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 6 

She went to the village first.

Not to the house. That is what he had not accounted for, because he was still thinking like a man who fights with arguments, and she was not fighting him, she was fighting a rumour, and rumour does not live in houses. It lives at the pump.

She stood by the pump in the market square with the Vicar’s wife and two other women and she said, in a voice pitched to carry exactly as far as she needed it to and no further, that her nephew had been ensnared; that the Offlets were a grasping family fallen on hard times; that a clever woman past her prime will stop at nothing; and that she had come to see the connection broken before the family was disgraced.

And then she said — and this is the part that went into my mother like a blade, and the part I have never once been able to forget, and the part I have decided to write down anyway, because if I am going to be a subject I will be an accurate one —

that it was a mercy Tania’s father had not lived to see his daughter reduced to trapping men over card tables.

I was six feet away, choosing apples.

I heard all of it. I heard every word, standing at the fruiterer’s stall with a paper bag in my hand, and I did not turn round, because turning round would have given her my face, and my face is the one thing in this world that I own outright.

I paid for the apples.

I walked home. It is a mile and a quarter, and I have never been able to recall a single step of it.

I came into the parlour smiling — my mother told him this afterwards, and I have never forgiven her for it — she was smiling, your grace, the way she smiles when she has been cut to the bone.

And then I went upstairs and packed one trunk.

He came in the afternoon and found the small parlour empty of me, and my mother sitting alone by the window with a face gone grey and old.

“She is not here,” said Mrs. Offlet.

“When will she return?”

“She will not.”

My mother’s hands were folded very tightly in her lap.

“She has gone to my sister in Yorkshire. She left at noon on the stage with one trunk. She asked me to give you this, and to tell you that the wager is discharged, that you kept your terms most honourably, and that she releases you from all of it with her thanks.”

She held out a folded paper. Her voice, when it came again, was not quite steady.

“Your grace. My daughter is the bravest creature I have ever known, and I have watched the world spend thirty years teaching her that she is worth nothing. And I watched her, these six weeks, begin to unlearn it. And this morning a great lady in a great carriage came to the village and said a number of things in the hearing of a number of people about spinsters who trap dukes and dukes who tire of their toys. And my daughter came home from the market having heard every word. And she was smiling the way she smiles when she has been cut to the bone. So she has gone. She would rather leave you than be the thing that woman called her. I am sorry. She loves you. That is exactly why she has gone.”

He stood in that shabby parlour with the last roses in the window and he did not open the letter, not yet.

“Tell me what the Countess said,” he said, very quietly, and something in his voice made my mother look up. “The exact words, if you can bear it. I find I wish to know precisely what my aunt considered it fit to say in a public market about a woman she has never met.”

And my mother, who has buried a husband and a son and a house and a life, told him. The ensnared nephew. The grasping family. The mercy that my father had not lived to see it.

He found afterwards that his hands had closed into fists at his sides, and that he was in the grip of a rage so pure and so cold that it frightened even him.

And that the object of it was not me, for leaving. Nor even his aunt, for her cruelty.

It was himself. For the man he had been before this autumn. The man who would have said such things, or worse, and thought them wit.

He opened the letter.

It was short, and in my hand, which is clean and unhesitating, because I had made up my mind.

Your grace, — You were a worthy adversary, and I release you gladly, and I will remember the autumn as long as I live. Do not come after me. It would only prove the Countess right, and I could not bear to have been in the end exactly what they said I was. Let me keep this one dignity. It is nearly all I have.

Yours in the only way that costs you nothing,

T. Offlet

He read it three times.

Then he folded it and put it inside his coat over his heart, where it would stay for the rest of his life.

And he turned to my mother, and for the first time in the whole of that grey day something kindled in his face that was not despair.

“Madam. Your daughter is the cleverest person I have ever met, and she has made precisely one error in six weeks, and she has made it just now. She believes that following her would prove the Countess right.”

He was already moving toward the door.

“She is wrong. She has calculated, as she always calculates, from the assumption that I care what the Countess and the county think of me. I did care. I have not cared for some weeks, and it is entirely her doing, and she has not yet understood that she has cured the very disease she is now trying to protect me from. She thinks she is sparing me my dignity.”

He took up his hat.

“I have discovered that I do not want it. Where in Yorkshire?”

My mother looked at him for a long moment. And then, slowly, the grey lifted from her face, and something came into it that in a younger woman might have been hope.

“The village of Nettleby,” she said. “By Richmond. My sister’s cottage. The stage does not reach it until tomorrow noon. She must lie the night at the posting inn at Boroughbridge.”

A pause.

“A man on a good horse, your grace, who did not stop to sleep, might reach Boroughbridge by dawn.”

“Then I had better not stop to sleep,” said the Duke of Dowich.

And he bowed to her as low as he had ever bowed to anyone, and was gone.