He Rode Out to Settle a £400 Debt and Found a Beaten Girl Kneeling in Icy Water Beneath Her Stepmother’s Roof — Then the Silent Duke Asked Her Name, and Everything in That House Began to Break

 PART 7

And the Duke of Dunbear, who had not spoken his own heart aloud to another living soul in seven years, who found tenderness harder than iron, stood in the cold hall of his fathers and found the words were there after all, simple, and had only been waiting.

“Because I love you,” he said. “I have loved you, I think, since the first morning, though I did not know it then, and would not have known what to call it if I had. I do not ask anything of you. You owe me nothing, and I want nothing you do not freely wish to give. But you asked me why, and I will not lie to you, for you have had too many lies. That is why. That is the whole of it.”

She did not answer at once, and he had not expected her to, and was glad, in a way, that she did not — for an answer given so soon, in the wash of that morning’s fright, would have been one he could not have trusted. He wanted the true thing or nothing.

“You need not say anything,” he said gently, stepping back. “Indeed, I would rather you did not — not now, not for a long while yet. I have startled you, and that was wrong of me. Come and sit by the fire. That is an order,” he added, with the ghost of something on another man might have been a smile, “and I am told I am a very fearsome man, so you had best obey it.”

She gave a small, broken laugh — the first he had ever heard from her — and let herself be led to the fire.

So began the long, quiet mending of Isan Olveston, and the Duke came to understand it was the true work of that season, beside which sending the widow away had been the easy part. The marks on her body faded within a fortnight. The other marks — the ones the physician had spoken of — mended slower, and the Duke set himself to their mending with a patience he had not known he possessed. He learned the shape of her fear so he could go around it. Never to come upon her suddenly. Never to raise his voice within her hearing, even to another. And when, in the early days, he forgot and reached too fast for something and saw her flinch in the old dreadful way, it cut him worse than any wound, and he would stop and go still and say quietly, “It is only me. Nothing is coming. You are safe” — until the terror ebbed and she could breathe again. Each time, it happened a little less.

He gave her the run of the house entire, and watched her learn, disbelievingly, that she might go where she pleased, eat what and when she pleased, and no one would stint her. He had the library opened and aired, and watched her stand before the shelves with tears standing in her eyes, remembering — he supposed — the books that had been hers once, and sold. “They are all yours now,” he told her gruffly from the doorway, “to read and to keep,” and went away before she could thank him.

He learned to leave gifts where she would find them rather than put them in her hand, for a gift given directly discomposed her, made her feel she must earn it. A shawl over a chair. Gloves on the hall table. A little writing desk appearing one morning in the window of the room she’d taken for her own.

He had the old blind dog fetched over from the Olveston house before the widow sold up, and when Isan came into the room and found it there, snuffling and thumping its tail, she went down on her knees and wept into its gray fur — and the Duke, watching from the door, understood that this ugliest, least valuable of all his gifts was the one that told her most surely she was safe.

Slowly, week by week, through that cold season and into the first softening of spring, she came alive. He heard her singing by accident once, passing an open door — a few low notes, broken off the instant she thought herself heard. “Do not stop,” he said, without coming in. “In this house you may sing as loud and as long as you like.” And after a moment, hesitantly, she went on, and he stood in the passage with his eyes closed, and thought he had never in all his life heard a sound so beautiful.

She began to laugh. She began to argue with him — gently at first, then boldly — about books, about whether he worked too much and ate too little and shut himself away too much, and he found he loved to be argued with, that her quick clear mind delighted him, that he would say a thing he did not quite believe merely to watch her eyes kindle.

The county talked, of course. Some of it was unkind, and the first time word of it reached her, the Duke found her white and shaken, folding in on herself in the old way, ready to believe herself a blot upon him. He crossed the room and took both her hands in both of his — the first time he had taken her hands — and waited until she looked up.

“In all the county, in all the world, there is exactly one person whose opinion of you I care a straw for, and I am holding her hands. What the rest say is noise. I stopped hearing it long before you came. The only difference now is that I have something worth not hearing it for.” He held her gaze. “Let them laugh. I would rather be laughed at with you than honored without you.”

Something moved in her eyes that had not been there before — not gratitude, not fear, but something new and warm and frightened and alive. And the Duke, seeing it, felt his heart turn over — and let go of her hands before he should say too much, too soon, and stepped back, and gave her time, as he had sworn he always would. For he had understood, in these weeks, the one truth that governed everything: she had never once in her life been free to choose. Every large thing that had ever happened to her had been done to her, by force or by circumstance — even her rescue, for he had lifted her onto his horse and given the orders that made her safe, and she had chosen none of it. This last and greatest thing — whether she would love him — she should choose herself, freely, even if it meant he lost her.

He would rather lose her free than keep her bound.

And so he waited, and loved her quietly, and never pressed, and let the spring come on — until the evening Mrs. Thorne came to him in his study, folded her hands, and said the thing that would not let him wait any longer.

“You are waiting for her to be sure, my lord. But she is sure. It is not her that’s waiting now. It’s you. She thinks you spoke of love out of pity that first day and have thought better of it since, you’re so careful, so far off. She thinks you do not truly want her. You are each of you breaking your own hearts, and if one of you does not soon find the courage to speak, I shall lose all patience with the pair of you.”