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 3

He watched her for the remainder of that visit. He watched her fetch the shawls. He watched her endure Mrs. Ashworth’s small cruelties with a composure he came to understand was not meekness at all, but a kind of steel — the deliberate refusal of a strong person to give a weak one the satisfaction of a reaction. He watched her be kind to the one creature in that house who loved her — young Cassandra Ashworth, a plain, shy girl of fifteen whom her own parents neglected, and Berangaria mothered.

And he watched no one — no one but himself — notice that there was a remarkable woman in their midst.

He engineered conversations. This was not easy. A duke cannot simply strike up talk with a companion without causing comment. And Berangaria, when he tried, deflected him with a wariness that he came only slowly to understand.

She thought he was toying with her.

Of course she thought so. A great man’s sudden interest in a poor woman meant, in her experience, exactly one thing — and it was not honorable. And she had learned to close herself against it like a house shutting its windows before a storm.

It took him three days to make her understand that he wished to speak with her about the natural philosophy and nothing else. That he had read her translation and thought it brilliant, and wanted to argue a point of it. And when she finally understood that he was in earnest — that a duke wished to debate Latin with her at eleven in the morning in the cold garden where no one would see them talking — something in her weary face had opened just slightly. Just for a moment.

And the Duke of Dankar had felt that small opening as though a door had been flung wide in his own chest.

They argued the philosophy. She won.

She won handily, and she did not spare him. And when he pressed a point she thought weak, she demolished it with a precision that would have been rude in a drawing room and was, in the cold garden, purely exhilarating.

The Duke of Dankar had spent thirty-eight years being deferred to, flattered, feared, managed. He had forgotten — if he had ever known — the sheer pleasure of being met. Of speaking to someone who did not care in the least that he was a duke, who cared only whether he was right, and told him plainly when he was not.

He went back to Dankar at the end of that visit with old Ashworth’s mortgages in his pocket and Berangaria Kembley’s face in his mind. And he found over the weeks that followed that he could not get her out of it. And that he did not, when he examined the matter honestly, wish to.

He learned her history slowly, and it made him angrier the more he learned.

She had been the only child of a gentleman of small fortune — well educated by a father who loved her and treated her mind as worth cultivating, which was itself rare enough. At nineteen she had been engaged, respectably and with affection, to Sir Halbert Vain — a match everyone approved. And then her father had died, and the small fortune had proved smaller than anyone knew. Mortgaged to the roof.

And within the week of the discovery, Sir Halbert Vain had thrown her over — not privately, not kindly, but with a public brutality calculated to shift the blame onto her, so that no breath of fickleness should attach to him. He had let it be understood that he had discovered something to her discredit. He had never said what. He had not needed to. The mere suggestion from a man against a woman with no father and no fortune to defend her had been enough.

She had gone from an engaged gentleman’s daughter to a ruined nobody in the space of a fortnight. And the only roof that had opened to her had been the Ashworths — who took her because a poor relation is cheaper than a paid companion, and let her know it every day for five years.

Five years.

The Duke of Dankar thought about those five years a great deal. Five years of a mind like that fetching shawls. Five years of that steel and that grace and that quickness spent on enduring the small cruelties of small people — unseen, unthanked, translating Latin at two in the morning for the only pleasure left to her — because a man had wanted her worthless, and society had been happy to oblige him.

It was, the Duke thought, one of the quietest crimes he had ever encountered. And one of the worst — precisely because it was so quiet. No blood, no theft, nothing anyone could be hanged for. Only the slow, patient murder of a remarkable life by neglect and contempt, and the whole world’s cheerful complicity in it.

He resolved to end it.

He did not at first entirely admit to himself what form the ending would take. He told himself he wished to help her — settle a small independence on her, perhaps anonymously, enough to free her from the Ashworths. He was rich enough that it would cost him nothing. And it would be a kind of justice.

He told himself this for several weeks.

And then one night at Dankar, alone in his own great library with her remembered face and her remembered voice and the memory of being — for the first time in his life — truly met, the Duke of Dankar set down his glass and admitted the truth to himself.

Which was that he did not want to settle an independence on Berangaria Kembley and free her to live her own life somewhere far away from him.

He wanted to marry her.

He — who had held the whole institution in contempt, who had fended off every matchmaking mother in England for twenty years, who had believed himself constitutionally incapable of the thing — wanted to marry the invisible companion who had beaten him at Latin in a cold garden.

And he wanted it with an intensity that frightened him.

And he was not, he discovered, going to be able to talk himself out of it.