After Watching the Man Who Promised Her Forever Place a Sapphire on Another Woman’s Finger, Diana Asked the Lonely Duke for One Dance to Make Her Ex Jealous—But Before the Music Ended, He Whispered, “Marry Me.”

PART 8

The first letter arrived on the fourth day after the Rexfords left.

It came up from the village with the mail sack, on a road that had only just been cleared, and Mrs. Higgins delivered it to the breakfast table on a silver salver with the expression of a woman delivering a live snake.

Diana recognised the hand before she broke the seal.

Penelope.

My dearest Diana,

I am writing this in three separate sittings because each time I get past the first page I begin weeping again and my mother thinks I have a cold, which I have decided to allow.

London is unbearable and you are the reason, which I resent, because you are also the only person I want to talk to.

The story has become enormous. It has grown legs. It has grown a whole horse. There is a version in which you slapped Lydia in the middle of the floor and a version in which the Duke carried you out over his shoulder, and I have done my best to correct only the ones that make you look foolish, which is to say none of them, which is to say I have been correcting nothing, because every single version is better than the truth and I refuse to ruin a good story with facts.

Simon has gone to his wife’s estate in Dorset and is not expected in town before Easter. Lydia was seen at the opera and told four separate people that Northumberland was “quite rustic,” which I am told she pronounced like an illness.

Lady Ashby has been asked, twice, precisely how she broke the news to you in the powder room, and has told the story both times as though she had done you a kindness.

I hope the Duke is dreadful. I hope he is dreadful in the direction of being dreadfully rich and dreadfully devoted. Write and tell me everything. Do not leave out the part where he is handsome. I have decided he must be handsome now that it is fashionable.

Your friend, who misses you and is furious about it, Penelope

Diana read it twice. Then she laughed — a real one, loud enough that Benedict looked up from his ledger at the other end of the table.

“Penelope?”

“Penelope.” Diana folded the letter. “Apparently I did not slap Lady Rexford, but the ton has decided I might have, and is disappointed in me.”

“The ton is a hydra with a bad memory.” He turned a page. “Ignore it. It will grow three worse heads and forget all of them by June.”

But she did not ignore it, exactly.

She wrote back that afternoon, at length, and did not leave out the part where he was handsome.

London was not the only place that had noticed.

In late January, a letter came from the archbishop’s office regarding the registry of the marriage, and with it a short, terse note from Benedict’s solicitor in town enclosing a folded newspaper cutting.

Diana found Benedict reading it in the library.

He did not look up when she came in. That was how she knew something was wrong.

“What is it?”

“Nothing of consequence.”

“Benedict.”

He set the cutting down.

It was two paragraphs in the society column. The Duke of Rothwell is understood to have removed to his northern seat with his bride, formerly Miss Waverly, whose sudden elevation occasioned considerable comment earlier in the season. The Duchess has not been seen in town since the ceremony. Certain parties continue to enquire the precise terms of the settlement.

Certain parties.

Diana read it through twice before the anger arrived.

“Who asked the solicitors about my settlement?”

“Three separate enquiries.” His voice was flat. “One from Rexford’s man.”

She looked up.

“He wants to know what he lost.”

“No.” Benedict’s eyes did not move from her face. “He wants to know what I paid for you, Diana, so that he can tell himself you were bought, and not chosen.”

The word bought sat in the room between them.

She put the cutting down on the desk.

“That is the difference between us and them,” she said finally. “They think a marriage is a price.”

“You never said no.”

“I said yes the moment I understood what it would cost Simon to lose me,” she said. Her voice was steady. “But you cleared my father’s debts in silence, and let me stand in that solicitor’s office believing the whole of it began and ended with the ballroom. You never told me what you had already done. I found out from Mr. Finch, along with everyone else in the room.”

Benedict was quiet.

“I did not want you to feel obliged.”

“I know.” She stepped around the desk. “That is exactly why I did not say anything either, for four months. We are both of us very bad at telling each other the truth, Benedict.”

He looked up at her then, and something in his face that she had never been able to name finally surrendered.

“I told you I do not know how to be the husband you wanted.”

“You have been practising for four months.” She took the cutting off the desk and folded it once, then again. “You may continue.”

Spring came to Northumberland late and reluctantly, the way everything came to Felburn.

The snows retreated off the lower moors. The roads opened. The first ships came up the coast with the seed corn, and the tenants began the spring ploughing on fields that had been under ice for four months.

Diana rode out with him in April.

She had not ridden out before. She had assumed she would be in the way — that the coal mines and the drainage ditches and the tenant farms were his territory, and that she had been given the house because the house was what he could spare.

He corrected her on the second morning, without ceremony.

“You are coming.”

“I am not dressed for a mine.”

“You are dressed for a mine.” He handed her a riding crop. “I want your opinion on the eastern drainage and I want it before the work is contracted, not after.”

She went.

And she learned, on a slope above a village she had never seen, that the tenants did not flinch when she asked them questions. They did not look past her at the Duke. They answered her — and when they disagreed with her, which happened four times, they said so.

Benedict stood behind her the whole time, saying nothing, doing nothing, exactly as he had stood beside her at Lady Brackley’s assemblies in another life. Silent enough to let her speak. Near enough to make it clear he had chosen to bring her.

On the ride home, it began to rain.

They sheltered in a stone barn on the edge of the moor, and stood in the doorway watching the weather move across the valley in grey sheets.

“I did not think I would say this,” Diana said.

“Then do not.”

“I am glad I married you.”

He did not answer for a long moment.

“I have nothing to compare it to,” he said finally. “I expected an arrangement. I did not expect mornings.”

“That is a very poor compliment.”

“It is a fact.”

She laughed, and the sound startled a curlew off the wall outside, and he looked at her the way he had looked at her across a ballroom — as though she had walked into a room he had thought was empty.

She told him in early June.

She had suspected for three weeks and said nothing, because the house was full of work and she wanted to be certain before she handed him a thing that had once been, from the beginning, one of the clauses.

One of the clauses. That was how she had carried it: as a term. Eventually, you will provide an heir.

She sat on the edge of his desk, which she had never done before, and waited until he put down his pen.

“I have something to tell you. It is one of the contract terms, and I want you to know that I am telling you as a term and not as anything else.”

He looked at her carefully. “Go on.”

“It appears I am going to provide you with an heir.”

The pen rolled two inches across the desk.

Benedict did not move at all.

Then he stood up, so quickly that the chair went back hard against the wall, and he crossed to her and went down on one knee beside the desk — not to propose; there was nothing to propose. He simply knelt, so that his face was level with hers, and put both of his hands flat on either side of her, on the wood, boxing her in very gently.

“That is not a term,” he said. His voice was not steady. “That is not a term, Diana.”

“It was.”

“It is not.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “There is no contract. There has not been a contract since the first night I came in from the mines and you were awake at midnight with a ledger.”

“I know.”

“Then do not call it that.”

“Very well.”

She reached down and took his face in her hands.

“What shall I call it?”

He did not have poetry in him. She had known that from the beginning, from a dance floor, from a man who had said I do not offer comfort and had then knelt beside her desk in a cold room at the top of England.

“Call it ours,” he said.