“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 12
The Duke of Foscliffe went to the stable, did not wait for a groom, threw a bridle on the first horse to hand, and rode bareback out of his own gates and down the cliff road after her — hatless, coatless, ready at last, eleven years too late and just possibly not one moment too late, to be a fool.
He caught them where the cliff road dipped through the hanger, a mile below the house, where the way narrowed and the driver had slowed for the turn. Winston brought the horse alongside in a scatter of gravel and a spray of the driver’s oath, took the leader’s bridle in his own hand, and hauled the whole carriage to a plunging stop — sitting there heaving for breath, bareback, hatless, wild-haired, entirely beyond the reach of dignity.
The carriage door opened. Sidwell Glennville put her head out to see what madman had halted them — and the careful, composed grief on her face broke, for just an instant, into pure astonishment.
“Winston. What in the — you are in your shirtsleeves. You have no coat. Did you ride that horse without a saddle? Have you run mad?”
“Yes,” he said. “Get down, please. Sidwell — get down and hear me. And if, when I have finished, you still wish to go, I will hand you back into this carriage myself and never trouble you again, on my honor and my name. But I will not let you drive out of my life believing what you believe. I could not read your letter. I never found it. I was in the library the whole night, and you thought I would not be, and so it never reached me. You have gone thinking I let you go without a word. I did not get the word. Give me the chance to say it now. Please.”
Something in the raw plainness of it — the plea from a man the whole county believed incapable of the word — reached her. She looked back once at her father, watching from the shadows of the carriage with a face of dawning hope he did not trouble to hide, and at her sister beside him, hands pressed to her mouth. Then Sidwell gathered her skirts and let herself down onto the road, and stood before him with her chin up and her heart in her eyes, guarding it hard.
“Say it, then,” she said. “Quickly. The horses are blown, and my father should not sit in the cold.”
So Winston slid off the steaming horse and stood before her in the dust of the road — this severe, famous man with the wild hair and the bare throat and no armor left of any kind.
“I love you,” he said. “That is the word I could not say across the chessboard, and I will tell you exactly why I could not, because you deserve the whole truth and not a scrap of it. I could not say it because I made you a promise on the terrace — that you owed me nothing, that no obligation would ever touch you, that you would walk away whole and free. And I thought, God, I thought it so nobly, that if I told you I loved you while you were living under my roof, while your father lay warm in my house and your sister waited on my patronage, I would be no better than a man using your situation to buy what he wanted. I thought my silence was the honorable thing. I thought I was protecting you.”
“You were not protecting me,” said Sidwell. “You were protecting yourself, exactly as you have protected yourself for eleven years, and you dressed your cowardice up as honor, because that is the only trick you have ever truly known.”
“I know that now. You saw it on the beach — you named it a wound wearing the mask of cruelty. And last night at the ball I let that same coward silence stand while a spiteful woman called you a schemer, and I let you walk away believing I had never felt a thing. When the truth is that I have felt more in one month with you than in the whole gray desert of the eleven years before, and I do not want the season to end, or the bargain kept, or you to go. I want you to stay. Not as a duchess, not by any custom or trap — as yourself, chosen, married to me because you wish to be, or not married to me at all, if you do not. But either way, knowing past all doubting that you were loved. That is the word. That is all of it. That is everything I have.”
The leaves whispered overhead. Sidwell stood very still, and he watched her face, and he watched the guard on it tremble. He made himself say nothing more — he, who had hidden behind saying nothing all his life, now held his tongue and simply let himself be seen, which was the harder and truer thing.
“You told me,” she said at last, unsteadily, “on the terrace, that you did not do things gracefully. Being thanked, you said you had no practice.” Her eyes were swimming now, and she did nothing to stop them. “You have no practice at this either. It was a terrible speech, Winston. It went on far too long, and you insulted yourself the whole way through it, and you are standing in the road in your shirt with a horse you have half killed, and I—” her voice cracked clean across “—and I believe every word of it. That is the trouble. That is exactly why I believe it. A careful man could not have made a speech that bad. Only a fool in earnest could.”
“Then be a fool with me,” he said. “I have it on the best authority that it is the only thing worth being.”
And Sidwell Glennville laughed — that bright, water-over-stones laugh that had undone him across a bowl of negus a lifetime and a month ago — laughed with the tears running down her face, and closed the last small distance in the road herself. Winston gathered her in against his bare-throated shirt with a groan that came all the way up from the gray stone foundations of him, and kissed her at last, there in the hedge-shade, with her father cheering weakly from the carriage and her sister openly weeping for joy and the poor blown horse cropping the verge — kissed her the way he had wanted to on the beach, and every day since, thoroughly, and without one particle of caution.
“I have one condition,” Sidwell said against his mouth, when she could speak.
“Name it. Anything.”