontented with them? She did not want daughters. She believed her only worth lay in providing the succession.”
Euphemia’s breath caught, her heart aching for the little girls downstairs who had no idea of the shadow surrounding their birth. “But surely she knew it was not her fault? Did you not try to comfort her, to tell her it did not matter?”
“I did,” he said, finally raising his eyes to meet hers. “I tried to tell her the pressure from my father did not dictate our lives, but Eleanor was even stricter than he was when it came to duty. She was entirely duty-bound. She had been schooled to believe that the only way to secure her position and her marriage was to give me a son. She refused to settle for being anything less than the ideal Duchess, so she demanded we try again immediately.”
“Immediately after childbirth?” Euphemia asked, a look of horror crossing her face.
“Barely a month or two after the twins were born,” Nathaniel said flatly. “I refused her. She was frail, but she insisted she was fine and kept pretending the birth hadn’t broken her health. We were never friends before our marriage. We had no foundation of kindness to rely on, and so we fought. We fought bitterly over it. She kept hiding how ill she truly was, and a few months later, she passed away.”
The room was very quiet.
Euphemia looked at her hands. She did not know what to say to that. For some reason, she felt sad for Eleanor. She had read of women like her. Their stubbornness wasn’t always entirely their fault.
“Thaddeus knew her, and he disliked her intensely because she made no secret of her disdain for him,” Nathaniel explained, a faint, humorless twitch at the corner of his mouth. “He watched us tear each other apart for months. So, when he asked earlier, if I had told you about Eleanor, he wanted to talk to you about how much we fought, and how much he did not like her. He thought I would have told you about the numerous... ridiculous things that she did when she was duchess.”
Euphemia raised her head. “Things like what?”
Nathaniel scoffed and shook his head. “Well, she dismissed three housemaids in a single week for folding the table linens in the wrong direction.”
Euphemia stared at him. “The wrong direction?”
“There was apparently a correct direction. Eleanor knew what it was. The housemaids did not learn quickly enough.”
Euphemia’s eyes widened. “That is a thing?”
“Not really.” He chuckled, then looked at the ceiling briefly. “Also, she had the dining room chairs reupholstered four times in one year because she could not settle on a color that adequately communicated the correct degree of authority she wanted.”
Euphemia pressed her lips together very hard, a sudden, helpless giggle bubbling up against her will. The sheer, terrifyingabsurdity of it broke the remaining tension in her chest, and she had to bury her face slightly in her hands to stifle the sound.
Nathaniel watched her, the shadow in his eyes finally lifting as a smile softened his face.
“Forgive me,” she said, from behind her hands. “I should not laugh. It is not... it is not funny.”
“It is a little funny,” he said.
Euphemia lowered her hands, her cheeks still slightly flushed from the unexpected light-heartedness. “I suppose I am only relieved to find there was some absurdity in it. Though, I must admit, it makes me worry a little about us.” She looked down at the sheets, her voice softening. “We have had our own shares of disagreement already. I should hate for us to become a house where air is rationed.”
Nathaniel shook his head instantly, shifting slightly closer on the mattress to ensure she was listening. “You must understand that it is entirely different, Euphemia. I know that we too tend to bicker, and we have had our arguments, but it does not belong in the same realm.”
“Does it not?” she asked quietly, raising her eyes to meet his.
“No,” he said. “With Eleanor, it was enmity. We did not like each other. We did not share the same thoughts, the same values, or the same ideas about anything that mattered. We had been putin the same house and told to produce an heir, and we had failed at the only thing that might have given us a common purpose, so we argued out of resentment. About everything. About nothing.”
He paused, his expression softening into something remarkably gentle as he looked at her. “What you and I do, when we argue, there is a point to it. There is something we are both trying to say, and we say it, and at the end of it something has been resolved or at least understood. It is a conversation. A difficult one sometimes, but a conversation. Do not ever mistake our friction for what happened with Eleanor.”
“I understand,” Euphemia said softly, a sense of relief loosening the tight knot that had lived in her chest for weeks. “Thank you for telling me, Nathaniel.”
He offered her a nod, the remaining tension finally draining from his posture. “Now that we have settled that, there is another matter. Your good friend, the duchess of Carrowell sent us an invitation.
“Emily?” Euphemia asked, sitting up.
Nathaniel nodded. “She is hosting an evening gathering at the end of the week. If you are feeling well enough by then, I thought perhaps we could attend together.”
Euphemia’s eyes brightened slightly. “I would like that very much. I am certain I shall be perfectly recovered by then.”
