“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 2 

It was only then, as the Dowager Duchess stepped forward with her cane and her diamonds and her small, terrible smile, that the Duke understood he had walked, eyes open, into a trap very old and very well-made — and that the maker of it was his own flesh and blood.

“My dears,” said the Dowager, in a voice pitched with the exquisite precision of a woman who has spent sixty years making herself heard across ballrooms, “how very glad this makes me. You will all of you know the tradition of our house — that no Duke of Foscliffe takes his bride but by the betrothal waltz, danced beneath the crest at Harwick, under witness. It has been so for nine generations. My grandson has honored the old custom tonight. He has chosen. I give you the future Duchess of Foscliffe.”

For one long, unbearable moment, the ballroom was perfectly silent. Then it broke — into gasps, into a scatter of stunned applause, into the hiss and rustle of two hundred people turning to their neighbors at once.

Winston felt Sidwell go rigid beside him, her hand tightening convulsively upon his sleeve.

“What is she talking about, Winston?”

He looked down at her. The color had gone out of her face at last — not from any swoon, but from something far worse: a dawning, disbelieving horror, as she understood, before he could tell her, that the joke had teeth. That the whole watching world now believed, upon the word of a duchess and the weight of nine generations, that she had promised to marry a man whose Christian name she had learned not ten minutes before.

“I did not know.” He said it, and it was the truth, and it was useless. “Miss Glennville, on my honor—”

“Is it true? Is it a real thing, or is it some cruelty? Some sport?”

“It is real,” he said quietly. “It has no force in law. But this room—”

He did not need to finish. This room was the law that governed people like Sidwell Glennville.

“Then I am ruined,” she said. “Whichever way I turn.”

He offered her his arm.

“Not here,” Winston said, low, for her alone. “Whatever is to be done, it will not be done for the entertainment of two hundred people. Take my arm, and let them make of it what they will. It is the only kindness I can give you in this room.”

She looked at his offered arm as though it were a snake. Then, because she was — he was fast learning — a woman who understood the difference between the fight she wanted and the fight in front of her, she laid her hand upon it, light as a leaf, lifted her chin another quarter inch, and let him walk her the whole length of that blazing, merciless ballroom, her head held like a queen’s.

At the tall doors, she stopped. The night air came cool through them. She turned to him, and in the shadow of the doorway where no one could see, her composure cracked — not into weeping, but into a single unsteady breath, and a whisper he would remember for the rest of his days.

“I only wanted,” Sidwell Glennville said, “to laugh at one ball. Just one. I did not think it would cost me everything I have.”

Winston opened his mouth to answer her, and found, for the first time in eleven years, that he did not know what a man was supposed to say to that.