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 4

The weeks that followed took on a rhythm he had not anticipated and found himself, against every careful instinct he possessed, beginning to look forward to. There were further walks in the park, where Friedwide’s dry observations of passing society reduced him to unseemly public laughter. An evening at the theater, where she wept unashamed at the third act, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief he pressed into her hand without thinking. A musicale at his grandmother’s house, where his young sister Iris — fifteen and starved for female company since their mother’s departure and their father’s death — attached herself to Friedwide with such immediate, fierce devotion that Cadwallan found himself watching the two of them together with an ache in his chest he did not know how to name.

Cresia Kellett, invited to the same musicale on the strength of her connection to Friedwide, watched the whole scene from the edge of the room with an expression that curdled somewhere between envy and calculation — an expression Friedwide, absorbed entirely in Iris’s earnest questions, did not once notice, though her aunt did, and privately resolved to keep watch on her elder niece a little more closely thereafter.

“Do you truly think it foolish,” he overheard Iris asking Friedwide during that musicale, low and earnest, “to prefer botany to needlework, when everyone tells me a lady ought to occupy herself with the latter?”

“I think it foolish to occupy yourself with anything that does not interest you merely because someone has decided it is proper,” Friedwide answered with a seriousness that plainly startled the girl. “The world has quite enough indifferent needlework in it already. It has rather less use for a young woman who has troubled to understand why a rose blooms as it does. I dare say such understanding will serve you better in the long run than a competent sampler ever could.”

“She is remarkable,” Iris told him afterward, with the blunt sincerity of a girl not yet trained out of honesty by the season’s demands. “She asked me what I actually thought about my lessons — rather than what I ought to think. No one does that. You do not do that, Cadwallan, and you are the person who arranges all my lessons.”

“I shall endeavor to improve,” he said, and meant it — and understood, with a small cold shock, that Friedwide Neville was altering him in ways that had nothing to do with debts or Lady Marberry or the careful public architecture of their bargain.

He had built his entire adult life upon the principle that attachment was a liability — that the people one loved were sooner or later the people who left. His mother through scandal. Once, before that, a fiancée through greed. His father through a grief he had never permitted himself to voice aloud. He had constructed the arrangement with Friedwide precisely to avoid that particular danger — a courtship so plainly false that no one’s heart could reasonably be endangered by it.

And yet here he was, three weeks into a pretense, finding himself arranging his days around the hope of an hour in her company. Finding himself unaccountably lighter for the mere fact of her presence. Finding himself, God help him, disappointed on the two occasions their engagements did not permit them to meet.

He told himself it was merely the relief of honesty after years of guarded solitude. He told himself this with increasing frequency and decreasing conviction as the weeks wore on. He did not yet notice that Friedwide, for her part, had begun to watch him with an expression she was careful never to let him see fully — something weary and hopeful and afraid all at once. The look of a woman who has been told a thing is not real and finds, to her own quiet terror, that her heart has stopped believing the warning.

The invitation to Winerth Park arrived in the fifth week — penned in the Dowager Duchess’s decisive hand, addressed not merely to her grandson but expressly to Miss Neville and her aunt, requesting the pleasure of their company for a fortnight in the country.

“Your grandmother means to inspect me,” Friedwide said when he called to deliver it. “A fortnight under her own roof is not a garden party, Your Grace. It is an examination.”

“She believes I mean to marry you. I have not corrected the belief, because correcting it would unravel the entire arrangement before it has served its purpose.”

“Then I shall have to convince her that I am worthy of you.”

He looked at her. “And if she comes to love you over this fortnight — only to learn afterward that the whole of it was invented for her benefit?”

He had not permitted himself to consider that particular consequence too closely. In the same way he had not permitted himself to examine too closely why the prospect of a fortnight in her company at Winerth Park filled him with something perilously close to eagerness, rather than the weary calculation such an invitation ought to have provoked.