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 4

He came for me on Tuesday of the sixth week, and he was not carrying a plan and he did not pretend to be.

It had been a grey wet morning that turned brilliant by noon, the way this country does when it wants to remind you that it is not yours. He had written over to return a book he had in fact borrowed, which he plainly considered ingenious, and he found me in the garden cutting the last of the roses against the frost.

He did not come in. He stood at the little mean gate with the book in his hand and said, “Put those down. Come for a walk.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. That is the point.”

And because it was the sixth week, and because I had spent days now thinking about sixpence, I put the roses down.

We walked past the mean gate and up the lane and out onto the open shoulder of the down, where the whole county lay spread below us under a sky scoured clean, and I had forgotten what that looked like. I had lived under it for thirty years and I had not walked up there since my father died, because it had been our walk.

We argued the whole way.

I had read a pamphlet of his — a speech he had given in the Lords on the condition of returning soldiers. I had found it at the bottom of a box of my father’s papers, and I had read it eleven times, and I had opinions. I took it apart clause by clause, standing on the windy down with my bonnet ribbon streaming, telling him where he had been generous and where he had merely been fashionable, where he had felt the thing and where he had only performed feeling it.

He stood in the wind and let me do it.

“Do you know,” he said at last, “that no one has ever spoken to me like that.”

“I am aware. I have met your county.”

“My tutors flattered me. My aunt corrected my manners, never my mind. My —” he stopped. “Other people agreed with everything. And I have been told, in the Lords, by men whose careers I could end, that I speak like a man who knows his own mind, which is flattery of a more expensive kind.”

“Your speech was three-quarters true,” I said. “I pointed out the quarter.”

“You pointed out the exact quarter. That is a different thing. It is a thing nobody has ever done.”

He looked out over the county — the fields, the church spires, the smoke of small houses he did not own — and he said, in the voice of a man setting down something heavy:

“My brother used to argue with me. Which I have told no one. He was the only one. When he died I stopped being argued with, and I mistook the silence for peace. And it was not peace, Miss Offlet. It was a slow death by agreement. And you have come along and argued with me on a hilltop, and I feel, for the first time in years, that I am not entirely alone inside my own life. That is what I have not got a word for. Forgive me. I shall recover my composure directly.”

I had no set-down ready. I had nothing ready. I put my hand on his sleeve — not a flirtation, not a performance, just the plain human gesture of one soul acknowledging another’s grief — and I said:

“You need not recover it on my account. I have never much cared for composure. It is only fear in good clothes.”

He looked at me then. And he did not take my hand off his arm, and he did not move, and we stood there in the wind until the light began to go.

We walked home in a silence that was not a death. It was the other thing. The living thing.

The letter from London arrived the next morning, and I know about it because he told me about it, the following day, in the way of a man laying evidence on a table.

His aunt, the Countess, keeps the family’s honour the way a dragon keeps gold. Word had travelled, as word does. The Duke of Dowich had made a public spectacle of himself over a portionless spinster of thirty with a soldier for a father and darns in her gloves — and the Countess wished to know, in three closely written and pitiless pages, whether her nephew had lost his reason along with, it was to be presumed, a very great deal of money, and whether he intended to shame the name his mother had died bearing.

“She summons me,” he said. “I am to present myself in London and account for myself.”

“And will you?”

“No.”

He was standing at the window of Lady Marchmore’s drawing room, which he had borrowed the use of, as one borrows a house one already owns the mortgage of.

“I read it twice,” he said. “And then I put it on the fire and watched it burn, and I rang for my horse.”

I did not say anything. I have learned that with him, silence is the only thing that ever gets an answer.

“I have spent eleven years regretting nothing,” he said. “It is the emptiest condition a man can occupy. I have decided to take my chances with regret instead.”

He turned round.

“There are only a few days of the terms left, Miss Offlet. I intend to use every one of them.”

“And then?”

“And then we shall see.”

That is the last conversation we had in which either of us told the truth on purpose.

There was a dinner on the Thursday at Sir Rodrik Pell’s, who owns the largest of the neighbouring estates and the smallest of the neighbouring mines.

I was invited quite plainly as the entertainment. I understood it the moment I saw where they had seated me — far down the table, between a deaf old man who owned a mill and a dull young one who owned nothing, among people with whom I was to be safely and amusingly placed.

He reached me in the crush of the drawing room before dinner and murmured that Pell meant mischief, and that I should let him speak for me if it came to it.

I looked at him. I am told my face did something; I do not know what.

“Your grace,” I said, “I have been dining at tables like this one, being made sport of at tables like this one, since before you noticed I existed. I do not require rescue. I require only that you not spoil my aim by leaping in front of the target. Sit still. Enjoy your soup. And watch.”

He went scarlet — I saw the exact moment the flush reached his collar — and it took me until the second course to understand why. In his eagerness to defend me he had been about to do to me precisely what the world has always done: treat me as a thing that things happen to, rather than a person who acts.

He had not meant to. That is what made it unbearable. And he had not argued. He had sat down and taken his soup and left me my target.

Sir Rodrik Pell called down the table over the fish, in the jovial carrying voice of a man about to be cruel and call it fun.

“We are all agog, Miss Offlet. You must tell us — how does a lady of your seasoned years and modest situation contrive to hold the attention of a duke? The younger girls are quite in despair. They wish to know your secret. Is it conversation? Do enlighten us. What is it you talk of, you and his grace, hour upon hour?”

The table waited to watch me flush.

“We talk of you, Sir Rodrik,” I said, pleasantly, into the waiting silence. “Very often. His grace finds you a subject of endless instruction. Only last week he was observing to me that a man may inherit a great estate and a great name and still, by careful and lifelong effort, contrive to be remembered for neither. I said surely no man works so little. And his grace said, my dear Miss Offlet, you have never dined at Pell’s.”

I lifted my glass one inch.

“And now I have. He was quite right, as he generally is. Thank you for the education. I shall treasure it.”

The silence held for one full second.

Then it broke — and it did not break the way Pell had planned. It broke into laughter. Real laughter, helpless and delighted, from the very guests who had come to laugh at me, because there is nothing a well-fed table enjoys so much as watching a bully take the ground out from under his own boots.

Sir Rodrik Pell sat at the head of his own table going a slow and total purple while his guests wept into their napkins.

I did not laugh. I was shaking, if I am honest, in a way I would not have permitted anyone at that table to see, and I kept my hands below the cloth.

Then Gaultier rose.

The table quieted the way a table does when the largest animal in the room stands up.

“Sir Rodrik,” he said. “You asked what Miss Offlet and I speak of, and since you were good enough to inquire, I will tell you. We speak of Greek, which she reads and I have forgotten. We speak of the corn laws, on which she is better informed than three men I could name in the Lords. We speak of courage, of which she has more than any soldier I have met. And of victory, which she has taught me I never once understood. I came to this county to be bored. Miss Offlet has made that impossible, and I find I am grateful.”

He picked up his glass.

“To Miss Offlet. The most dangerous woman in England, and the only honest one. I would sooner cross swords with the whole of Bonaparte’s army than sit down to cards against her again, and I have never in my life meant anything more.”

He drank.

The table drank with him, after a startled moment, because a duke had commanded it — and because it was, besides, plainly and gloriously true.

I sat far down among the deaf and the dull with the colour high in my face and my grey eyes bright and — I am told — wet, and for the first time in our acquaintance I had nothing whatever ready to say.

He had not planned it. I know he had not planned it, because he told me afterwards that he had known, even as the words were leaving him, that he had just told a room full of the county’s worst gossips exactly how matters stood with him, more nakedly than if he had gone down on one knee among the fish-forks, and that it would be all over three shires by breakfast.

And that he had found, in the moment, that he did not care.

He had me out of that house within the half hour, on the flimsiest pretext in the language, with my cloak round my shoulders and his hand under my elbow, and we stood together in Sir Rodrik Pell’s cold gravel courtyard waiting for the carriage while the noise leaked out through the lit windows behind us.

“You should not have said that,” I said.

My voice was unsteady. He had never heard it unsteady.

“Every word was true.”

“That is precisely why you should not have said it.” I turned on him, and the composure I had worn for thirty years — the composure that is only fear in good clothes, as I had told him myself — was gone entirely, and in its place was something raw and afraid. “Do you know what you have done? You have made them believe it. All of them in there. They think the Duke of Dowich is in love with me, and it was supposed to be a wager. Gaultier, it was supposed to end. I was supposed to walk away with my dignity and a story. And instead you have stood up at Rodrik Pell’s table and made it real. And when you go — when the season ends and you go back to your London and your beautiful girls of nineteen — they will not pity me any more. They will laugh at me. And that is worse. That is so much worse. And you did not think of it, because you have never in your life had to think of what happens to the person you leave behind.”

He was silent.

“She is right,” he said at last. “She always is.”