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 5

Kitpatrick watched from a little distance as his cousin performed the presentation she had been commanded to perform. He saw Lady Weathersby’s face — the swift confusion, the search for the joke, the dawning and unwelcome comprehension that the Duke of Gaspre had made this nobody his particular acquaintance, and that the hostess would now, before her own assembled guests, have to treat a shawl-minder as a person of consequence or answer for it to Gaspre.

He watched the smile arrive a full beat too late and heard her say that Miss Kyniston was most welcome, most welcome indeed — that she had always thought Sir Halbert’s family sadly overlooked.

He watched the lie settle over the group like powder. And he watched Orwenna receive the sudden warmth of women who had cut her at three assemblies with a grave and perfect courtesy that gave nothing back — neither gratitude nor triumph. Only the level regard of a person who knew exactly how much the welcome was worth and was too well bred to say.

It was, Kitpatrick thought, a small masterpiece of dignity. Not one woman in fifty could have managed it.

He did not follow immediately. He had learned that a man reveals too much by hurrying, and he had already revealed a great deal. Instead, he took a glass from a passing tray and stood in the window embrasure she had vacated, looking out at the room he had ruled without effort for fifteen years. He saw it for the first time as she must see it — the six endlessly repeated figures of the dance, the mothers whispering behind their fans, the beauties angling, the whole vast machine of it. He understood that he had been the most valuable coin in that market for so long that he had stopped being a man to any of them at all. He had become a thing to be won.

And the one person in the room who had not tried to win him was the one being led, at this moment, unwilling and dignified, into the light to be examined.

He drank, and he watched, and he made up his mind.

He came to the long supper table with its pyramids of hothouse fruit and its dishes of glazed game, and he found Orwenna Kyniston seated where his cousin had, with poison-sweet correctness, placed her — at the very foot of the table, below the salt, among the poor relations and the paid companions, as far from the Duke’s honored place at the head as the room allowed.

Kitpatrick looked at the empty chair of honor. He looked at the length of white damask between it and the young woman at the foot. Then, in full view of forty of the first families of the county, the Duke of Gaspre walked the entire length of the table — past the astonished faces of every person who had spent the evening maneuvering to sit beside him — and drew out the modest chair next to Orwenna Kyniston. He sat down among the companions and the poor relations as though it were the head of the table after all.

“You have done it again,” Orwenna murmured, not looking at him, addressing her soup with great concentration. “You cannot keep sitting in the wrong chairs, Your Grace. People will think you cannot count.”

“On the contrary,” said the Duke. “I have counted very carefully. There is exactly one chair in this room I wish to sit in, and this is the one beside it.”

He heard her breath catch — the smallest sound, quickly mastered — and he counted it a greater victory than any he had won at cards or law or the settling of a boundary dispute.

She set down her spoon. She turned her head, and her gray eyes searched his face with a gravity that had no coquetry in it at all — only a plain and rather frightening honesty, as though she were trying to find the trick, the wager, the cruelty that surely lay beneath so unlikely a courtesy.

“Why?” she asked him low, so only he could hear it beneath the clamor of the table. “Truly, why? You do not know me. An hour ago, you did not know I existed. There are twenty women in this room more beautiful than I am, richer, and cleverer at the sort of things a duke is meant to want. So why?”

There was no bitterness in it. Only that unnerving directness.

“I should like to understand the joke before I become the object of it. It saves so much time.”

The Duke was quiet a moment. It was a fair question, and she had earned an honest answer. He was so unused to giving honest answers that he had to reach for the words as one reaches for a tool long unused.

“When I came into that gallery tonight,” he said at last, “every soul in it looked at me. You did not. You went on reading. I have spent my whole life being looked at, Miss Kyniston, and I did not understand until the doors opened tonight how tired I was of it — nor how much I had come to distrust every face that arranged itself when I drew near. You did not arrange your face. You did not know who I was, and when you learned, it did not change you by a hair.”

He looked at her steadily. “Do you know how rare that is? I could buy anything in this room. I could not, in fifteen years, buy one honest moment. And you gave me one for nothing — without knowing you had given it — because you would rather read about drains.”

“That is not a joke. That is the truest thing that has happened to me in a very long while. I sat down beside you because I wished to see whether it would happen again.”

He paused. “It has.”

Orwenna Kyniston looked at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, a flush rose in her plain cheeks — the first he had drawn from her, and worth more to him for its rarity. She picked up her spoon again.

“You will make my aunt insufferable for a month, saying things like that.”

But she did not tell him to stop.