In Mayfair, 1814, She Was Humiliated in a Dress Shop When They Mocked Her for Counting Twelve Shillings and Four Pence—Until a Duke Walked In, Chose Her, and Revealed He Knew the Truth About Her Disgraced Father

PART 7

The gallery was cold. Somebody had left a window open two rooms down, and the draught came along the passage carrying the garden and the wet gravel and the last of the roses.

Lydia stood with her back to the wall and the sapphires still heavy at her throat, and Nathaniel Harrington stood a careful three feet away, which was exactly as far as he could stand from her and still say what he had come to say.

“The arrangement,” he said, “was meant to be business.”

“I know what it was meant to be.”

“Then you know I have no right to alter it.” He said it plainly, without any of the coldness he used on the House of Lords, and the plainness of it was the thing that undid her. “I told you it was mutually beneficial, and it is. I told you it was for now, and I meant it in the only way that let me say it at all. But I have spent six weeks watching you learn to sit straight in a carriage that frightens you, and hold your own at a table full of people who were waiting to see you fail, and refuse — on three separate occasions — to let me solve a problem for you that you had decided to solve yourself.”

“You were counting.”

“I was noticing.” He paused. “You told me in the carriage that I did not know you. That was fair. This is the part where I would like to be given the opportunity to find out.”

Lydia’s hands were clasped in front of her, and she was very aware of her own breathing.

“There is a version of this,” she said slowly, “where I say yes because you have just restored my father’s name in front of four hundred people and I owe you everything I have.”

“There is.”

“And there is a version where I say yes because you are a duke and my mother needs a physician and I have spent two years being afraid, and I have discovered tonight that I am extremely tired of it.”

“There is that too.”

“And neither of those,” she said, “is a reason to marry anybody.”

“No.” He did not move. “They are not.”

“So you should know,” Lydia said, “that when I answer you, it will not be for either of those things.”

The music came through the doors behind them, muffled, a waltz she had just danced badly and would remember for the rest of her life.

“I am not asking you to be my duchess,” Nathaniel said. “I am asking you to be my equal — my partner — and the person I intend to love for all the days I have left on this earth. The title comes with it because I cannot shed it, and you are going to have to make your peace with the diamonds. But that is not what I am asking you for.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

“Yes.” Her voice did not shake. “That is the entire difficulty.”

He took one step forward. Then he stopped himself, deliberately, in the middle of a movement he had clearly begun, and let his hand fall back to his side — because he had spent six weeks learning that this woman had been moved around by other people her entire life, and he was not going to be another one of them.

Lydia watched him do it.

And then she closed the distance herself.

She put her hand flat against his chest, over the black wool, and felt the beat under it going hard and fast and entirely out of keeping with the face he was wearing, and she looked up at him and said:

“Yes. Not to the arrangement. To you.”

He kissed her.

It was not the kiss of a duke claiming a bride in front of a county. It was slow, and it was careful, and it was the kiss of a man who had waited six weeks to be certain, and when it ended he rested his forehead against hers and neither of them said anything for a while.

“You are going to be an extremely difficult duchess,” he said eventually.

“I intend to be an excellent one.”

“Is there a difference?”

“An enormous one.”

He laughed — an actual laugh, low and startled, the first one she had heard out of him — and somewhere down the gallery a footman who had been standing at his post for twenty minutes heard it and decided, correctly, that this was the sort of thing worth mentioning in the servants’ hall.

The Countess of Leven’s ball ended at four in the morning.

By five, three separate versions of the evening were already on their way out of Leven House in three separate carriages. By six, the most durable of them had settled into its final shape, and it was not the version Arabella Wentworth had spent a week building.

The version that survived was this: that the Duke of Ashborne had spent two years looking for the daughter of a dead spy; that he had found her kneeling on a shop floor with twelve shillings and four pence scattered round her; that a marquess’s daughter had put her heel down on the woman’s fingers and had discovered, in front of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, exactly what the word consequence meant.

The version omitted the arrangement entirely, because nobody outside the family ever knew there had been one.

That suited them both.