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 6 

It was in those last weeks of the secret marriage that Sir Halbert Vain came back into her orbit.

Vain — whose fortunes had already begun their long decline — had taken to haunting the country houses of the neighborhood in search of a rich second wife. And he turned up at last at Ashworth Park, where he found, to his sour amusement, the woman he had jilted five years before, still installed as a poor companion, still, as he supposed, entirely beneath the notice of a man like himself.

And he could not resist her.

That was the thing the Duke understood afterward, piecing it together. A certain kind of man cannot leave alone the person he has wronged — because their continued lowliness is the proof he needs that his wrong was justified. And their smallest sign of spirit is an unbearable reproach that must be crushed.

Vain baited her. He condescended to her, mocked her, reminded her before others of her fallen state. All with the lazy cruelty of a man perfectly secure in his own superiority — not knowing, could not have dreamed, that the companion he tormented went twice a month to a ruined chapel to be the Duchess of Dankar. And that her patience under his cruelty was not the meekness of the beaten, but the composure of a woman who knew exactly what was coming, and had only to wait for it.

She told the Duke of it in the chapel, calmly. And the Duke’s fury had risen so hot that he had been all for ending the secrecy that very week — riding to Ashworth Park, taking her out, and calling Vain to account on the spot.

But Berangaria stayed his hand.

“No,” she said. “Not yet. And not privately. Listen to me, Joris. If you take me out now in anger over Halbert Vain, then Vain becomes the reason. The whole thing becomes about him. And I will not give him even that much importance. A private accounting settles nothing. He will tell it his own way and be pitied. Let it wait. Let it wait for the right moment. The public moment. The moment of our choosing. Cassandra is nearly settled. Society does not yet know. Let us keep it so a little longer. And let Vain go on tormenting the woman he thinks I am. And let him do it in public, before witnesses, at some great gathering. And then let the truth come down on him all at once, in front of everyone, at the worst possible moment for him and the best for us. He is building his own scaffold, Joris, one cruelty at a time. Do not interrupt him. Let him finish it. And then we will spring the trap.”

The Duke of Dankar had looked at his wife with something close to awe.

“You are planning it,” he said. “You are actually planning the whole thing. The public revelation, the moment — you are laying a trap for Halbert Vain and using yourself as the bait — and you are perfectly calm about it.”

“I have had five years,” Berangaria said, “to think about what I would do to Halbert Vain if I ever had the power. I told you — I have always had the plan ready. All I lacked was the power. And now, thanks to you, I have that too. So yes, Joris, I am planning it. And when it comes, and it will come at a ball, I should think, for that is where such men do their cruelest work, you must be ready to play your part. Which is to cross the room when I need you, and say the true things in that terrible quiet voice of yours. And not one moment before. Can you do that? Can you wait for my signal, and not spend yourself early in anger? It is the hardest thing I will ever ask of you. But it is the difference between wounding him and destroying him. Will you wait?”

“I will wait,” the Duke of Dankar had said, “though it costs me everything I have. You are the most formidable person I have ever known, Berangaria. And I thank God I am on your side of this.”

And he had waited.

All those weeks, holding his fury on its chain. Until the night at the ball, when Sir Halbert Vain, secure in his contempt, raised his hand to a woman in a corner. And the trap that Berangaria had laid so patiently sprang shut, exactly as she had planned it.

The Duke of Dankar crossed the room.