He Struck Her at the Ball, Never Knowing Her Husband, the Feared Duke, Was Watching From the Doorway — Then Dankar Crossed the Ballroom With Slow, Deliberate Fury and Revealed the Woman Everyone Ignored Was His Wife

PART 2 

To understand how the Duke of Dankar — the most feared and most private man in England, who had held the whole institution of marriage in contempt for twenty years — came to marry the invisible companion of a minor country house, you have to understand how he first saw her. And the shaming truth of it was that he had not seen her at all.

He had been a guest at Ashworth Park. One of those interminable country visits he endured for the sake of business. Old Ashworth held mortgages the Duke wished to buy up to relieve certain tenants Ashworth was squeezing. And Berangaria Kembley had been there the whole while — the poor relation, the companion to Ashworth’s wife, the small brown figure who fetched shawls and read aloud and made herself useful and invisible.

And the Duke of Dankar, who prided himself on missing nothing, had missed her entirely.

He saw her — truly saw her — for the first time on the third night, in the library at two in the morning, when neither of them had known the other was there.

The Duke did not sleep well. He never had. And he had come down to the library for a book, and found the fire still faintly warm, and a single candle burning, and Berangaria Kembley asleep in a chair with a book fallen open in her lap.

He had meant to withdraw. And then he had seen what the book was.

It was a volume of his own — or rather of the great library’s — a difficult work of natural philosophy in Latin that he had been reading himself, and had wondered at finding shelved in a house like Ashworth’s, where no one read anything. And he had seen tucked into it a sheet of paper covered in a small, clear hand.

And being a man of few scruples where his curiosity was concerned, he had looked at it.

It was a translation. She had been translating the Latin — for no reason, for no master, for no purpose but her own pleasure, at two in the morning in stolen candlelight, after a full day of fetching Miss Ashworth’s shawls. And the translation was good. It was better than good. It was more graceful and more exact than his own reading of the same passage. And it was annotated in the margins with observations of a quickness and originality that stopped the Duke of Dankar where he stood — because he had spent his whole life among the most educated men in England, and had rarely met a mind that moved like the one on that page.

He had stood in the library doorway and looked from the sleeping woman to the page and back, and he had felt the ground shift very slightly under him — as it does when a man discovers that the world contains something he had not known was in it.

He put another log on the fire quietly, so she would not be cold. And he withdrew, and took nothing, and said nothing.

But after that, he saw her. He could not stop seeing her. Once a man has truly seen a person, he cannot go back to looking through them.

And the Duke of Dankar spent the rest of that visit in the strange position of being the only person in the house who knew that the invisible companion was the most interesting person in it.