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 6

The evening that changed everything came on the ninth day of their visit.

Cadwallan had gone in search of his grandmother in the small drawing room to discuss a matter of household accounts. He found the door ajar and heard, before he could announce himself, Lady Marberry’s voice — for she had descended upon Winerth Park uninvited that very afternoon, ostensibly to pay a neighborly call, in truth to assess for herself the seriousness of the threat to her daughter’s prospects.

“You cannot mean to countenance it, Your Grace,” Lady Marberry was saying, sharp beneath a veneer of concern. “A penniless nobody with no connections to speak of, when your grandson’s estate carries a debt that could ruin the family entirely without my late husband’s forbearance. Saraphina’s dowry would clear the whole of it in an instant. Surely you see which match serves the dukedom better.”

“I see,” the Dowager replied with the dry precision Cadwallan had inherited from her, “that my grandson has not looked so content in three years as he has these past two weeks. I have buried enough of my own family to know the value of that — whatever it costs in debts.”

“Content — or performing contentment for your benefit? I have heard rumor, Your Grace, that the whole arrangement began as nothing more than a means of deflecting my daughter’s suit — a pretense merely, to buy him time until the debt can be settled some other way. I would not be so certain of his affections if I were you.”

There was a pause, and Cadwallan, standing frozen in the corridor with his hand upon the door frame, heard his grandmother’s reply with a sinking dread he could not master.

“Whatever it began as, Lady Marberry — I have watched them together. And I do not believe it remains a pretense on his side — whether it may or may not be on hers. But you are welcome to your doubts. Time generally settles such questions better than gossip does.”

It was the sound behind him — a soft indrawn breath, quickly stifled — that told him he was not alone in the corridor. He turned to find Friedwide standing not three feet away, her face gone very pale, one hand pressed flat against the paneled wall as though she required its support.

“Friedwide —”

“You need not explain,” she said, her voice perfectly steady — which frightened him far more than tears would have. “I have always known what this was. I do not know why I permitted myself to forget it.”

“That is not what I meant when I said it began as a pretense. It did begin so. I have never denied that. But it has not remained so — not for me. And I had thought — I had hoped —”

“Lady Marberry is not entirely wrong to doubt it.” There was something raw beneath the composure now — some old wound reopening. “A debt cleared by marriage to Lady Saraphina would serve the dukedom a great deal better than continued association with a woman who brings nothing to the match but a brother in Hampshire and a fortnight’s worth of your grandmother’s charity. I have known that from the first evening. I simply chose — against my own better judgment — to believe it might not matter to you as much as it evidently ought.”

“It does not matter to me.” He said it with a fierceness that startled them both. “I do not want Saraphina Marberry’s dowry or her mother’s forgiveness or any solution to this debt that requires me to marry where I do not choose to. I have told you why I do not trust easily, Friedwide. I did not tell you the whole of it — that I have begun, these five weeks, to trust you more than I have trusted anyone since I was a boy of twelve watching my mother’s carriage disappear down the drive. That is not pretense.”

But she was already stepping back — already retreating behind the composed stillness that had carried her through four seasons of being overlooked. And he understood, with a helplessness he had rarely felt in his adult life, that the damage of the overheard conversation could not be undone with words alone, however true they were.

“I should like to return to London tomorrow, if it would not inconvenience your grandmother. I find I need time to consider what is real in all of this — and I cannot do that clearly while I remain a guest in your house, performing a happiness I am no longer certain either of us entirely feels.”

She left him standing alone in the corridor, the drawing room door still ajar behind him, his grandmother’s and Lady Marberry’s voices continuing their debate, unaware of what had just transpired. Cadwallan stood very still for a long moment, feeling something he had spent years carefully avoiding settle over him with the weight of inevitability.

He had built the arrangement to protect himself from exactly this — the particular devastation of caring for someone and watching them doubt it. He had not anticipated that the greater devastation would be watching her doubt herself — watching five weeks of hard-won trust collapse beneath a single overheard sentence — and understanding that he alone bore the responsibility for having built, however unwittingly, the foundation of doubt on which that collapse now stood.