Every Lady Curtsied as the Duke Entered — But He Walked Straight to the Woman Reading Alone by the Window, Unaware She Was About to Become the Only Choice That Truly Mattered

 PART 3

“What are you reading?” he asked.

She turned the spine toward him without opening it. He read the title, and his brows rose — for it was a treatise on the drainage of fenland. He had himself struggled through it the winter before, a dry and difficult volume that half the men in his acquaintance would have flung across a room within the hour.

“You find that entertaining?” he said.

“I find it useful,” she corrected. “Which is rarer and lasts longer. My uncle’s land floods every spring and drowns the winter wheat. Every spring he curses the sky and does nothing. I have formed the opinion that the fault lies not with the sky but with a great many years of neglected ditches. I cannot dig them myself, more is the pity. But I can at least know why they ought to be dug.”

She tilted her head. “You have read it, too. I saw your face. You need not look so surprised that a woman opens a book on drainage. I assure you the water does not care who reads about it.”

“I am not surprised that you read it,” he said slowly. “I am surprised to find anyone under this roof tonight who would rather read it than dance.”

“Then you have not been watching the dancing,” said Orwenna Kyniston. “It is the same six figures endlessly repeated, and everyone pretends the repetition is the point. I would sooner drain a fen.”

And she smiled at last — fully — and it changed her whole plain face, the way a sudden light changes a plain room.

The Duke of Gaspre, who had faced a charging boar without altering his expression, felt something shift dangerously in the region of his chest.

He should have risen then. He was aware of it distantly, as a man is aware of the sensible thing he has no intention of doing. He had made his point. He had appalled the room. A wiser man would have paid his brief tribute to the novelty and withdrawn to the card table before the whole county wrote him a romance he had not authored.

But he did not rise.

He found instead that he wanted to know what she thought of a hundred things — and that the wanting was not the calculated interest of a man appraising a possible wife, but something far more disarming and far less governable. The plain hunger of a mind long starved of company that did not flatter it.

“You spoke of your uncle’s ditches,” he said. “You have opinions, then, on the management of land.”

“I have opinions on the mismanagement of it,” she corrected, “which is a larger and more useful field, there being so much more of it about. My uncle owns four hundred acres and farms perhaps two hundred well. The rest he lets go to rushes and calls it God’s will. It is not God’s will. It is my uncle’s disinclination to spend a shilling this year to save a pound the next — which is the commonest disease among landowners, and the least remarked upon, because the men who suffer from it are the very men who write the books.”

She glanced at him — a swift, assessing flick of those gray eyes. “You will forgive me. I dare say you own a great deal of land and manage every acre of it to perfection, and I have just insulted your whole order.”

“You have described my whole order with painful accuracy,” said the Duke, “and spared me from it only by a courtesy I have not yet earned. I manage my acres well enough. But I inherited a steward who had grown fat on my father’s inattention, and it took me four years to discover how much I did not know. I have never forgotten the feeling of it — of holding a thing in trust for a thousand people and not knowing how it worked.”

He heard himself say it and was faintly astonished. It was not a thing he told people.

“Most men in this room would rather lose the harvest than admit they did not understand it.”

“You would go and read a book.”

“I would go and read a book,” she agreed. “And then I would go and look at the ditch — which is the part most people leave out. A book is only a rumor until you have stood in the mud it describes.”

She tilted her head. “You look at me as though I have said something strange.”

“You have said something true,” said the Duke. “In this room tonight. That is very strange indeed.”

Behind them, the music rose, and the dancers wheeled through their figures, and the candlelight ran gold along four hundred jewels. And the Duke of Gaspre sat in the window with a woman in a mended gown and talked about clay and water and the folly of men who wrote about what they had never stood in. He was happier, he realized with something close to alarm, than he had been at any gathering in fifteen years.