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 5

The carriage came round. Neither of us moved toward it.

“You should take me home,” I said.

“Yes.”

“You should take me home and we should finish the terms and be done.”

“Yes.”

“Then do it.”

“I am trying,” he said, “to think of a single reason to do it, and I cannot find one, and I have a great deal of practice at finding reasons.”

The groom was holding the door. The lamps were lit. Beyond the wall, the last of the dinner party was spilling out into the courtyard, and in two minutes there would be witnesses, and I have spent my whole life arranging to be unobserved.

“You are meant to let me walk away,” I said. “It is in the terms.”

“Then hold me to them,” he said.

He turned to face me.

“Look me in the eye, Tania —” and it was the first time he had used my name, and I understood, from the way he said it, that he had been holding it in his mouth for weeks, “— and tell me you want me to keep to the wager. Tell me you feel nothing. And I will hand you into that carriage and I will keep to it, on my honour, because I would sooner die than force one moment of my company on a woman who does not want it.”

The lamplight from the carriage was on my face. I opened my mouth to lie.

Lying is armour. I have worn armour my whole life; I put it on at eighteen and I have never once been seen without it, and I am extremely good — I am better than anyone I have ever met — at saying the cool, correct, wounding thing and walking away while the other person is still assembling their face.

I could not do it. I stood in a gravel courtyard in front of a duke with the truth sitting in my throat like a stone, and I tried, and I failed, and I felt my whole guarded, gallant, unbeautiful face crumple into it.

“I cannot,” I said. “God help me, Gaultier. I cannot lay it down. I have nothing in my hand. You have taken every card I had.”

And the Duke of Dowich — who had not lost at anything in eleven years — went very still, and then he began to laugh, very quietly, with the particular helplessness of a man who has been struck in the chest, and I understood that I had just won him the only thing he had ever actually wanted.

He put me into the carriage. He sat opposite me the whole way and did not touch me, and I have never in my life been so aware of the distance between two seats.

He did not sleep. He told me so the next day, and I believed him, because he had the look.

He sat up the whole of that night in the borrowed house with my confession ringing in him like a struck bell, and by dawn he had done a thing he had not done since his brother died: he had made a plan that had nothing to do with winning and everything to do with another person’s happiness.

I did not know it then. I found out much later, and only because he was, in the end, incapable of not telling me.

He would marry me — that was settled in him with the completeness of a foundation stone. But he would not do it the way a duke does things, by decree, sweeping the woman up and expecting gratitude. He had learned this much of me: that Tania Offlet would sooner walk into the sea than be any man’s act of charity, and that if he asked me while the county still whispered wager and his aunt still wrote pitiless letters, I would refuse him out of pure ferocious pride.

And I would be right to.

So he would have to make it so that marrying him cost me nothing of myself. He would have to defeat, one by one, every voice that would call me a spinster who had trapped a duke — and he would have to do it before he asked, so that when he asked, there was nothing left standing between us but the two of us and the truth.

He drew a sheet of paper toward him and began, in his cold clean hand, to make a list. The way his steward makes lists. Because he had discovered — he told me this too, eventually, over a small table, in a voice of enormous embarrassment — that love, real love, is not the swooning idleness the poets describe but the most practical enterprise a man can undertake.

On the list:

A sum settled on my mother, quietly, through a third party, arranged so that it could never be mistaken for the purchase of a daughter.

A word dropped, without appearing to drop it, that the Duke of Dowich considered his attachment to Miss Offlet a matter of his own honour, and would regard any slight to her as a slight to himself.

London in the spring. Not to be paraded. To be armoured. So that when the ton’s cruelty came, as it would, I should meet it from inside a fortress and not in the open.

And, fourth, in a hand that had gone slower and less certain than the rest:

I will learn to say the tender things aloud before it is too late to say them.

Because he had watched his own father go to the grave having never once told either of his sons a kind word, and he had sworn at that graveside a great many bitter oaths — and had taken a spinster in grey silk to show him that the bitterest of them had been a vow to become exactly the cold thing he had hated.

He was still writing when the carriage came up the drive.

His first move was undone before he made it.

His aunt did not answer letters. She answered them in person, and she arrived at the borrowed house at eleven that same morning in a travelling carriage the size of a small chapel, having driven through the night from London with the express purpose of saving him from himself.

She informed him of this before she had removed her gloves.

“I will not sit down,” said the Countess, sitting down. “I will not stay. I have come to say one thing, Gaultier, and then I shall go and undo the damage in the drawing rooms of three counties, which will take me the better part of the winter. You will end this at once. The connection is impossible.”

“Madam.”

“The woman is thirty. She is poor. She is nobody, and she is laughing at you. They are all laughing at you. Do you understand me? The Duke of Dowich, made a fool of by a clever spinster over a card table. Your mother, God rest her, would not have survived it.”

“My mother,” said Gaultier quietly, “did not survive my father, which is a rather different matter, and I would thank you not to conscript her ghost into an argument she cannot answer.”

The Countess had the grace, briefly, to look struck. Then she rallied — dragons always rally.

“Sentiment. You were never sentimental. That woman has addled you. I have made inquiries, Gaultier. Do you know what she is? A colonel’s daughter with nothing but her wits, who turned down three respectable offers in her youth out of sheer arrogance, and who is now past thirty and past hope and has fastened on the largest prize in England and reeled you in with the one bait a proud man cannot resist — a woman who pretends she does not want him. It is the oldest trick there is. She does not love you. She loves your four thousand acres. And when she has them she will make you the laughing-stock of the kingdom, and I will not — I will not — stand by and watch it done.”

The fire ticked in the grate. Leaves came down off the elms in the park.

“You are wrong about her,” he said at last, “in every particular, and I could correct you point by point. But I find I do not wish to, because you are not truly speaking of her at all. You are speaking of your own fear.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You have spent your life, aunt, guarding this family’s honour as though honour were a thing kept in a strongbox to be defended by keeping the wrong people out. And I have lived inside that strong box for thirty-eight years — admired, and untouched, and until this autumn more than half dead. And I would rather be the laughing-stock of the kingdom with her than the pride of it without her. That is the whole of my answer, and it is final.”

She stared at him as though he had begun to speak in tongues.

And perhaps, in a sense, he had. She had known him all his life as a cold and governable creature — the one member of the family who could be relied upon to put consequence before feeling — and she was watching that reliable coldness dissolve in front of her, and it frightened her more than any defiance could have, because it meant the nephew she thought she understood was gone, and a stranger stood in his coat.

“Your father,” she said, and her voice had lost some of its iron, “would have horsewhipped you for this.”

“My father horsewhipped me for a great many things, aunt, and I carry the marks of some of them still. And I have concluded, late and at great cost, that a man who takes his father for a compass will spend his whole life walking north into a wall.” He set his cup down. “I loved my brother. My father did not, particularly. And my brother died anyway — unloved, and unargued with — and I stood at his grave and understood that all the consequence in England had not bought him one hour of being truly known. I will not make his mistake. I have found someone who knows me. I would sooner lose the duke than lose her. And if you knew me at all — which I begin to think you never have — you would understand that I mean it as plainly as I have ever meant anything.”

“You will regret this,” said the Countess, rising white with anger.

“Perhaps,” said Gaultier. “But I have spent eleven years regretting nothing, and I promise you it is the emptiest condition a man can occupy. I will take my chances with regret. Good morning, aunt. My man will see to your horses.”

She swept out.

He should have felt triumph. He had, after all, won; he had faced down the fiercest opponent his family possessed and held his ground.

He felt instead a cold unease, because a duke’s carriage the size of a chapel does not travel through the night unnoticed, and the Countess had come to undo the damage in the drawing rooms of three counties —

— and Tania Offlet lived in one of them.