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 8
The Duke sat a long time over his open books after she had gone, and saw, slowly, that his very carefulness might have wounded Isan as much as haste could have done — that a woman so long unloved might read distance not as respect, but as rejection.
It was near midnight when he rose, took up a candle, and went up the great staircase to her door. This time he did not merely rest his hand near the wood. He knocked, softly.
“It is I,” he said, when her voice, low and uncertain, asked who was there. “Rouse. Forgive the hour. I would not have wakened you, but I find I cannot wait for morning to say a thing I ought to have said long since. I will not open the door. I will say it through it, if you will only listen, and then I will go.”
A silence. Then, softly: “I am listening.”
He stood with his forehead near the door and his eyes closed. “I told you once that I loved you, the day I sent them away, and then I never said it again, and I have let you believe — Mrs. Thorne has made me see it tonight — that I spoke out of pity, in the heat of the moment, and have been only kind to you since, out of duty. That is not so. It is the very opposite of so.
“I did not speak again because I loved you too well to press you. You had never in your life been let to choose a single thing for yourself, and I could not bear to be one more person who decided your life for you. I wanted you free — free to choose to love me or not, of your own will, with no gratitude and no fear in it. Because if you came to me for any other reason than that you truly wished it, I do not think I could have borne it.
“So I drew back, and told myself I was doing right, and perhaps I only wounded you — perhaps I only taught a girl who has been unloved all her life one more lesson in not being loved. If so, I am sorrier than I know how to say. I am not clever with words. Silence was always easier for me than speech, and I let it be, and it has nearly cost me you.
“So here is the truth, plainly, through this foolish door at this foolish hour. I love you. Not out of pity. Not out of duty. I love you as I did not know a man could love — I, who thought that part of me dead and buried years ago. You have made this house into a home, and made me into a man again, and there is no hour of my day that is not brighter for knowing you are somewhere beneath this roof.
“I want you to be my wife. I want it with my whole heart. But only if you want it freely, truly, for yourself. If you cannot — if what you feel is only the gratitude of a rescued creature toward the one who rescued it — you have only to tell me so, and I will never speak of it again, and you will keep your fortune and your freedom for as long as you live, and I will be your friend to my last breath, and never reproach you.
“That is my whole heart. I have never given it to anyone. I give it to you now, to keep or return, as you truly wish. Good night, Isan. Sleep well. You need not answer through the door.”
He turned to go. He had gone perhaps three steps when he heard the door open behind him.
She stood in the doorway with a candle of her own, her wrapper drawn about her, her fair hair loose about her shoulders as he had never seen it — and her face was wet, but it was not the face of fear. It was open. Wholly open. Lit from within.
“You are the most foolish, clever man in all of England,” she said, and her voice shook.
“I have been told something like it,” the Duke said, standing very still, “this very night, by your ally, Mrs. Thorne.”
“All these weeks,” Isan said, coming a step toward him, “I have lain awake believing you did not want me — believing you had spoken once out of kindness and repented of it. Watching you be so gentle, so careful, so far away, always drawing back, always a room’s length off, and thinking: he is a good man, he took pity, and now he is stuck with me and too honorable to say so. And I have loved you, Rouse. Since the low road. Since the tin of salve, in that cold parlor, as though I were a person and not a thing. And I never dared say it, never dared hope it could be wanted. And here you have been, three steps down the passage, about to walk away, still not knowing.” Her voice broke. “We are neither of us any good at this. We have both been too long alone.”
“Yes,” said the Duke, his own voice unsteady. “We have. But I begin to think we might learn it together — if you are willing to be patient with a slow and silent man who has a lifetime of not saying what he feels to unlearn.”
“I am very patient,” she said, half laughing, half weeping. “It is the one thing I am truly good at. I have had a great deal of practice.”
He crossed the three steps back up the passage, set his candle down upon the little table by her door with a hand that was not quite steady, and took her face very gently between both his hands, the way a man handles a thing he has feared to break.
“Then answer me freely, for yourself,” he said. “Will you marry me, Isan Olveston? Not because I saved you. Not because you have nowhere else. Only because you wish it. Will you?”
“I will,” she said. “Oh, I will — freely, for myself, because I wish it more than I have ever wished for anything. I will.”
And he bent his head and kissed her, once, softly, in the dark passage of the great house — and it was, for both of them, unlike anything either had known. She had never been touched in tenderness in the whole of her grown life. He had believed himself past all tenderness forever. And here they were, the frozen duke and the beaten girl, neither of them frozen now, and neither of them beaten — standing in the candlelight with their two long solitudes folded up together into one, while down the passage a floorboard creaked, where a certain old housekeeper, happening to be passing, happening to pause, wiped her eyes on her apron and went off to bed, well satisfied with her night’s work.