“One Waltz With Me and You’ll Be My Wife,” the Cruel Duke Said—He Hadn’t Danced in Eleven Years, Until a Penniless Girl Laughed at Him and Turned His Reckless Joke Into a Scandal the Whole County Believed

PART 10 

Her eyes were bright now, too bright, and she was holding herself together by main force, and he could see it, and could do nothing.

“You have been more than good to me. My father is warm, my sister will have her season. I have had — I have had weeks I shall keep all my life. It is more than I came with. It is a great deal more than a woman like me had any right to. Let it be enough. Let us do the sensible thing we agreed to, and end it cleanly, before either of us—” her voice caught, just once “—before it costs more than it already has.”

“That is not what I want.” The words came low and fierce. “Sidwell. Listen to me. That is not—”

“It does not matter what you want,” she said, “if you will never let yourself say it. And you never will. You told me why you built the fortress. You told me its whole design. I was a fool to think one afternoon on a beach had pulled it down.” She drew a breath and steadied, and became, before his eyes, the girl from the terrace again — the general looking at ground she had not chosen. “I am going to go and sit with my father now, and smile, and let the county see us together one last easy time, because that is what we agreed to, and I do not break my bargains. And in the morning we will begin, quietly, to be a couple who did not suit. It will be kinder to do it now, while it is only a little broken.”

She looked at him one last time, the whole of her steady gray art in it, and it was the worst thing he had ever seen.

“Thank you, Winston, for all of it. I mean that with my whole self. Now please let me go, before I make a scene in the one ballroom in England where we can least afford another.”

She walked away from him across the blazing floor, her head held like a queen’s, exactly as he had once walked her — and Winston stood alone by the long windows with a glass of negus going warm in his hand, and understood that he had done it, after all. The very thing he had sworn on the terrace he would never do. He had cost her everything. Not with cruelty. With caution. With the careful, guarded, self-protecting silence he had mistaken all his life for wisdom. He had let the one person who had ever reached him walk away believing she had reached nothing at all.

He did not sleep. He sat the whole of that night in the cold library at Foscliffe with a single candle and an untouched decanter, and did the thing he had not truly done in eleven years — looked, without armor, at his own life, and took an honest accounting of it. He had called himself wise. He saw now that he had only been afraid. Every cold gray door he had shut, every kindness he had refused, every year spent making himself unreachable — he had told himself it was strength. It had not been strength. A woman had shown him that in a month, without meaning to, simply by moving through his house and his land and his life as though people were to be trusted until they proved otherwise, and by being, in every case, trustworthy herself.

Sidwell Glennville was braver with nothing than he had ever been with everything. She had stood in the wreck of her own good name and reasoned like a general. She had faced down Aramenta Vain with sunshine. She had touched his ruined face on a beach and named his cowardice mercy and called it a wound and not a wickedness. And he had rewarded her, in the end, with the very silence that had made him the hollow man she had first laughed at.

He thought of all the small evidences he had refused to read for what they were — the account books in her sloping hand, the way his servants had begun to sing, old Howlerton standing straighter in his door, his grandmother laughing again after eleven silent years, his own face in the glass some mornings, wearing an expression he had not worn since he was young. The look of a man who has something to get up for.

Sidwell had done all of that, quietly, in a month, asking nothing, expecting to be turned out at the end of the season with exactly what she had brought. And he had let her believe he would let her go, because letting her go was written in his own careful hand on the terms of a bargain he had drawn to make her trust him — and he had not had the courage to tear the bargain up and stand before her with nothing between them but the truth.

He was done, he decided, as the candle guttered and the first gray came up over the sea. Done being afraid. Done being cautious. Done, above all, letting a promise he had made to protect her stand as the excuse that kept him from the only thing that could.

The Dowager Duchess found him there at dawn.

“You heard, I suppose,” Winston said. “The whole county heard by now. Aramenta has told them it was a bargain — that Sidwell schemed me into it and holds me to it — and there is not one word I can say to disprove it that does not make it worse.” He looked up at his grandmother, and for once did not trouble to hide anything from her. “You did this. You sprang the trap at Harwick. You threw us together and named her my wife before two hundred people, and you have watched the whole month with that look of yours, and I have let you, God help me, because I did not want it undone. So tell me now, before I do the thing I am going to do. Tell me why.”

The Dowager lowered herself into the chair across from him, slowly, her cane between her hands, and looked at her grandson for a long time. The iron went out of her face and left only something very old and very tired and very fond.

“Because I was going to die,” she said simply, “having watched you turn to stone, and I could not bear it. That is the whole of it, Winston. You were the brightest boy — do you not remember? You laughed like your grandfather, and that woman, that wretched, clever woman, took it out of you. And for eleven years I have watched you sit in this house like your own effigy — correct, and cold, and admired, and entirely, entirely alone — and I have prayed for something, anything, to reach you before it was too late for either of us. And then at Harwick, I saw you cross a ballroom.” Her old eyes glittered. “You had not crossed a ballroom to speak to a woman in eleven years. And you crossed one to reach a girl in a mended gown who was laughing at the ostrich plumes. And I watched you dance, and I watched your face — I had not seen your face in eleven years, Winston. You had put it away. And I thought: that one, before he can think better of it, before he can be careful. That one, or no one, ever.”