Her father staked her at a card table like a purse of coin — “my daughter, worth more than every guinea here.” The coldest duke in England looked at the wager and did something no one at that table expected: he refused to play.

PART 6

“One does not know one is cold if one has never been warm,” he went on. “I am telling you because you asked me for honesty at the beginning, and I find I cannot stop paying it to you. I did not marry you to armor you against your father, or not only. I married you because a man drowning does not always know he is reaching for the shore, and I reached for you, and I dressed it up as a sensible transaction so neither of us would have to say the frightening thing, and I am tired of the disguise. That is the truth of it. You may do with it what you like.”

She had gone very still. The old painted faces of his ancestors looked down at the two of them in the failing light.

“You are not to say such things,” she said, and her voice was not quite steady, which he had never heard, “unless you are entirely certain of them. I have built a whole life in six weeks on the understanding that you did not want me, only the quiet of me. If you tell me you want me, and it turns out you have merely got sentimental of an evening by a northern fire, you will pull the floor out from under a woman who has already had it pulled out once this year and cannot afford it a second time. So be certain. I keep accounts. I cannot make an entry I will have to scratch out.”

“I have never been more certain of anything in my life. I want you. Not the quiet of you. You, the whole ungovernable arithmetic of you, the mended glove and the word soon and the way you look at me as though I were weather you intend to walk through. I am in love with my own wife. It is the least fashionable thing a duke can possibly be, and I do not care, and I would say it in front of every drawing room in England if you asked me to.”

Lori, who had not wept once through her ruin, nor her father’s betrayal, nor the cold church, put one gloved hand up over her mouth and made a small sound that was not quite a sob and not quite a laugh. Norwin took one step toward her and stopped — because their terms said separate, and he would not break a term she had not first invited him to break, not even now, not even for this.

“You are waiting,” she said from behind her hand, “for me to say you may.”

“I will wait as long as you like. The choice is yours, Lori. It has always been yours.”

She lowered her hand, looked at him a long moment across the failing light, and crossed the distance herself, deliberately, the way she did everything — plainly, having decided. She put her hand flat against his chest, over the place where he had once carried a folded paper of candles and coal.

“I choose you,” she said. “There. It is entered. I will not scratch it out.”

They did not rush it after that. That was the wonder of them — having found the thing, they went slowly toward it, two careful people taught by hard masters not to want, teaching each other to want without fear. The separate rooms remained, by her choosing and his patience, and Fosskar grew warm from the kitchens up.

Word reached the world, because the world is always reaching. The story that had run through every drawing room by that first Sunday — Fosskar won a baronet’s daughter at cards — met, over the following months, a second story that overtook it: that the cold duke had married the girl, settled a fortune on her in her own name, put his whole household into her hands, and been seen by the vicar and the tenants and a visiting cousin who could not keep it to herself, to look at his own wife across a dinner table as though she were the only lit candle in a dark room.

But a father, unlike a scandal, does not always stay quietly in the north.

Sir Emlin Hulsey came back in the spring, reasoning in the loose ruined way of him that a daughter so richly married would surely help the man who had arranged the marriage — for so he had already begun telling it in the taverns. He was shown, on the Duke’s standing orders, not into the great hall but into the steward’s room, where Lori sat at the long table with the household books open and a candle burning.

“Lori,” he said, spreading his arms in the old loose warmth. “My girl, look at you. Did I not do well by you?”

“Sit down, Father, or stand as you like. I am working.” She did not rise.