For eleven years, the Duke of Dowich had never lost a card game. Then a thirty-year-old spinster in grey silk accused him of cheating before thirty witnesses and wagered that if she won the next three hands, he would publicly court her for six weeks. On the final morning, she left him a letter containing only four words: “Do not come after me.” He read it in a shabby parlour and was on horseback before dark.

PART 2 

Gaultier, Duke of Dowich:

I am told it is unseemly for a man in my position to reply to a public account of himself. I have been told this by three people, one of them my own solicitor, and I have considered their advice with the attention it deserves and am now disregarding it.

Miss Offlet’s account is accurate in every particular but one, and I find I cannot let the error stand.

She writes that she does not understand why I shuffled the cards myself.

I will tell her. I have not dealt a hand to an opponent since I was twenty-seven years old. When one is a duke, one’s opponents are not opponents; they are arrangements. They come to the table to lose to me in a seemly fashion and to be paid in the privilege of having been beaten by me, and I have known this for a decade and have taken a certain grim comfort in it. I dealt to her because I wanted to sit across from someone who had not already decided to let me win. I did not think it through. It was the first uncalculated thing I have done since I was nineteen.

She says she does not know what to do with the laughter. Neither did I.

Two corrections of fact, which she will forgive me for, since she is a woman of exact terms.

The first: she says the odds are like men, and are never so fond as when someone is managing them. That was a good line and I have thought about it every day. She is wrong, though. The odds were not fond of me that evening. I was not winning because the odds were managed. I was winning because I was better than every man in that room, which is a small and barren sort of being better, and she is the first person in my life to make that distinction out loud. She was not accusing me of cheating. She was telling me I had never been tried. There is a difference, and it took me until the second hand to hear it.

The second: she is wrong that the third hand was the finest cards I have played in ten years. It was not. It was the finest cards I could play, and there is a difference there too, and she is the reason for it, and I have not yet decided whether to forgive her.

I will note for the benefit of the thirty witnesses that she has neglected to record what I said when it was over. I rose and bowed to her as I bow to almost no one, and I said: It seems I am at your service, entirely publicly and for the whole of the autumn.

I did not say the rest of it, which was: and I have not the faintest idea what is happening to me, and I have not been frightened of anything since I was nineteen, and I am frightened now.

She writes that she has started counting the days.

So have I, Miss Offlet. So have I.

And that, I think, makes two of us who have made their first mistake.

Henry — no relation, merely a friend of the family: Your grace, you have written eight hundred words in a comments section at half past one in the morning.

Gaultier, Duke of Dowich: Good night, Henry.