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 9

He came round the small table in the firelight, in the falling snow of their many-wintered life, and drew his wife up out of her chair and into his arms — the cards forgotten, the game forgotten, the long-ago wager settled forever in the only coin that had ever mattered.

And he held her the way he had held her in a coaching yard at dawn a lifetime before: as a man holds the one hand in all the world he was always meant to lose to.

“Then it is settled,” murmured the Duke of Dowich into the grey hair of the woman who had beaten him at everything, and in doing so saved his life. “You have won again, my love. You always do. And I have never once in all my days been so glad to be defeated.”

“Past the end of the counting,” he echoed into her hair.

And found that the words fit exactly, as hers always had.

For from the very first night she had told him he cheated like a man who had never once been caught — and that had been the truth, though not the truth she meant. He had been cheating himself all his life of the one thing worth having, and she had caught him at it, and made him stop.

He would go to his grave a debtor to her for it, and count the debt the greatest fortune of his life, and never once wish it paid.

The snow came down over the whole sleeping county — over Dowich and its warm windows, over the small church where they had wed, over the long fields she had made green again.

And inside, by the fire, the two of them stood a long time in the quiet, needing nothing, wanting nothing.

At the end of every reckless bet and every clever word and every mile ridden through the dark, the only prize either of them had ever truly been playing for was simply, and entirely, and for the whole of their lives — each other.

THE END