“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 13 

“You will have to court me truly this time. Publicly. Convincingly.” She drew back just enough to look up at him, her wet eyes dancing, her hand flat against his hammering heart. “I warned you at Harwick I should mark your performance hard. Well, now it is real, your grace, and I shall mark it harder still. You shall have to smile every day. You did it once. I have seen that you can.”

“Every day,” he swore, “for the rest of my life. God help me. Agreed to all of it.”

He cleared her name that same week, plainly, before the county, at the next assembly, standing beneath the very crest that had caught them and telling them the whole truth — his grandmother’s trap, the false engagement made to protect a woman who had done nothing but laugh at the right moment, and how the bargain had failed utterly, because he had gone and fallen in love with his false betrothed against every term of his own agreement, and meant now to marry her in earnest, if she would still have a man foolish enough to say so out loud in a ballroom. And he added, in the flat gray voice that had once frozen a hundred conversations, that any soul present who wished to name Sidwell Glennville a schemer was welcome to say so to his face, at dawn, and that he was reckoned a fair shot.

No one took up the offer. Aramenta Vain found urgent reason to be wanted by her mother and troubled Foscliffe no more; she married a baronet in the spring and was, by all accounts, exactly as content as such women ever are. The county, robbed of a scandal and handed a love story instead, did what counties do. It adored it. Within a fortnight there was not a drawing room within forty miles that had not always known, always said, that the cold Duke of Foscliffe had a great heart hidden somewhere, and only wanted the right woman to find the door.

He courted her truly through the short, bright weeks before the wedding, kept his condition to the letter because he found he wanted to — he who had never in his life gone out of his way to please a soul, now scheming and contriving like a boy for the pleasure of her company. He rode the cliff path each dawn, and she was in the breakfast room each dawn to meet him, and they walked his land together now without a groom trailing and without a county to perform for — two people who owned nothing of each other, and had chosen each other regardless.

He gave her one gift before the wedding, having promised on the terrace to settle nothing on her she had not earned, and found a way at last around his own promise. He did not settle money on her. He mended, quietly and at his own charge, the small shabby house in the next county where she had grown up — put the roof right, the garden in order, the old pianoforte back in tune — and gave her the deed to it in her own name. Hers alone, to keep or sell or let, tied to no marriage and no duke and no bargain.

“It is not a settlement,” he told her, when she stared at the paper and then at him, her eyes filling. “It is your own, whatever becomes of me or of us. You told me you would walk away from Foscliffe with exactly what you brought and nothing more. I could not bear that you should have nothing. So I have given you back the thing you had before you ever met me. A home that is yours and answers to no one. You need never be the poor relation grateful to be allowed to stay — not here, not there, not anywhere, not ever again. That is not charity. That is only justice, a very long time late.”

She did not laugh. She put her face against his coat and wept — which he had not once seen her do, not in the wreck of the ballroom, nor on the terrace, nor on the road — and he held her, and understood he had at last, and by accident, given her the one thing all his money could not have bought and all her courage had never let her ask for: to be safe, and to know it, and to be able, therefore, to choose him freely, out of no need at all.

They were married from Foscliffe on a bright hard day at the turn of the year, the sea glittering below the cliffs, the gulls crying over the walled gardens, Mr. Glennville giving his daughter away from a wheeled chair with a face of such complete contentment that Sidwell wept before the vows were half spoken. The Dowager Duchess wept too, and denied it fiercely, and lived, as it happened, a great many more years than she had feared — long enough to see the house she had schemed for filled at last with the laughter she had gambled everything to buy.

And it was filled. That was the wonder of it, the thing Winston never quite got over in all the years that followed, however ordinary it became. The cold house warmed, and stayed warm. The servants who had gone gray under a grave master grew easy, and stayed, and their sons and daughters came to service at Foscliffe as to a good place — a happy one, which it had not been within living memory, and now was. The tenants no longer touched their hats to a stranger on a tall horse. They knew him, and he knew them — their roofs, their sons, their failed cheeses — because Sidwell had taught him how, and because, once taught, he found he had a gift for it that his fear had hidden even from himself.

At the center of it all was his wife — running his drains and keeping his books and singing tunelessly over both, meeting him in the breakfast room each dawn so that the first face of every day of his life was hers, laughing her water-over-stones laugh in rooms that had not heard laughter in a hundred years, until the very stones of Foscliffe seemed to have learned the sound and to give it back.

That night, when the last of the wedding guests had gone and the great cold house was warm from cellar to attic for perhaps the first time in a hundred years, the Duke of Foscliffe led his wife out into the long gallery, where a single fiddler he had asked to stay played softly to the two of them alone. And he bowed to her as gravely as he had bowed in the blazing ballroom at Harwick, on the night that had started everything.

“One waltz with me,” Winston said, “and you’ll be my wife.”

Then he smiled. The real smile. The one she had woken in him. The one the whole county now swore he had always had.

“Though I am given to understand the line has already worked once. I should not like to overtax it.”

Sidwell laughed and laid her hand in his exactly as she had that first night — freckle and mended courage and all, save that the glove was new now, and the hand no longer trembled.

“It is a very good line,” she told him. “I said I should remember it. I said I should tell all the young ladies, when I am a wrinkled old woman, that a duke once offered to marry me across a bowl of negus, and that none of them would believe me, and that I should not care in the least.” She stepped into his arms, into the place that had been made for her since a night she had thought it all a game. “I was wrong about only the one part, Winston. I said I should not care. I find I care a very great deal. It is the best thing that ever happened to me. And I mean to spend the whole of my life not caring who believes it.”

The Duke of Foscliffe drew his wife close and turned her once, slowly, in the firelit gallery. The fiddle sang, and the sea kept its long, patient time below the cliffs, and the two of them danced the second waltz of their lives — the true one, the chosen one, the one no custom had trapped and no scheme had bought — round and round in the warm gold light. A man who had forgotten how to be happy, and the woman who had laughed him back into remembering, bound now by nothing in the world but the thing they had, each in the end, freely chosen.

And neither of them — not that night, nor in all the long, treasured years that followed it — minded in the least.

THE END