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 9

The child was born the following February, in the room above the great hall, with Mrs. Higgins running the household like a campaign and Benedict pacing the corridor outside until the boards gave up and learned the shape of him.

A girl.

They named her Margaret, after no one at all — because Diana had said, midway through a contraction, that she refused to name a child after either family, since one had sold her and the other had bought her, and Benedict had said then we shall start a new one, and that had settled it.

Lady Margaret Ashcombe slept through her first winter at Felburn in a cradle that had been made in the village.

The years did what years do.

The estate prospered. The eastern drainage held. The Halloway pension was docked to the penny, and the money went into a schoolroom attached to the village church, which Diana opened herself in her third summer, wearing brown wool and ink on one sleeve, because she had never once in her life ornamented anything successfully.

Penelope came north once and complained about the wind for four days and cried when she left.

Mrs. Higgins retired at sixty and was given the dower house in Kent that Diana had never once needed, which Mrs. Higgins found so upsetting that she reorganised the garden in protest.

And in London, the story grew.

The ton never entirely gave it up. It was too good a story. The ballroom bargain. The disgraced spinster and the dangerous duke. It was retold in drawing rooms for years by women who had been in that room and could not remember a single true detail of it, and every retelling made Diana taller, and Benedict colder, and the sapphire on Lydia Montrose’s hand smaller.

Simon Rexford’s marriage did not last.

That was the only part of it Diana ever asked about, and she asked once, in the fifth year, when a letter came from Penelope with the news folded inside it like a pressed flower.

Lydia has gone to her father’s house in Kent and is not expected back. There is talk of a separation. People say she could never forgive him for marrying her fortune and calling it love. Simon has been seen in town, drinking, and asking after old friends who do not wish to be asked after.

Diana read it at the window and then folded it and put it in the fire.

Benedict was watching her from the desk.

“Well?”

“He is exactly where he belongs,” she said.

And she meant it the same way she had meant it on a set of stone steps in the snow, with nothing vindictive in it at all — just the flat truth of a man who had chosen comfort and had received it, in full, in exact measure.

Her mother came north every second summer, and on her first visit she walked the whole of Felburn from the kitchens to the battlements, inspected the management of the winter stores, and delivered her verdict over supper.

“He has improved.”

“Mother.”

“He has. He was expensive and teachable in London. He is still expensive.” Martha Waverly regarded her son-in-law down the length of the table with the frank appraisal of a woman who had married off one daughter and had opinions about the process. “He has become teachable in the right direction.”

Benedict, who had never once in his life been appraised by anyone and survived it, bowed his head slightly.

“I am trying, Mrs. Waverly.”

“Try harder when my daughter tells you.”

“Yes, Mrs. Waverly.”

The fan stayed in a drawer in her sitting room.

She had not thrown it away. She had brought it north folded into her travelling case like a small, splintered confession, and she had never once explained it, and he had never once asked.

Then, one evening in the seventh winter — the child asleep, the snow coming down over the moors, the fire built high enough that the great hall was almost warm — he found it.

She came in from the stillroom and he was standing at the table with the fan open in his hand.

The ivory ribs were yellowed. Three of them were cracked clean through, and one was missing entirely, and the silk had gone the colour of weak tea.

He looked at it for a long moment.

“When did you break it?”

“In the ballroom.”

“You told me you never wept.”

“I didn’t.” She came and stood beside him and looked down at the fan in his hands. “I broke something instead. It seemed the more sensible option.”

He turned it over, examining the splintered stave under his thumb the way he examined everything — an assessment of a threat, or a problem, or a cost.

“Which night?”

She looked up at him.

“The night I crossed the floor.”

Something moved across his face. He closed the fan very carefully, and it made a small, dry, tired click — the sound of old ivory remembering.

“I was standing in that corner for forty minutes,” he said.

“I know. A footman told me, years later.”

“I had already asked your name before you crossed the room, Diana. Before the engagement was announced. Before you had done anything at all.”

“I know that too, now.”

She took the fan out of his hands.

She opened it — the broken ribs fanning out, one gap in the middle where the missing stave had been, the whole thing damaged beyond restoration and entirely useless and kept, for seven years, in a drawer.

“It is ruined,” she said.

“It is not ruined.” He closed her hand around it. “It is the only thing in this house that was there at the beginning.”

Outside, the wind came off the moors the way it always did, screaming along the battlements of a fortress built to keep the Scots out and maintained, for a very long time now, against the whole rest of the world.

Diana put the fan back in the drawer and did not close it all the way. She crossed to the window and stood with her hand flat on the cold glass, looking out at the snow going down over the valley.

Behind her, the Duke of Rothwell came and stood at her shoulder, and said nothing at all — because he had never in his life been a man for poetry, and had learned instead, slowly, over seven winters, the exact distance at which to stand.

She leaned back against his chest.

She had walked across a room because she had nothing left to lose.

And she had found, in the coldest county in England, in a marriage that was supposed to be a transaction, behind a man who had told her to her face that he would never love her —

the only place she had ever truly been safe.

She closed her eyes.

THE END