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 9

Lady Weathersby’s drawing room was as full as her ballroom had been. Word had gone round that the Duke was to attend, and word had also gone round — Lady Voss had seen to that — that a certain interesting matter concerning a certain nobody was reaching its natural crisis. Half the county had come to watch the girl be quietly dropped, as such girls always were, once the great man tired of his whim.

They were not prepared for what they saw.

The Duke of Gaspre entered the room with Orwenna Kyniston on his arm. She was not dressed grandly — he had understood by now not to make that mistake — but she was dressed with a plain and perfect dignity in a gown of deep gray silk that she had made over herself from her mother’s. She wore the yellowed pearls. She held her head as though the whispers were weather and she had walked in worse.

Instead of installing her in some corner, instead of allowing the room to close around her and pick, the Duke walked her to the very center of it — to the card table where Lady Serena Voss sat in violet with her cards fanned and her triumph already composed upon her face — and he stopped there.

He raised his voice for the first time in fifteen years, so that every soul in the crowded room could hear him.

“I find,” said the Duke of Gaspre, “that I owe this company an introduction — and one correction.”

He looked at the room.

“The introduction is this. Miss Orwenna Kyniston — whom some of you have been discussing with a freedom that does you no credit — is the woman I intend to ask to become my wife, if she will have me.”

He let that fall into the silence and shatter it.

Then, into the gasp and the rustle and the frantic snap of dropped fans, he went on — unhurried, cold, and terrible.

“The correction concerns a story that has been carried about this county for some ten days now, touching the memory of Miss Kyniston’s late mother. I have looked into it. I have the parish register of St. Olms and the sworn word of the clergyman who buried her first husband and married her second — three full years apart, and in perfect honor. The story is a lie.”

He turned his head slowly and looked at his cousin. The whole room turned with him.

“I know who invented it. I will not name her out of respect for a family connection she has spent this fortnight abusing. She knows who she is. She will spend the rest of this evening — and I dare say a good many evenings after — considering how it feels to be the subject of a story that everyone believes and no one will say to her face. I understand the sensation is unpleasant. I am told it is a great deal more unpleasant when the story is not even true.”

The silence was absolute. Lady Serena Voss sat very straight, her cards still fanned in a hand that had begun very slightly to tremble. The color drained from her lovely face as she felt the room’s regard turn — from her cousin’s supposed disgrace to her own actual one — felt it turn and settle and harden in the terrible way a crowd’s mood turns when it discovers it has been the tool of someone’s malice.

One by one, the very people who had leaned in to hear her whispers now leaned away from her. Each small withdrawal was a brick pulled from the house of her standing. She could do nothing but sit and feel it fall.

The Duke did not look at her again. He turned instead to the woman on his arm.

Orwenna’s eyes were wet and furious and shining. She was looking at him not with the gratitude he had feared but with something far larger and more frightening.

“You did not tell me you would ask me to marry you in front of the whole county before you had asked me at all,” she whispered unsteadily. “That was very badly managed, Your Grace. A woman likes to be asked in private, so that she may weep without an audience.”

But before he could lead her out, the room found its voice again — and it was not the voice he had expected.

There came from somewhere near the fire a single pair of hands. Then another. Then, hesitant at first and then with a strange gathering warmth, the whole room began absurdly to applaud. The truth was that the county had been made an accomplice to Lady Voss’s cruelty without its full consent, and there is nothing a crowd loves so much as the chance to be on the side of justice at no cost to itself.

Old Lady Marchbanks, who had cut Orwenna dead at three assemblies, dabbed at her eyes and declared to no one in particular that she had always thought the girl had a fine countenance. Mothers who had wanted the Duke for their daughters found, now that the wanting was hopeless, that they could afford to be generous.

Orwenna herself did not smile at the applause. She looked at it steadily, and Kitpatrick, watching her, understood that she trusted it exactly as much as it deserved — which was not at all — and loved her the more for it.

“They are applauding,” she murmured. “A month ago, they would not lend me a chair.”

“They are cowards,” he agreed. “And their approval is worth nothing. But their fear is worth a great deal, and you have that now — whether you wish it or not. No one in this county will slight you again while I draw breath.”

“That is not justice. Justice would have had them kind to you when you were poor. But it is the nearest thing the world offers, and I mean you to have all of it.”

He led her out through the long windows into the garden. The garden behind Lady Weathersby’s house was a formal one — all clipped box and gravel walks, silvered by a high autumn moon. The noise of the drawing room fell away behind them.

She was trembling — not from cold, he thought, but from the sheer force of what had just passed, the years of endurance meeting all at once a defense she had never in her life been offered.

He led her to a stone bench beneath a bare pear tree. He did not sit. He stood before her, and then, with a deliberateness that surprised them both, the Duke of Gaspre went down on one knee on the frost-touched gravel, careless of his fine dark breeches, and took both her hands in his.

“Now it is done properly,” he said.

“Orwenna Kyniston. I have been alone for nineteen years — since I was a boy of nineteen with a dead father and a title too big for me and a whole county wanting things I did not know how to give. I built a wall so high that nothing honest could climb it. I told myself I preferred it so. I believed the lie until three weeks ago, when I walked into a ballroom and saw a woman by a window who would not look up from her book.”

He looked at her in the moonlight.

“You did not want anything from me. You are the only person in my whole life who has never wanted anything from me. And the strange consequence is that I find I want to give you everything I have. Not my name, not my acres, not my French gloves — which you will only send back — but the man behind the wall, whom no one has troubled to look for in a very long time.”

His voice was low and rough and entirely without its usual armor.

“Marry me — not to save you. You do not need saving. You are the least helpless creature I have ever met. Marry me because I am a better man in the same room as you than I have ever managed to be alone. And because I do not wish to go back to being the other man.”

He paused.

“Marry me because I love you — which I have never said to any living soul, and which I find is quite true and quite terrifying and entirely your fault.”

She was weeping now, freely, as he had promised she might, and she made no attempt to hide it. He thought he had never seen anything so brave as a woman who had learned to hide everything, choosing in front of him not to.

“You are a very foolish Duke,” she said through the tears. “Do you know that you have thrown over the finest match in three counties for a woman who owns one good gown and a great deal of opinions about drainage? Your mother would have been appalled. My aunt will faint. Half of England will say I trapped you.”

She drew a shaking breath. “And I do not care for any of it. And that frightens me more than all the rest — because I have spent nine years caring very carefully about exactly such things, and you have undone it all. I do not know how to be a person who does not count every penny of feeling before she spends it.”

She freed one hand and laid it, cold and trembling, against his cheek.

“Yes. Of course, yes. It has been yes since you cleared that ditch, you impossible man. Since you rode out in the rain to see whether a poor woman was right about water. No one ever thought me worth the trouble of proving right before you did.”

“I will marry you. I will marry you, and I will make you a very inconvenient duchess who reads at dinner and argues with your steward and sends back your gloves — and you will deserve every moment of it.”

The Duke of Gaspre, kneeling in the frost, laughed aloud — a sound so rare and so unguarded that a nightbird startled from the pear tree above them. He rose and drew her up into his arms, and for a long moment beneath the cold moon, he only held her, her wet cheek against the dark silk of his coat.

Two people who had each, in their separate ways, given up on exactly this.

When at last he tipped her face up to his and kissed her, it was gentle and it was certain — the kiss of a man who had found, late and against all expectation, the one thing he did not know how to want. She rose into it without artifice. The frost glittered on the box hedges. Somewhere behind the lit windows, a ruined woman in violet was quietly ordering her carriage.