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 8

There was in the middle of that autumn a subscription assembly at the town rooms — the sort of gathering the Duke did not attend, being above it, but which the lesser gentry treated as the great event of their season. Orwenna went because her cousins begged her, and because she would not hide, and because she had decided early that if the county meant to whisper about her, she would give it the courtesy of doing it to her face.

Kitpatrick was not there. He heard of the evening only afterward, in pieces, and each piece added a degree to the cold thing that was gathering in him.

The county, sensing that the Duke’s interest might make the poor Kyniston girl a person of consequence — and resenting bitterly the prospect — had done what such gatherings do to a woman who has risen above her station without yet securing it. It had closed against her. She had been left to stand at the edge of the floor while the sets formed without her. The matrons had turned their shoulders. A wit whose name Kitpatrick would later take some quiet trouble to learn had said loudly enough to carry that it was affecting, was it not, to see how the Duke amused himself in the country, and that he supposed even a great man must have his charities.

Orwenna Kyniston had stood through all of it with her chin level and her hands still. She had neither wept nor fled nor pretended not to hear. When at last a kind old clergyman’s wife had crossed the room to sit with her out of pity, she had thanked the woman and then said gently that she did not require rescuing — that she had weathered colder rooms than this one, and would weather this.

The Duke heard all of this and said nothing for a long moment. Then he asked only one question.

“Did she come home and tell you she had wept?”

“No, Your Grace,” said the cousin who reported it, twisting her handkerchief. “That is the thing of it. She came home and she was quite calm, and she made me my chocolate, and she said only that she was sorry I had had a dull evening on her account. Then she sat up half the night with her book. Her eyes were red in the morning — but she never said a word. She never says a word. That is why nobody troubles to be kind to her. She makes it so easy to be cruel by never letting it show that it lands.”

That — more than the slander that came later — was the thing that decided the Duke of Gaspre. The picture of her standing alone at the edge of a floor she was too proud to weep upon, making it easy for small people to be cruel by refusing them the satisfaction of her pain.

He resolved, quietly and completely, that she would never stand at the edge of any room again while he lived.

He did not tell her any of this. He only came to her the next day with a new problem for her clever mind and watched her forget the assembly in the pleasure of being useful. He thought that a woman who could be so wounded and show so little of it deserved a champion who showed nothing either — until the moment came to show everything at once.

That moment came sooner than he expected.

Lady Serena Voss made it her particular business. She had watched, with mounting alarm, three months of dinners and guest lists and carefully arranged introductions come to nothing beside a country curate’s stipend of a woman and a book on drainage — and she had no intention of losing, without a fight, the place she had spent years building at the Duke’s elbow. She was not a stupid woman, and she did not make the mistake of attacking Orwenna openly, for she had seen the Duke’s face at supper and knew that the surest way to bind him to the girl was to give him someone to defend her from. Instead, she worked in the old way, the patient way — the way of a woman who has poisoned wells before and knows the pleasure of a slow drip. She spoke of Orwenna with a pained kindness. She wondered aloud, to just the right ears, whether the dear Duke quite knew what he was about. She recalled with every appearance of reluctance a certain old story — so faded now, so long ago — that she was sure could not be true, and would he not be angry with her for repeating it, and so she must not, she really must not. And having thus ensured that everyone leaned in, she told it.

The story was this: that Orwenna Kyniston came of tainted blood — that her father had died in a debtor’s prison, which was true and which she had never hidden, and that her mother had left her first husband to run off with that father — which was a lie, a cruel and specific lie, the kind that ruins women. And that Orwenna herself was therefore no better than she should be, and the Duke was being played by a clever, penniless girl who had baited a hook with a book on drainage.

Kitpatrick heard of it through the loyalty of an old servant. He listened to the whole of it in silence, standing at the tall window of his own great house, and by the end of it his hands had closed slowly into fists at his sides. Something in him that had been sleeping for a very long time had woken, and was very cold and very awake.

“Who began it?” he asked — though he already knew.

“Her ladyship, Your Grace. Lady Voss. She has been dining out on it for a week.”

The Duke of Gaspre turned from the window. His face was perfectly calm. It was the most frightening thing the old servant had seen in forty years of service.

“Order the carriage,” said the Duke. “And send to Lady Weathersby that I shall attend her card party after all. Tell her I am bringing a guest — and that she is to seat that guest at my right hand. If she wishes to remain on terms with Gaspre, she will see it done.”

He reached for his gloves. “My cousin has decided to tell a story to the county. I find I should like to be present when it reaches its end.”

He went to Orwenna first. He would not spring it upon her — that much he had learned. He drove to the shabby manor that same afternoon and found her in the walled kitchen garden, sleeves pushed up, on her knees in the black autumn earth, doing with her own hands the work her uncle could no longer afford to pay a man to do.

She sat back on her heels when she saw him and pushed the escaped hair from her face with the back of a soil-dark wrist. She looked — he thought — more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen in a ballroom.

“You have heard something,” she said before he could speak. “Your face has the look. Sit down. You will spoil those boots. Tell me what they are saying. It will be about my father. I expect it usually is.”

So he told her. He told her plainly because she would have accepted nothing less. He told her what was being said of her father, which was true, and what was being said of her mother, which was a lie.

She listened, and he watched the old grief move under her face like a fish under ice. She mastered it as she mastered everything.

“The part about my father is true,” she said when he had finished. “He was a good man and a bad manager, and he loved my mother past sense, and he died in the Marshalsea owing money to men who had dined at his table. I have never hidden it. I was fourteen. I was there.”

She said it flatly, and only the whiteness of her knuckles where she gripped her own wrist betrayed the cost.

“The part about my mother is a lie. She was married once before, when she was very young, to a man who died of a fever within the year. She was a widow — free and honorable — three full years before ever she met my father. There was no running off. There was no first husband left living. It is a lie built on the bones of a truth, which is the worst kind. Because to deny it, you must drag the whole sad story into the light and let strangers pick at it.”

She looked up at him, and her gray eyes were bright and hard. “That is what your cousin has done. She has taken the saddest thing in my life and sharpened it into a knife.”

“I mean to answer it,” the Duke said. “Tonight, at Lady Weathersby’s card party, before the same people who have been repeating it. But I will not do it without you, and I will not do it if you forbid it — because it is your story and your mother’s name, and not mine to spend as I please.”

He paused. “I am not offering you my protection because I pity you. I am offering it because I would be honored to spend my name on the defense of yours. There is a difference. I need you to hear it.”

She was quiet for a long time. A robin came down and pecked among the turned earth, unafraid of either of them.

“For nine years,” she said at last, “I fought every battle of my life alone — because there was no one to fight them with me, and because I learned young that to lean on anyone is to fall when they move away. I taught myself not to want it. It seemed safer not to want what I could not have.”

She drew a breath. “And now you come and kneel in my aunt’s garden and offer to stand in front of me and take the stones meant for my mother. I do not know what to do with it. I have no practice at being defended. I have only practice at enduring.”

She looked at him, and something in her face broke open — just a little, just enough.

“Yes. I will come. Not because I cannot bear it alone — I have borne worse alone. But because you asked. And because I find, to my very great inconvenience, that I no longer wish to do the bearing alone.”

She paused. “That is your doing. I hope you are proud of it.”

“I am,” said the Duke of Gaspre, “prouder than of anything in my life.”

And he took her soil-dark hand in both of his there in the walled garden, with the robin and the turned earth. He did not kiss it, though he wished to. He only held it and let her feel that he would not let it go.