For Four Seasons, She Sat Alone and Unclaimed at Every Ball—Until the Duke Crossed the Crowded Room, Leaned Close, and Whispered, “Act as Though You’re Mine,” Unaware Their Carefully Staged Lie Was About to Become Real

PART 3

The garden was small, hemmed by brick walls, but afforded them privacy enough. Once they had walked the length of it twice and Mrs. Kellett’s anxious face had withdrawn from the window, Cadwallan spoke of what had lodged in his mind since the supper dance.

“You mentioned a brother. Peter. His schooling.”

Friedwide stiffened slightly, embarrassed to have let the subject slip at all. “I should not have burdened you with it. It is not your concern.”

“I should like to make it my concern, if you would permit it. I have the means, and I find I do not much like the notion of a clever boy losing his place at school for want of a sum that would trouble me hardly at all.”

She stared at him, momentarily robbed of the composure four seasons of disappointment had taught her to keep close at hand. “That is a very great deal to offer a woman you have known one evening, Your Grace.”

“I do not entirely know why it matters to me what becomes of your brother,” he admitted when she pressed him further. “I believe I dislike watching people go without who need not, when I have the means to prevent it. I have not always had the means.”

“That is not what the ton says of you.”

“The ton says a great many things of me, very few of them accurate. It is easier to be thought cold than to be thought vulnerable, Miss Neville. I suspect you understand that better than most.”

Her eyes met his, and for a moment something passed between them — a recognition, plain and startling, of two people who had each learned separately and at considerable cost the particular loneliness of being misjudged.

The garden party at Lady Ashcom’s the following afternoon proved, as Cadwallan had predicted, an occasion of studied dullness enlivened only by the spectacle of the Duke of Winerth arriving with Miss Friedwide Neville upon his arm and installing her, with every appearance of solicitous attention, beneath the striped awning nearest the rose walk. Within the hour he had fielded seven separate inquiries as to his intentions, deflected his grandmother’s pointed observation that Miss Neville seemed a sensible sort of girl at least, and watched Lady Marberry’s face go the particular shade of white that suggested a woman recalculating a campaign she had believed already won.

What he had not anticipated was how little of the performance felt after the first hour like performance at all.

“You are meant to look at me as though I have said something charming,” Friedwide murmured when he had lapsed into silence beside her on a stone bench half-screened by climbing roses. “You have instead been staring at the middle distance for a full three minutes, which is hardly the picture of a man besotted.”

“Forgive me. I was calculating whether the Northfield might be let to advantage.”

“That is not remotely charming, Your Grace. But I confess I find it more interesting than most of the conversation I have endured today.” She turned toward him, genuine curiosity replacing the teasing note. “Tell me about the Northfield, since you cannot stop thinking of it.”

He had not expected to be asked — still less to find himself answering at length. The drainage difficulties. The tenant families who had farmed the land three generations together. His reluctance to let it to a stranger who might work it hard and leave it exhausted. She listened with a stillness that was not the polite, waiting stillness of young ladies enduring a gentleman’s dull enthusiasms, but something closer to actual attention — occasionally asking a question sharp enough that he understood she had genuinely followed the thread of it.

“You care for those people,” she said when he had finished, “not merely for the rents they bring in.”

“They are my responsibility. My father did not always remember that a title is a duty before it is a privilege. I have tried not to make the same mistake.” He heard the rawness in his own voice and was faintly startled by it. He did not, as a rule, speak so plainly of his father to anyone.

“I lost my own father when I was nineteen,” Friedwide said quietly. “He was not a duke — only a gentleman of modest means, who loved his children rather better than he managed his accounts. When he died, there was very little left. I do not say this for your pity, Your Grace. I say it because I think you and I understand something of the same weight — the difference between inheriting a name and inheriting what the name requires of you.”

He looked at her properly then — this quiet, plainly dressed woman who had sat overlooked at four seasons’ worth of balls — and felt something shift and resettle in his chest. Some old certainty coming loose from its moorings. He had spent three years assuming that no one outside his own small circle of solicitors and stewards had the faintest notion of what it cost to hold an estate together. He had not expected to find that understanding in a woman he had approached purely as a convenient shield.

“I am sorry for your losses,” he said quietly. “Though you have not spoken of them so plainly. You need not tell me. I do not ask it as part of our bargain.”

He found to his own surprise that he wanted to tell her anyway.

“My mother left when I was twelve. Not died — left. There was a man — a foreign count of some description — and considerably more scandal than my father’s pride could survive. He never spoke of her again — not once in the fourteen years remaining to him. I learned very early that love in my family was a door that closed rather more often than it opened — and closed hardest on the person left behind it.”

He paused, surprised at himself, at how easily the words had come after years of careful silence.

“And then at nineteen, I was engaged to a young woman — Honoria Fairfax — whom I believed myself thoroughly in love with. She broke the engagement three weeks before the wedding when a marquess with a considerably larger fortune made her an offer. I do not tell you this for sympathy either. I tell you so that you understand precisely why I proposed the arrangement I did. I do not trust easily. I have found it safer on the whole not to try.”

“And yet you trusted me enough to ask,” she said softly.

“I did not trust you. I calculated that a pretense clearly understood by both parties as a pretense carried no risk of the kind that has wounded me before. There is nothing to betray in an arrangement neither of us mistakes for love.”

Even as he said it, something in his own certainty rang hollow, though he could not yet have said why.