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 4 

Making her believe him was the hardest thing he had ever done.

He went back to Ashworth Park in the autumn on a pretext. And he found a way to speak to her alone — it was easier this time; he had learned the geography of the house and the hours when the family did not want her. And he told her, plainly, without ornament, that he wished to marry her.

She laughed.

It was not a cruel laugh, and it was not a happy one. It was the laugh of a woman who has been hurt so thoroughly that a good thing offered can only be a trap. And who defends herself with disbelief — because disbelief is the only shield she has left.

“Your Grace,” she said, “I do not know what game this is. And I will not pretend I am not wounded to find you playing it — because I had come foolishly to think you a man of a different sort. But I am not a fool, whatever these last five years have taught the world to think of me. Dukes do not marry penniless companions with ruined names. If you want a mistress, you have mistaken me, and mistaken me insultingly. If you want sport, you have chosen a poor subject. I have had five years’ practice at being the object of powerful people’s amusement, and I no longer find it wounds me as it once did. Either way, I would be obliged if you would let me go. Mrs. Ashworth will want her shawl.”

“Berangaria.”

He said it — it was the first time he had used her name — and he saw it startle her.

“Look at me. And tell me what you see. Not what your five years have taught you to expect. What you actually see in front of you now.”

She looked at him. He held still under it, and let her look. And he watched her wariness war with the evidence of her own eyes — for whatever else Berangaria Kembley was, she was too honest a thinker to ignore evidence, even when the evidence frightened her.

“I see a man who is not laughing,” she said slowly. “Who is not looking at me the way men look at sport. Who looks —” She stopped. “Who looks almost as frightened as I am. Which makes no sense at all — because you are the Duke of Dankar, and you have nothing in the world to be frightened of.”

“I have exactly one thing in the world to be frightened of,” said the Duke. “And I am looking at it. And it is not going well — because it is looking back at me as though I mean it harm, when the truth is I have never in my life meant anyone less harm or more good. I am frightened, Berangaria — because I have spent thirty-eight years perfectly certain that I would never do this, never want this, never be fool enough to hand any woman the power to wound me. And then I read a translation of Lucretius at two in the morning, and argued philosophy in a cold garden with a woman who did not care that I was a duke and cared very much that I was wrong. And I discovered that all my certainty was the certainty of a man who had simply never met the person who would undo it. I have met her now. She is standing in front of me, telling me to fetch a shawl. And I am asking her to marry me — not for sport, not for a season, not as any kind of arrangement — but for the whole of both our lives. Because I have looked at the alternative — a life in which I go back to Dankar and you stay here fetching shawls and we never argue Lucretius again — and I find I cannot bear it. That is the whole of it. That is the truth. I know you have no reason on earth to believe a word of it. I am asking you to believe it anyway. Or at least to let me spend as long as it takes to prove it.”

It took him until the winter to prove it.

She would not be rushed, and he did not rush her — though it cost him more patience than he had known he possessed. He wrote to her — letters that came, by an arrangement they contrived, to the one servant at Ashworth Park who could be trusted: an old gardener Berangaria had been kind to for years.

And the letters were not love letters. Or not only. They were the continuation of the argument in the garden — page after page of philosophy and books and ideas, the correspondence of two minds that had found each other.

And it was through the letters — more than through any protestation — that Berangaria came at last to believe him.

For a man may lie in a proposal. A man may even lie in a love letter, if he is practiced enough. But no man writes twelve pages arguing the finer points of natural philosophy with a woman he means only to seduce or to mock.

The letters were the proof. The thing that could not be counterfeited. The plain evidence, week after week, that the Duke of Dankar valued her mind, sought it out, delighted in it — treated it as the equal of his own. Which no one, not even her father, had ever entirely done.

And which was, she confessed, the one form of courtship against which she had no defense at all — because it was the one thing she had wanted her whole life, and given up hoping for.

They were married in the spring at Dankar. Very quietly.