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 5

Winerth Park in high summer was, Cadwallan privately believed, the most beautiful estate in England, though he had learned young not to say so aloud, since his father had loved it with a careless, spendthrift love that had very nearly cost them the whole of it. The house rose gray and ancient above gardens tumbling down toward a lake silvered with evening light. The first days of Friedwide’s visit unfolded in a warmth Cadwallan had not permitted himself in years — mornings spent walking the grounds while Iris gathered wildflowers ahead of them, afternoons on the terrace where the Dowager Duchess presided over tea with a watchfulness she made no particular effort to disguise, evenings in the long gallery where Friedwide’s fine reading voice filled the old house with a warmth he had not heard within its walls since long before his father’s death.

“You are different here,” Friedwide observed on the third morning, watching him with the frank attention that no longer unsettled him as it once had — that he had, in fact, come to crave. “In London, you carry yourself like a man expecting an attack from every direction. Here you look almost at peace.”

“This is the one place I have never had to pretend anything,” he said before he had entirely considered the admission. “My father loved it recklessly, and my mother left it without a backward glance. I have spent three years trying to hold it together — for Iris’s sake, for my tenants — for some version of myself that existed before either of them taught me what love generally costs.”

She was watching him with an expression he could not entirely name — something tender and grieved at once.

“I do not know why I tell you these things,” he said quietly. “I have told no one — not even my grandmother — half of what I have said to you these five weeks.”

“Perhaps,” Friedwide said softly, “it is because I do not want anything from you beyond what you have already promised to give. There is a great deal of freedom in that. For a man who has spent his life suspecting everyone’s motives.”

He wanted, in that moment, with a suddenness that frightened him, to close the small distance between them and kiss her. Wanted it with a force that had nothing to do with performance — with no audience present to require it — only the two of them and the lake and Iris’s distant laughter drifting back through the summer air.

He did not do it. He stepped back instead and offered some remark about the house, and watched something flicker and dim in Friedwide’s eyes before she too retreated behind the composure she wore like armor. He told himself the retreat was wisdom rather than cowardice. He did not entirely believe it.

The Dowager Duchess conducted her examination of Friedwide’s suitability with a thoroughness that would have done credit to any solicitor. She inquired closely into the Neville family’s history, drew out with gentle but unrelenting persistence the full particulars of Friedwide’s circumstances — her father’s improvidence, her mother’s lingering illness, the modest annuity that remained, the considerably less modest sum still required for Peter’s education.

“You do not flinch from your own poverty,” the Dowager observed one afternoon. “Most young women in your position learn to disguise it, or apologize for it as though it were a moral failing rather than mere misfortune. You do neither.”

“I have found, Your Grace, that apology accomplishes very little beyond confirming to one’s listener that shame is warranted. I would rather be known plainly for what I am than admired falsely for what I am not.”

“A sensible philosophy — and rather rarer than it ought to be among the young women my grandson has been presented with these three seasons past.” The Dowager’s sharp old eyes flicked briefly toward Cadwallan, who kept his gaze fixed with great determination upon his newspaper. “I confess, Miss Neville, I had my doubts when this attachment first began. I have watched him guard himself so thoroughly since his father’s death that I had begun to fear he might never again permit anyone close enough to matter. I do not know precisely what you have done to change that. But I am grateful for it — whatever it was.”

Cadwallan, listening despite his pretense of absorption, felt the words land somewhere deep and unguarded, and understood with a fresh stab of guilt how completely his grandmother had already invested her hope in an arrangement she believed genuine in every particular.