He crossed a ballroom of forty sweating guests to reach the plainest woman in it — and Cassandra Ashwell, twenty-four, three seasons unclaimed, made the error of taking his hand. He was a duke. He was also hiding something with teeth.

PART 8

“You took the weapon out of his hand.”

Gabriel had not moved from where he stood. The window bars lay across the boards between them, and the dust turned slowly in them.

“In an afternoon. Exactly as you said. I have watched men lose fortunes in that chair, and I have never once seen it done so quietly.”

He came toward her at last across the sunlit boards.

“You did not have to give me back Verina. That was not in any bargain. That was not for the villages.”

“No,” said Cassandra. “That was for you. I found I could not bear to leave you with unkind last words from every single person who ought to have loved you.”

She lifted her chin, though her heart was going like a shutter in a gale.

“It appears I have caught the same complaint you did at my sister’s wedding. It is very inconvenient. I dislike it enormously.”

He stopped a foot from her.

He did not reach for her hand. He looked at her the way he had once looked at a lock he could not open.

And then his whole guarded face gave way.

“Marry me.”

“Not for the villages. Pennington has certified the match — the moment we wed, the entail is satisfied, and Julian’s clause is dust, and he has not a court left to challenge us. But I will not have you come to me to save three villages, Cassandra. I would sooner see the whole northern reach fall than buy you with it.”

His voice dropped.

“The only knife left at my back is the one my own heart holds. There is only a man in a dusty library who has been looked past his whole life by everyone who wanted his rank — and looked at once by a woman in a corner who wanted nothing from him at all. And who cannot now imagine the rest of his life without her frown in it.”

He said it plainly. The way he had said the plainest things, from the first.

“I love you. There it is. The one card I have left, and I am laying it face up on my father’s table, in the full sun. Marry me because you want to. It is the only reason I will have.”

The blackbird — for there was always, in that summer, a blackbird — sang once from the shaggy lime beyond the open window. Quite unconcerned.

“Say it again,” said Cassandra. “And I will consider it. Not the villages. The other part.”

“I love you,” he said. And this time it came steady, and whole, and unafraid.

“Then yes.”

She said it, and something in the room seemed to exhale — the old house, the shut years, the dust.

“You infuriating, honest, badly dressed man. Yes.”

And because his cravat was crooked, and because she had wanted to since the top of a country dance in July, she reached up and drew his head down and kissed him — once, and warm, and with her whole heart in it, and none of it arranged for the room.

And the shut house, and the beaten dust, and the singing blackbird, and the long light of the summer afternoon all leaned in at last to keep her.

They were married three weeks later, in the little Hampshire church where Lucy had been wed.

Cassandra’s mother, who had waited three years and a duke for the privilege, sobbed so magnificently through the vows that the curate lost his place twice, and the ratafia ran short at the breakfast after. Aunt Maud wore lilac taffeta and a smile she did not trouble to hide, and told anyone who would listen that she had known the whole business from the first — from the very moment the man began pretending to admire the plasterwork.

It was the following June that Cassandra sat again in a corner.

This time by choice. And by a window of her own — in the great east room at Ravensmore, which had been shut three years and was now the warmest in the house. The Holland covers were gone for good. The lime avenue had been shorn. The hundred windows stood thrown open to the summer.

And through the nearest of them came the smell of cut grass and beeswax, and the particular green sharpness of box, and the low murmur of the tenants out on the south lawn — three villages’ worth of them, come to drink the Duke’s ale on ground that would be theirs, and their children’s, for good.

Gabriel found her there, as he always found her. In the corner with the best view of the whole turning room.

“Brooding,” he said, dropping into the chair beside her.

His cravat was crooked. It was. She had long since accepted it as incurable.

“Resting my feet,” said Cassandra. “One cannot rest what one has not used. And I have been used a great deal today. Your Mrs. Falk has let out her seams again — I watched them go at the lemonade.”

He laughed. The real one. The surprised one. Still, after a year of her.

On the sill beside them, a blackbird landed. It cocked its head, regarded the Duke and Duchess of Ravensmore with frank contempt — and stayed.

Gabriel took her hand, and the rough place at the base of his palm caught warm against her fingers, and neither of them said the thing that no longer needed saying across a crowded room.

“You are the only person here,” he murmured, “who is not entirely miserable. I confess I should like to know your secret.”

Cassandra leaned her head against his shoulder, and looked out over the bright turning summer below them, and answered him the way she had once answered a stranger in a corner of her sister’s wedding.

“You mistake me. I am extremely happy. I have simply had a great deal of practice at concealing it.”

THE END