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 8

By the next morning, London had turned entirely over — the way London does — and the Duke of Dankar watched it turn with a cold satisfaction he did not trouble to hide.

The cards began arriving before noon — a flood of them. From every great house that had spent the previous evening whispering about the woman in the corner, all now falling over themselves to congratulate, to have always known there was something distinguished about Miss Kembley. One saw it at once.

The hypocrisy of it was breathtaking. Berangaria, reading the cards aloud over breakfast with a mark still faintly visible on her cheek, found in it a bitter amusement the Duke was glad to see — bitter amusement was a great deal healthier than the composure of the ballroom, which had frightened him with its completeness.

But she did not want to ruin the Ashworths. She had thought about it, she said — God knew she had thought about it a great many nights over a great many shawls. Now that she could, she found she did not want to.

“Ruining the Ashworths would only make me into a smaller version of Halbert Vain,” she said. “A person who uses power to punish. And there is something else. If I ruin them, I punish Cassandra along with them, for she must live in that house. A ruined house is a bitter place for a neglected child. No — here is what I want, and it is the only thing I want from the Ashworths in the whole world.”

She looked up. “I want Cassandra. I want us to go there this week, as soon as it can be arranged. I want to take that child out of that house and into ours, in such a way that the Ashworths cannot refuse, and are glad to be rid of her, so Cassandra never knows she was fought over, and can believe cleanly that she was chosen. That is my revenge, Joris. Not to destroy them. To take the one thing they never valued, and to love it, and to raise it into everything they were too small to see it could become.”

They went within the week, in the great crested carriage. It was one of the purest pleasures of the Duke’s life — not for any cruelty they did the Ashworths, for they did none, but for the exquisite spectacle of the family’s scramble.

Berangaria asked for Cassandra privately, before any proposal to the parents. She would not have the girl learn her fate as a transaction between adults. The Duke waited in the drawing room while his wife went up to the schoolroom.

When she came down again, she was leading by the hand a plain, thin, frightened girl of fifteen, whose face had been transformed by something the Duke recognized. He had seen it once before, in a cold garden, on another face. The look of a person just told by someone they trust that they are wanted.

Cassandra came to Dankar in early summer, and the great empty house began, for the second time in a twelvemonth, to fill with life.

The gratitude was almost unbearable at first, and it was the gratitude that broke the Duke’s heart. She thanked the servants for everything. She apologized for taking up space. She ate too little, as though afraid to be seen wanting anything, and kept to her room unless summoned, watching Berangaria with a fierce, hungry devotion, and watching the Duke with plain terror, for she had never known a great man to be anything but cold.

He set himself to unteach her the terror, patiently, meeting her where she was rather than where he wished her to be. He discovered she had a mind — slower than her cousin’s, less brilliant, but genuine and curious and starved, one that had been told its whole life it was stupid because no one had troubled to feed it.

So the Duke of Dankar, with thirty-eight years of the finest education in England and a library famous throughout the kingdom, began quietly to teach a plain, frightened girl the things no one had ever thought her worth teaching.

He started with the stars, because they required nothing of her but wonder. He took her out on clear nights to his grandfather’s observatory and showed her the planets through the great telescope, and watched the terror leave her face, night by night, replaced by something he knew well from a cold garden years before — the opening of a person discovering, late and against all expectation, that they are worth something after all.

“You are courting that child,” Berangaria said to him one night, watching from the observatory door as the Duke and Cassandra bent together over a chart of the heavens. “Exactly the way you courted me — with her mind. You found the one thing no one had ever valued in her, and you valued it. I did not know when I married you that you had it in you to be a father. I do not think you knew it either.”

“I did not,” he admitted. “I assumed, if I thought of it at all, that I would be correct and distant, like my own father. Instead I find—” He stopped, watching the girl’s absorbed face in the lamplight. “I find I would burn down London for that child. I have known her two months. She apologizes for existing, and eats too little, and flinches when I raise my voice, and the flinching makes me want to weep. The night she laughed. The morning she asked for a second helping without apologizing. The day she contradicted me about the orbit of Mars, and was right, and knew it, and did not take it back. These make me happier than any triumph of my life before you. Is this what it is to care for a child? No one told me this was in the world to be had.”

“It is what it is,” Berangaria said softly, and came to stand beside him. They watched the girl they had rescued bend over the stars, and said nothing more for a long while, because nothing more needed saying.