For eleven years, the Duke of Dowich had never lost a card game. Then a thirty-year-old spinster in grey silk accused him of cheating before thirty witnesses and wagered that if she won the next three hands, he would publicly court her for six weeks. On the final morning, she left him a letter containing only four words: “Do not come after me.” He read it in a shabby parlour and was on horseback before dark.

PART 1 

My name is Tania Offlet. I am thirty, I have no fortune, I have no beauty of the sort this county buys and sells, and I own one good gown. It is grey silk. It was my mother’s, and I have now worn it four times in the presence of the Duke of Dowich.

Two weeks ago, in Lady Marchmore’s card room, I called him a cheat in front of thirty people.

I want that entered in the record properly, because in the last week I have heard four separate accounts and not one of them is true. The county has decided that I was either very brave or very drunk, and I was neither. I was accurate. That is a different vice and a rarer one.

Here is what I said. He had been winning all evening with that lazy half-smile of a man who has arranged to be admired and has got his way. So I said it, quietly, so that only the table and the nearest fourteen people could hear:

“You cheat like a man who has never once been caught, your grace. Which is only to say you have never once played anyone worth catching you.”

The candles threw gold across a dozen turned faces, and every one of them had gone the pale delighted colour of people who have just watched somebody put a hand into a fire.

He has a voice he uses on parliaments. He used it on me. “I beg your pardon.”

“You needn’t,” I said, gathering my cards. “I have already forgiven you. I only meant to observe that the odds have been extraordinarily fond of your evening — and odds are like men. They are never so fond as when someone is managing them.”

I am told his face did not move. That is not what I saw. I saw a man of thirty-eight, who has spent two decades cultivating an expression that gives nothing away, discover that something had got out.

Then he looked at me the way a man looks at a horse he has not decided whether to buy, and he said: “Sit down across from me and take it back.”

“I am sitting down across from you, your grace. For a stake that matters.”

The room went so quiet I could hear the fire settle. Lady Marchmore made a small distressed movement near the pianoforte — the movement of a woman who has invited a duke to lend her house consequence and is watching that consequence discover a knife.

“Name it,” he said.

He named his first. Three hands of piquet, and if he won, I was to stand up before the whole room and confess myself mistaken, and admit that I had called him a cheat because it is the only way a woman of no fortune and less prospect can make a duke notice her.

He watched that land. I will say this for him: he did not pretend he had not aimed it.

I want to be honest about what I felt, because I have decided that if I am going to write any of this down I will do it properly. It hurt. It hurt in the place where I keep thirty years of being looked through at dinners.

And then I thought: good. He has shown me his hand. Very few people ever do.

“If I win,” I said — and my voice did not shake, which surprised us both — “you will escort me publicly and attentively through the whole of the county autumn season. You will call on me. You will dance with me. You will sit beside me at every wretched dinner in this county and pretend, before every matron who has pitied me and every gentleman who has looked through me, that the Duke of Dowich finds the conversation of a thirty-year-old spinster the most valuable thing in the room. You will not tell them it is a wager. You will let them believe whatever they please. And at the end of it you will let me walk away.”

“You want me to ruin my own name pretending to court a woman I have no intention of marrying.”

“I want you to spend six weeks discovering that you have no idea what a woman is for,” I said. “And I want it because you offered me a stake that mattered, and this is the only stake in the world that matters to me. I have been invisible for a decade. You are going to make me visible, and then you are going to let me choose to disappear. That is the whole of it. Do you accept?”

He studied me a moment longer. I have thought since that he was doing arithmetic, and that he got the wrong answer, and that it was the best wrong answer of his life.

“I accept,” he said.

And then he shuffled the cards himself — deliberately, slowly, so that I could watch his hands do it — and dealt.

Here is the part I have not told anyone.

He has not dealt a hand of cards to an opponent in eleven years. His man told my mother’s woman, who told me, which is how everything in this county travels. Eleven years of playing only with men who came to lose to him, and he dealt to me himself.

I did not understand it at the time. I understand it now, and I wish that I did not.

He won the first hand. I let him. I spent the first six tricks throwing away good leads to see what he did with an advantage, and I found it, and I have not stopped finding it since — he holds his cards one way when he is certain and another way when he is only pretending to be, and the difference is two degrees of the wrist.

The second hand I took, and the room made a sound like a county rearranging its entire opinion of a person in the space of a held breath.

The third hand he played better than I have ever seen a man play. He lost it to a low card he had entirely discounted.

I did not gloat. I want that in the record too.

I have been at Lady Marchmore’s house every day since. He came the very next morning, and he had plainly lain awake composing the cool, correct sentences with which he intended to demonstrate that he found the whole arrangement beneath his notice. He did not deliver a single one of them. He sat down in my mother’s parlour without being asked, which is a rudeness, and I poured him tea without remarking on it, which is a kindness, and by the second cup we had a private language, and I do not know when that happened.

He has stopped arriving with a plan. He told me once, in the manner of a man confessing a virtue, that he has never in his life arrived anywhere without a plan. On Tuesday he came to the gate in the rain, stood there four minutes, and informed me that he had come to return a book he had not borrowed.

At the assembly at Hartry, a woman near the door said, not quite quietly enough, that I was on the duke’s arm and that he must have lost a bet. He turned and looked at her until she went the colour of a boiled prawn, and then he said, in a carrying voice, that I had been saying something brilliant about the corn laws in the carriage and that he could not enjoy his evening until I finished it.

We danced. He led, and in the turn I took the lead so smoothly that half the couples never saw the sovereignty change hands, and he laughed — out loud, in the middle of the assembly rooms, with his whole chest, like a man who meant it.

Three separate people told me within the hour that the Duke of Dowich has not laughed in public in eleven years. One of them had tears in her eyes.

I do not know what to do with that. I have spent thirty years learning what to do with contempt. I have no equipment at all for that.

There are four weeks left in the terms.

I have started counting them.

That is the first mistake I have made.