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 3

He was right, of course. That was the difficulty with the man. He was right, and he had put it in writing under his own name where three counties could read it, which meant that by Thursday every drawing room between Hartry and the coast had agreed upon two things: that the Duke of Dowich had lost his head over a colonel’s daughter, and that the colonel’s daughter had better be worth it.

I read his comment standing up in my mother’s parlour, twice, and then I sat down on the arm of the chair like a servant, because my legs had done something I had not authorised.

He has not dealt a hand in eleven years.

I had known it, obliquely, in the way one knows the shapes of rooms one has never entered. I had not known that he knew I knew it. There is a difference between being read and being read aloud to, and he had just read me aloud to the county.

“Your hands are shaking,” my mother said from the window.

“I am aware.”

“Burn a candle for him,” she said. “I shall. It cannot hurt.”

I have not decided which of us she was praying for.

He came on the Friday, and he came without a reason, and that was becoming a habit of his.

The Offlet house is small and shabby and immaculately kept — the house of a soldier’s widow living on a soldier’s pension. There is a darned carpet in the parlour and a window that gets the last roses of the year and nothing else. My father bought the roses in a pot in Portugal in 1807 and carried them across two campaigns and half of Spain in a cart, and they have never once failed to flower, and I have never once been able to explain this to anybody in a way that did not sound like a lie.

The Duke of Dowich filled that room the way weather fills a valley. He took the chair by the window, which is my father’s chair and has been empty for eleven years, and he did it without looking at it, which is how I knew he had thought about it for a mile.

“You are punctual,” I said. “I confess I expected you to be sulky.”

“I am both.”

“That is not generally permitted.”

“I am a duke. Everything is generally permitted. It is the single most tedious fact about my life.”

I poured the tea. He watched me do it and did not offer to help and did not comment, and I understood that we had overnight established the terms of a private language, and that neither of us had agreed to it, and that it would be very hard to unlearn.

“Your comment,” I said.

“Yes.”

“It was reckless.”

“It was accurate. You of all people cannot object to accuracy.”

“I can object to it being printed. You have made me a subject. Do you know what the county does to subjects?”

He set his cup down. “Miss Offlet. I have been the subject of this county since I was nine years old. Every man who has ever shaken my hand has been pricing it. I am not going to apologise for saying something true in public because it has made your life inconvenient, and I am not going to pretend that I wrote it for your benefit.”

“Then for whose?”

He looked out at the roses.

“Mine,” he said. “I wanted it written down. I am thirty-eight years old and I have never once said a true thing in public without weighing it for its effect first. I wanted to know whether I could.”

“And could you?”

“I don’t know. It is in a comments section. It may not count.”

He stayed two hours. We spoke about the corn laws, which he understands better than he lets anyone see, and about a pamphlet he had written on the condition of returning soldiers, which I had read and had opinions about, and about the fact that he had boarded at Eton at nine and had not been permitted to come home for the first two Christmases, which he mentioned as evidence in an argument and then went very quiet about.

When he left he stood in the doorway and said, “Monday. The Hartry assembly was the first. Monday is the Fenwicks’.”

“I know.”

“You will need a gown.”

“I have a gown.”

“You have one gown.”

“I have worn it four times in your presence, your grace. On the fifth occasion you will find that I remain equally unimproved, and you will have to manage.”

He looked at me for a moment with an expression I could not read and have since decided was not meant to be read.

“I have never once,” he said, “in four occasions, been looking at the gown.”

And he went out, and I stood in the parlour with a teapot in my hand for a length of time I decline to record.

We were to be seen, so we were seen. That was the arrangement, and the arrangement had a purpose, and I had written the purpose myself, and I had not anticipated that being seen would be the easy part.

The easy part: dinners where I was placed beside him and the table watched us the way a table watches a card sharp. The Fenwicks’ table, where I said something about the price of consoles that was so precisely wicked that he laughed into his wine and had to be pounded on the back, and where he caught my eye afterwards down the length of the polished mahogany and did not smile, only lifted one brow a fraction — we two understand each other and none of these others do — and the look went through me like a blade that was warm and sharp at once.

I would have traded every ballroom in England for that eyebrow. I did not know I had that sentence in me until I wrote it down.

The harder part, which I had not written down anywhere: he was learning me.

I had counted on being the one who watched. It is what I do. I have spent thirty years in rooms where nobody looked at me, and I used the time precisely as a general uses terrain. I know how a man holds his glass when he is bored and when he is pretending to be bored. I know which matrons are cruel by accident and which by practice. I thought I was the only one in the arrangement doing reconnaissance.

And then one evening, in a garden gone gold with autumn, he said, quietly, without any preamble and without looking at me:

“You collect victories the way some men drink — to not feel a thing. What is it you are not feeling, Miss Offlet?”

I opened my mouth to deliver a set-down. I had three of them ready. I have had a set-down ready since I was eighteen years old; it is the only weapon a woman in my position is issued.

I found I had nothing in my hand but the truth, and I turned the conversation instead.

And he let me.

That was worse than if he had pushed. Pushing I could have met; I have been pushed my whole life and I am very good at it. But he had seen the thing and chosen to leave it alone, and mercy, I discovered, is a far more dangerous weapon than curiosity, because curiosity you can satisfy and be rid of, and mercy you can never repay.

I began, that evening, to be afraid of him. Not of his rank. Of his attention. It was the first attention I had ever received that I could not calculate my way out of.

In the third week I let slip — deliberately, or so I have told myself since — that I had not been able to afford a subscription to the lending library above the drapers in the market town in two years, and had missed it more than I have missed most things, which is a sentence I have never repeated because it is the only one that has ever made me cry.

He took me there on a wet Thursday.

The room is dim and dusty and smells of glue and old paper, and there are four thousand volumes in it, and I walked the shelves like a woman come home from exile and I did not think about him at all for a quarter of an hour, which was itself a kind of intimacy.

He had meant it as a small triumph. I know exactly what he meant it as, because I know him now. A duke’s easy generosity. The sort of gesture that ordinarily earns him a flutter of gratitude he finds faintly nauseating.

He got no gratitude at all.

I came round the end of the poetry and the sermons with my arms full and my eyes — I am told — suspiciously bright, and I said:

“You must not do this again. Do you understand me? You must not make me want things I cannot keep. It is unkind. When you are gone I shall have to give the subscription up again, and I had made my peace with going without, and now you have unmade it.”

He stood among the mild shelves and looked entirely undone.

And then he said, without thinking — I saw him say it without thinking, I watched the words leave him before he could catch them, and I have replayed it perhaps four hundred times:

“Then I shall settle it in your name for life.”

The library was very quiet. Somewhere behind the shelves a boy turned a page.

I did not take him up on it. I put the books back. All but one — a battered volume of a satirist we both love, which I have owned in three different forms and lost in two — and I let him buy me that one, and only that one, and I carried it home against my breast the whole wet walk as though it were made of glass.

He spent sixpence on me that afternoon.

I have thought about very little else ever since.

Some days later, at my own gate, he said: “You are meant to be losing this.”

“The terms are the terms,” I said.

“The terms were that I would let you walk away. You are making it very difficult to plan my walking.”

“Then you would be breaking the terms,” I said. “And I would have to point out to you, your grace, that a man who breaks the terms of a wager is not so very different from a man who cheats at cards. And we established the night we met exactly what I think of that.”

He did not answer. He stood at the gate a long time after I had shut the door, longer than any duke has ever stood at any gate, and the cold came down off the hills, and I stood on the other side of the door with my hand flat against it, and neither of us moved, and I have not slept properly since.