“If I Were Younger, I’d Ask You to Dance,” the Duke Teased — “Who Said No?” Replied the 38-Year-Old Woman Everyone Ignored. Then the Duke Who Hadn’t Danced Since Waterloo Took Her Hand, and the Entire Ballroom Fell Silent.
PART 8
The dinner was held in the very ballroom where they had danced, though the room had been transformed — chandeliers dimmed low, the long table set with silver and candlelight instead of a cleared floor waiting for scandal.
Sybil walked in on Arthur’s arm in a deep emerald gown, her gray hair swept up beneath a modest ornament, the heavy gold band glinting on her hand. The room stilled. The same ripple of whispers, the same turning heads — but underneath the shock this time, something else. A grudging, uneasy respect.
Lord Croft — the man who had ignored her for a decade — actually bowed. Lady Agatha’s fan stayed still, her expression betraying, almost imperceptibly, a softening around the eyes.
Sybil caught Arthur’s gaze across the table. He was watching her with something she’d never seen on his face before. Not cynicism. Not exhaustion. Something closer to pride.
She raised her glass to him. He raised his in answer, and for a moment the entire glittering room — the whispers, the candlelight, the years of quiet invisibility — fell away, and there was only the two of them, exactly as they’d been behind the fern.
They did not stay late. There was nothing left to prove, nothing left to win. They had walked into the fire and come out the other side to find that the world they’d been so afraid of losing was, in the end, built on nothing sturdier than whispers and polite lies.
The carriage carried them home through the same damp streets, past the same cobblestones that had once swallowed them fleeing this very ballroom in scandal and silence. This time, Sybil looked out at the gray, rain-washed city and felt nothing but a quiet, settled peace.
Arthur sat across from her, bad leg stretched out, his hand resting on the seat between them. She reached over and took it.
“You haven’t complained about your knee all evening,” she said.
“I haven’t had time. I was too busy being insufferably pleased with myself.”
She laughed, bright and unguarded. “A good evening, then.”
“The best of my life,” he said quietly, and meant it in a way that filled the whole carriage.
The gates of Westford House swung into view. The rain had stopped. Thin clouds broke apart to reveal a pale moon over stone that had once seemed so cold and forbidding, and now simply looked like home.
Arthur descended first and offered his hand, exactly as he had on their wedding day.
And Sybil took it — not out of duty this time, not out of necessity, but because there was nowhere else in the world she would rather put her hand.
They walked up the steps together. The doors opened onto warm golden light spilling across wet gravel. Inside, the fire in the study was already lit, the deerhound lifting its head from the rug to thump its tail once before settling back to sleep.
Arthur led her to the worn leather wingback chairs and poured two glasses of scotch from the crystal decanter, amber catching the firelight exactly as it had eight months and a lifetime ago.