such a thing before they wed, but she insisted he was the one she wanted. So I didn’t stand in her way. But not two months after their vows were spoken, I could already tell she regretted it.”
She stared down at the rug before her, her brow furrowed. “Helmswick had very . . . particular ideas about how his wife should and shouldn’t behave, and Eleanor could not be that woman. She didn’t want to be that woman, though she was willing to make concessions. However, Helmswick is anything but flexible. He insists on everything being exactly to his liking, and when it’s not, he has a terrific temper.”
“Did he hit her?” I asked, my stomach cramping with dread.
“No. Nothing like that,” she assured me. The look in her eyes told me she understood more about my past than perhaps I would have liked. “No, Helmswick has too much ice in his veins. He doesn’t need to use his fists when his words and will can be even more brutal.” She dipped her head. “Fortunately, he also likes to travel. Often as far as Paris or Rome. So Eleanor is spared his presence for at least part of the year.” Her voice turned droll. “Unfortunately, she has not yet produced society’s requisite spare to the heir she’s already given birth to, and yet she’s chosen to take lovers.”
“Does Helmswick know?”
She paused for one telling second before admitting in a low tone, “Yes. He knows. Or he strongly suspects.” She inhaled a taut breath. “Enough to accuse her of it.”
“When?”
Her gaze when it met mine was wary, but it must have been evident I already knew, for she replied resignedly, “Just before they came here.”
“Is that why she wrote to you? Because her husband was aware of her infidelity?”
“Yes.”
But there was more. There had to be. Or else why would the duchess have departed London so suddenly, racing off to Sunlaws when Helmswick was on his way to Paris and she already intended to see her daughter in less than a fortnight?
“Was he threatening legal action?”
She turned aside to gaze into the hearth.
“Was he threatening to take the children?” I leaned forward anxiously, recalling my conversation with the duchess’s youngest son, Henry.
Her shoulders stiffened, but still she didn’t speak. It was then that I realized.
“She confessed that she wanted to leave him, didn’t she?” I quietly guessed.
The duchess’s face turned pale. “I told her not to be a fool. That all she needed to do is give Helmswick a spare and surely he must allow her some freedom, so long as she was discreet. But she insisted he never would. That he would never grant her such a concession, no matter how many mistresses he took himself, no matter the normal expectations of society.”
“Was Helmswick religious?”
She scoffed. “Hardly. Unless you’re referring to the worship of himself. But I suppose in that, he’s not so very different from many noblemen. Yet, hypocrites that they are, most of them at least understand they can’t expect their wives to remain faithful to them beyond the birth of their successors when they themselves are so rampantly unfaithful.”
Though I understood why the upper class arranged marriages like they did—to consolidate wealth and secure bloodlines—I was even further from approving of it than I ever had been. It was true, I’d asked my father to arrange my first marriage for me. But only because I did not care to waste my time being put on display in the London marriage market—with little hope of capturing the attention of anyone I found even remotely palatable, given my awkward nature—when I could be spending my time painting. However, time had shown how disastrous a request that had been, given what a horrid husband Sir Anthony Darby had turned out to be.
I’d learned from that mistake, but much of society had not. Not for hundreds of years. Why continue to contract marriages in such a cold manner—one where the two parties might not even enjoy each other’s company—when the results were so unhappy and led to the need to proscribe an unspoken set of rules for acceptable infidelities? Some might call me romantically foolish, but I defied them to discredit the results.
“So she felt leaving him was her only recourse,” I summarized. “Was she content to be forced to leave her children behind?”
“Of course not.”
“Then, how—?”
“She said she’d discovered something about him,” she snapped. “Something she could use to force him to allow her to live separately and continue to