“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 11 

“So you trapped us both.”

“I trapped you,” she said, unrepentant. “She was innocent as morning, and I have felt the weight of that every day, and I have done what I could to make it up to her — her father, her sister, my own protection thrown over her before the county. But I would do it again. I gambled that if I forced the door, the thing that wanted out would come out. And it did. Do not tell me it did not. I have watched you this month at your chessboard, laughing like a man half your age. I have watched her make your servants sing.” She leaned forward on her cane. “I gambled on your heart, grandson, against your fear, and last night your fear won a hand. That is all. It is not the whole game. You are sitting here at dawn not sleeping, which tells me the game is not over.” The old voice sharpened to the general’s crack he had heard across the ballroom. “What are you going to do about it?”

“I am going to marry her,” Winston said. “Truly, if she will have me. Not by custom, not by trap, not by any bargain. I am going to ask her plainly, as a man asks, and let her say no if she means no, and mean it if she says yes.” His jaw set. “First I am going to clear her name before the same county that is tearing it, because I will not have the woman I marry carry one whisper of fortune hunter into my house. I will tell them the truth. All of it. That my grandmother trapped us. That I offered a false engagement to spare her. And that somewhere in these weeks it stopped being false for me entirely — and that any man who calls Sidwell Glennville a schemer will answer to me for it. Let them make of that what they will.”

The Dowager sat back, and something moved through her old face that in a younger woman would have been tears.

“There he is,” she said softly. “There is my grandson. I had begun to think I should die without seeing him again.” She reached across and gripped his hand with her dry, strong fingers. “Go and tell her, you great cold fool, and do not be careful. You have been careful for eleven years, and it has bought you nothing but this house full of ghosts. Be a fool for once. It is the only thing worth being.”

But when Winston went up through the waking house to the east wing, to the great grand room with the judging portrait, he found the door open, the bed made, and the single trunk gone.

Sidwell was leaving.

Of course she was leaving. She had said on the terrace that she would break no bargain, and the bargain, once it curdled — once she believed the whole of it, a kindness turned cruel — gave her nothing to stay for but a slow, public unpicking of the engagement over weeks. And she was not a woman to sit and be slowly unpicked. She had decided, in the cold hours, to do the clean, brave thing at once, and spare them both the drawn-out lie.

He found the housemaid and learned that Miss Glennville had risen before light and roused the household as quietly as she could, and asked for the small carriage, that she and her father and her sister were to go to her aunt’s in the next county — and that she had left a letter for his grace on the library table, where she thought he would not find it until she was well gone.

He had not been in the library. He had been in it all night. And she had not known, and the letter had never come.

He stood a moment in the empty room with its judging portrait and stripped bed, and thought of the first evening she had stood here, mutinous among her few unpacked things, telling him she kept waiting for someone to discover she was not meant to be here and turn her out into the road. No one had turned her out. She had turned herself out in the cold small hours, rather than stay one more day where she believed herself unwanted — had roused the house softly so as to trouble no one, had thought even in her own grief to spare the servants and spare him the awkwardness of a farewell — and had left her whole heart folded into a letter on a table he was, by the one accident of a sleepless night, never to reach in time.

The generosity of it, even in leaving, undid him where her anger never could have.

Then he stopped thinking, because there was no more time for it, and he moved.

Winston went down the great stair three at a time, in his shirtsleeves, without a hat, the servants scattering before him in astonishment — for no one had seen the Duke of Foscliffe run since he was a boy — and flung out through the great doors into the raw bright morning in time to see the small carriage already at the foot of the drive, already turning out onto the cliff road, already carrying her away toward the county line and out of his life forever, exactly as he had promised on the terrace that he would let it.

He had thought, in his tidy way, that the great sorrows of a life announced themselves — came with warning, with ceremony, so a man might arm himself. They did not. This one was a small black carriage on a gray road growing smaller, taking with it every warm thing that had come into his house in eleven years, about to be gone around the shoulder of the cliff in a matter of moments. He had a choice to make in those moments that would decide the whole remainder of his days.

He could be the man he had built — correct, restrained, letting her go with dignity, because dignity was all he had ever truly loved. Or he could be the boy he had buried, the one who laughed and danced and believed, the one Sidwell Glennville had reached down eleven years of stone to find. He had spent a lifetime choosing the first man. He was so very tired of him.

“Sidwell!” It tore out of him, ragged, whipped away on the sea wind, far too far to be heard.

The carriage did not slow. For one blank, ringing moment, eleven years of careful stone told him to let her go — that it was decent, that a gentleman did not chase a carriage down a public road in his shirtsleeves like a madman. Then he thought of her face at the ball, steady and gray and breaking, telling him it did not matter what he wanted if he would never let himself say it. He thought of the cold library, the cold bed, the cold breakfast room that would be cold again tomorrow, and every morning after, for the rest of his measured, guarded, admirable, empty life. He thought of the county laughing behind its fans at the duke who did not chase carriages, and found, to his own vast surprise, that he did not care one straw for the county — that the fear of what people thought was only the last and shabbiest brick in a fortress. He was, as of this moment, done defending.