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 5 

The quietness was her idea before it was his. And the Duke came to see the wisdom of it, though it went against his every instinct — for his instinct was to marry her before the whole of England and dare anyone to say a word.

Berangaria had thought it through, as she thought everything through, and she laid it out for him plainly.

“If you marry me before all the world,” she said, “in a great public wedding with the trumpets out — then the story becomes at once the story of the Duke’s astonishing folly. The great man who threw himself away on a ruined nobody. And it will be told and retold, and I will spend the rest of my life as a curiosity — the companion who trapped a duke. And every kindness you show me will be read as proof of my cunning, and every fault of mine will be magnified into evidence that you were deceived. Whereas if we marry quietly, and I remain a while longer as I am, and society is left in ignorance — then when the truth comes out, as truth does, it will come out on our terms. At a moment of our choosing. In a shape that we control. Let them discover it. Let them find out all at once that the woman they looked through was a duchess all along. There is a great deal of power, Joris, in being underestimated. My five years have taught me that. Let us use it.”

He had married her on those terms. And he had come, over the months that followed, to understand the full shrewdness of them. And to understand, too, the other reason she had given for remaining at Ashworth Park a little longer as plain Miss Kembley — a reason that had nothing to do with strategy, and everything to do with the kind of woman he had married.

“Cassandra,” she had said. “I cannot simply vanish and leave her. She is fifteen, and she is plain, and she is shy, and her own mother despises her for all three. And I am the only creature in that house who has ever told her she is worth anything. If I disappear overnight into a duchess’s life, she will believe I abandoned her the moment something better offered — that I was only ever biding my time, like everyone else in her life. And it will confirm the worst thing she believes about herself — which is that no one stays. I will not do that to her. Let me remain a few months more. Let me prepare her. Let me arrange matters so that when the truth comes out, she comes with me — for I mean to take her, Joris. I mean for us to take that neglected child into our own house and give her the growing up she has been denied. If you will have her. And let her understand that I did not leave her — but sent for her. That is my condition. And it is the only one I have. And it is not negotiable.”

“It is not a condition,” the Duke of Dankar had said, and he had meant it with his whole heart. “It is the finest thing I have ever heard anyone say. And it is the exact reason I am marrying you. And of course we will take the child. Dankar is large and empty, and I have wanted for years to fill it with something that mattered. Bring your Cassandra. Bring anyone you love. I have spent my life keeping people out. I find I would like, for once, to let someone in.”

And so the months of the secret marriage began.

They were the strangest of the Duke of Dankar’s life. And though he would not have traded them, they were the hardest. For a season and more, he was a married man whose wife lived thirty miles away in another man’s house, fetching another woman’s shawls, addressed by the world as Miss Kembley, and by her employers as an expense.

It went against everything in him. Every instinct — the possessiveness, the pride, the plain protective fury — rebelled against leaving his wife one more day in a household that used her ill. But Berangaria had asked it for Cassandra’s sake, and for the sake of the strategy she had thought through so carefully. And the Duke had learned already that his wife’s judgment was sounder than his instinct. And so he mastered the instinct, and he waited.

And he found the waiting a discipline that taught him things about himself he had never had cause to learn.

They contrived to meet. It was not easy, and the difficulty of it — the secrecy, the snatched hours, the elaborate innocent pretexts — lent those meetings a quality the Duke never forgot. The heightened, breathless preciousness of a thing that must be stolen. He would ride out, ostensibly to inspect a distant property, and she would walk out, ostensibly to visit the old gardener’s cottage or to gather simples for Mrs. Ashworth’s stillroom. And they would meet in a ruined chapel on the edge of the Ashworth land — a roofless old place among trees, where no one came. For an hour, twice a month.

He remembered those chapel hours all his life. He remembered her coming through the trees in her plain gown with her basket of herbs, and the way her whole bearing changed the moment she saw him. The wariness and the smallness that she wore like armor at Ashworth Park falling away, so that by the time she reached him, she was herself again — upright and quick and unafraid.

He remembered arguing philosophy among the ruins with the wind in the ivy. He remembered, most of all, the ache of watching her go again at the end of each stolen hour — watching her put the armor back on before she walked out of the trees, watching his wife make herself small again to survive a house she should never have had to survive.

And the fury it raised in him, and the vow it hardened in him — that this would not last.

“I do not know how you bear it,” he said to her once in the chapel, holding her before she went. “To be yourself here with me for one hour, and then to walk back into that house and be nobody again. It would drive me mad. It is driving me mad, and I only watch it. How do you bear it?”

“I bear it,” Berangaria said, “because it is nearly over. And because there is a reason for it. And because I have borne far worse, for no reason at all, for five years. It is a strange thing, Joris — it was harder to be small at Ashworth Park before I knew you than it is now. Before, the smallness was the whole of my life. There was nothing else. Now it is only a costume I put on for a few weeks more. And underneath it, I am the Duchess of Dankar. And I am loved. And I have a chapel in the woods where I am myself twice a month. And I have Cassandra to see safely out. And it is all nearly over. The costume does not touch me anymore. That is the thing you gave me — before you ever gave me a name or a house. You gave me back myself in the cold garden. And once a person has been truly seen, the not being seen can never again be quite as deadly as it was. Because they carry the seeing inside them.”