“I’m Not Marrying You,” She Told the Duke After Discovering Her Name in an Old Church Register — But He Smiled and Revealed That One Forgotten Childhood Promise Had Already Made Her His Wife Twelve Years Ago.

PART 2

“I mean,” he said at last, “to give you the truth. And then the choice. Both of those are more than the world generally offers a woman in your position, and I will thank you not to throw them back in my face until you have heard them out.”

That silenced her. She had expected a tyrant. Instead she had a man laying his cards face-up, one at a time, and it disarmed her more thoroughly than any command could have done. He saw her decide, wearily, to listen.

“Sit,” he said, and then, because he had not offered a woman a courtesy in so long he’d nearly forgotten the shape of it — “Please.”

She perched on the edge of the great chair as though it might be a trap. He drew out the seat opposite. For a moment neither spoke, and the fire cracked, and somewhere in the sleeping house a clock struck the half hour, and the Duke of Overwald understood he had arrived, without in the least intending it, at the most important conversation of his life.

“Twelve years ago,” he began, “on a May morning, I did a foolish thing to be kind to a crying child. Let me tell you how it was. Then, Miss Darnley, you may call me a scoundrel if you still think so — but you will at least be calling me one with the whole of the story in your hands.”

She said nothing. But she did not rise, and she did not go. To a man who had learned to read small signs in guarded faces, it was answer enough.

“My father brought me to Overwald that spring,” he said. “I was seventeen and sullen and certain the whole country was beneath me. On May morning the parish keeps its custom — the pole, the garlands, dancing on the green. But there is an older piece to it the guidebooks do not mention. The young people take hands in the churchyard at sunrise and speak the troth, two by two. Half in jest, half in earnest, the way such things are. Most mean nothing by it.”

“You knew the words,” she said. It was not quite an accusation. “You spoke them knowing what they were.”

“I knew they were words in a game. I did not know they carried the weight the law gives them, no more than you did. I was a boy showing off in a churchyard. There was a girl crying by the lych-gate — the older ones had told her she was too plain and too small to be chosen for the troth, and no village boy would take her hand.”

He glanced at her.

“You have not changed as much as you might suppose.”

Color came and went in her face. “You took my hand out of pity.”

“I took your hand because you had spirit and they had none. And because I could not abide to watch them make you small. And — I will be honest, since I have promised it — because it vexed my pride to be told by a farmer’s son that the young lord could not have whichever partner he chose. It was not a kind act, quite. It was a proud one, dressed as a kind one.”

She was quiet a long moment. When she spoke, the heat had gone out of her voice, replaced by something more dangerous to him — because he could contend with anger, and had no defense at all against honesty.

“I remember the handkerchief,” she said. “I kept it. I did not remember your face, but I kept it for years, because a boy had been kind to me when no one else was, and I did not know his name. I made up a great many foolish things about who he might be.” A short, unhappy laugh. “I never once imagined he was a duke.”

“This one is not, generally,” Godric said. “You would do well not to revise your opinion on the strength of a single morning, twelve years old.”

“Why did it wait?” she asked. “Twelve years. Why now?”

Here they came to the part he liked least.

“Because no one had cause to look. My father died two years ago. Last month my solicitors advised me I must at length settle the succession — name my heirs. Marry.” He said the word without inflection. “The estate is entailed, and there is a cousin I would sooner see drowned than seated in my father’s chair, and the only sure way to bar him is a son of my own body. So the stewards began their work, and old Pedifer, thorough to a fault, went through every deed and register in the muniment room to be certain nothing stood against a clean settlement.”

He looked at her, level.

“He found a marriage. Mine. Entered, witnessed, never dissolved.”

“So you need a wife,” she said slowly, working it through, “and you have discovered you already have one. How very convenient for you.”

“It is the least convenient thing that has happened to me in twenty years.” Enough plain feeling in it that she blinked. “I am a man who has ordered his whole life to be answerable to no one, and I am told by a steward with a nervous cough that I have been married since I was seventeen to a woman I would not know in the street. It is not convenient, Miss Darnley. It is a catastrophe with a ribbon on it. The only mercy in the whole affair is that the woman in question, now that I have met her, appears to have a working mind and a spine — which is a great deal more than I had any right to hope for.”

She stared at him. And then — he was not prepared for it — she laughed.

It broke out of her against her will, startled and bright, and she pressed her fingers to her lips and could not stop it.

“A catastrophe with a ribbon on it,” she repeated. “Yes. That is exactly what it is.”

“I am gratified you approve of the phrase.”

“I do not approve of any of it.” But the worst of the fear had burned off in the laughter, and what was left was a woman thinking hard and fast, which suited her far better than fear ever had. “Tell me the rest, then. You said truth, and then a choice. I have had a great deal of truth. Where is the—”

She stopped herself.

“Where,” she said again, quieter, “is the choice, your grace?”

PART 3

Godric rose. He thought better on his feet, and there was that in her steady gray regard which made a man want to be worthy of it. He moved to the fire and gave her the thing plainly.

“The choice is this. We may fight it — go to law, endure the scandal, hope for a decree that frees us both. I have told you what that road costs, and it costs you more than it costs me, because the world forgives a duke a great deal and a gentlewoman nothing.” He paused. “Or we may let it stand quietly as a thing already done, requiring no explanation, wanting no permission from any court. You would be the Duchess of Overwald. This house, the London house, forty thousand acres, and a settlement drawn to make you independent for life, whatever befell. You would never again write a proud little letter about family business, because you would have no more need to beg anything of anyone. And I—”

He stopped. He had not meant to say the last part. He said it anyway.

“I would have solved the one problem I could not solve. I do not wish to marry a stranger chosen for her connections and her acres, and I find myself, by the grace of a fool’s game in a churchyard, already married to a woman I could at least respect.”

“You do not know me,” Marisel said. “You cannot respect what you do not know.”

“I know you did not weep when you had every cause to. I know you laughed when most women would have swooned. I know you read a document that broke your life in half without missing a word of it. I know enough to be going on with. The rest we should merely discover in the accustomed order, having got the ceremony out of the way twelve years early.”

She did not laugh at that. She looked at him a long moment, and he let her look, not knowing what she saw, and finding, to his considerable discomfort, that he wanted very much to know.

“You have not asked me,” she said, “whether there is anyone else. Whether my heart is already spoken for. A gentleman would have asked before laying out his acres like goods on a stall.”

Something cold touched the back of his neck. He had not asked because he had not, until that instant, allowed himself to consider it.

“Is it?” His voice came out level. He was proud of that.

“No. There is no one. I am the third of four daughters of a gentleman with more pride than fortune. I have spent six seasons being useful to my sisters and overlooked by everyone else. I have long since made my peace with being the one who is not chosen.” She lifted her chin. “So you need not fear you are stealing me from a sweetheart, your grace. There is no sweetheart. There has never been a sweetheart. I am four-and-twenty and unmarried, and my family had begun to speak of me the way one speaks of furniture too good to throw away.”

He heard everything beneath the words — the years of it, the small daily wearing-down of a bright thing in a house that did not value brightness — and was surprised by the clean, hot anger that rose in him on her behalf, at people he had never met.

“Then we are two people,” he said, “whom the world had set upon a shelf and forgotten, and a parson’s twelve-year-old ink has taken us both down again, whether the world wills it or no.”

He came back to the table.

“I will not hold you to it against your will. Whatever the law says, whatever the parson would swear — if you tell me, having heard the whole of it, that you cannot bear it, I will set my own name to the suit and take the scandal onto my own shoulders and see you freed, and provide for you privately, so that you want for nothing, and you need never see me again.” He drew breath. “But I do not think you will tell me that. I think you are too honest to say you cannot bear a thing you have not tried. So I ask you only this, and not for an answer today. Stay a month here, under my aunt’s roof and my aunt’s eye, so that no breath touches you. Let the county believe what it will — that the Duke of Overwald has quietly married. Come to know the house, the land, and God help us both, the man. And at the month’s end, if you wish to go, I will open the door with my own hand, wish you well, and never reproach you.”

He paused.

“That is the choice, Miss Darnley. Fight, and lose your name in the winning. Or stay a month, and see.”

She rose from the chair at last, small and straight and gray-eyed in the great room that dwarfed her and did not, somehow, diminish her at all.

“A month,” she said.

Lady Ottoline Vane, the Duke’s great-aunt, was one-and-eighty, deaf in one ear precisely as much as it suited her, and possessed of the finest collection of pugs and opinions in three counties. She looked Marisel up and down through a lorgnette and delivered her verdict.

“Well. At least she is not a fool. Godric, you have spent nine-and-twenty years being the dullest interesting man in England, and now a churchyard has done for you what no mother in the kingdom could manage. Sit down, child. Have you any conversation, or are you only handsome and unfortunate?”

“I have a great deal of conversation, ma’am,” said Marisel, “when I am among people worth spending it on.”

Lady Ottoline barked a laugh that set two pugs to yelping. “She’ll do. Godric, go away. You stand about like a mute at a funeral. The girl stays with me.”

He went, and did not admit to himself that he lingered in the passage, and heard his aunt say, “Now, my dear, tell me the whole of it, and do not spare his dignity,” and heard Marisel’s low answering laugh follow him the length of the corridor.

It was arranged that first evening with a smoothness that ought to have troubled him more than it did. Within three days the county knew. Within a week the cards arrived on the hall table, and the neighborhood, which had given the cold duke up for a hopeless bachelor, discovered in the mystery of his sudden wife the most delicious subject it had enjoyed in a decade.

Godric watched it with the weary detachment of a man watching weather come over his own fields. He minded, chiefly, its effect on her — the way she stiffened when a carriage was announced, the careful blank courtesy she put on like armor, the exhaustion at the corners of her mouth by evening.

“You need not receive them all,” he told her, the fourth evening, when they found themselves briefly alone.

“It is not my house. I am a curiosity in it. If I shut the door, they will only invent worse things than they can see through an open one.” She stood at the long window, watching the last light leave the lake. “I have been a curiosity before, your grace. When my father lost the greater part of his money, I learned that the only way to be talked about less is to give them so little to work with that they grow bored. I am being dull on purpose. It is the hardest thing I do all day.”

“You are not dull,” he said, before he had decided to say it.

She glanced at him. Something in her face, quickly gone.

“That is because you are not one of them.”