“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 3 

And the Duke of Foscliffe, who had come to Harwick that night with a heart of gray stone and a reputation to match, discovered that it was possible, after all, for that heart to break — on behalf of someone else entirely.

“It will not cost you everything,” he said at last. “I give you my word. Come out into the air with me, Miss Glennville, and let me try to make this right — or at least less wrong than my grandmother has made it. I am not, whatever they tell you, quite so cruel as all that.”

“Are you not.” She said it without heat, only a terrible, careful weariness, as a woman totals a bill she cannot pay. “Whichever way I turn, your grace, I am undone. If I deny what your grandmother has said, I call a duchess a liar before two hundred witnesses, and I am the woman who threw herself at a man and lied about it after. If I do not deny it, I am promised to marry a man they call cruel, whom I have known for the length of one waltz, and who was five minutes ago making sport of a girl beside a bowl of negus.”

“I was not making sport of you.”

“Weren’t you.” But there was no real accusation in it, only exhaustion, and behind them, through the doors, he was aware of the room still murmuring — Miss Aramenta Vain white-lipped at the edge of the floor, her mother’s hand a claw upon her arm; his grandmother watching the doorway with the serene confidence of a woman who has already won.

She studied him a long moment in the doorway’s shadow — this severe, famous man with a surprised new softness in his face — and something in her seemed to decide to gamble one more time on the strength of one waltz.

“Prove it,” she said.

They stepped out together into the dark. The terrace at Harwick ran the length of the house in pale flagstones, and beyond its balustrade the gardens fell away toward the river, where the moon lay broken on the water. Winston walked her to the far end, past the reach of the lit windows, and let go of her arm, standing a careful, courteous distance from her, feeling for the first time in a decade entirely at a loss.

“Tell me plainly how bad it is,” Sidwell said. Her back was to the balustrade, her hands folded before her. She had command of herself again, though he could see the price of it in the set of her jaw. “You are a duke. You have been managing scandals since you were in leading strings. I have a father who cannot leave his chair without help, and a sister of nineteen who has not yet had her season, and I have precisely no money. I would rather know the whole shape of the thing at once than have it doled out to me in kindnesses. How bad is it?”

He respected that. He respected it enormously.

“Bad,” he said. “Not fatal, but bad. By tomorrow noon, every drawing room within forty miles will know that the Duke of Foscliffe danced the betrothal waltz and that his grandmother named the bride. My family’s custom is not law, as I told you. But the announcement is a fact, and a public one, made by a woman whose word has ordered this county since before either of us was born. If we contradict her, we do not merely embarrass ourselves. We call the Dowager Duchess of Foscliffe a liar before two hundred witnesses — and we invite every soul in that room to decide for themselves what really passed between us in the dark.”

“Nothing passed between us in the dark,” Sidwell said. “We are standing six feet apart, discussing my ruin like two clerks over a ledger.”

“They will not know that. They will know only that a girl of no fortune danced with me, was named my bride, and was then set aside within the hour. There is no version of that story in which you emerge unharmed. If I cast you off, you are the jilted woman, and men will draw their conclusions, and no respectable house will receive you, and your sister’s season is finished before it is begun.”

He said it flatly, because she had asked him for the truth and not for comfort.

“If you cast me off, it is a little better for you and a great deal worse for me,” she said. “But the county will still whisper that you must have something to make a duke wish to be rid of you so quickly. The Dowager knew all of this. She has forgotten more about the management of a ballroom than I will ever learn. She did not spring this trap by accident.”

Sidwell was quiet a moment. The river talked to itself below them.

“Then she wanted this,” she said. “She wanted you married. And when you would not choose, she chose for you. She waited for you to dance with the first woman foolish enough to say yes, and she sprang it.” A short, disbelieving breath. “And I walked into it holding a cup of negus.”

“You could not have known.”

“No. But you might have.” She looked at him then, and there was no accusation in it — only a clear-eyed reckoning. “You knew the custom existed. You knew what a waltz beneath that crest could be made to mean. And you asked me to dance it anyway.”

The justice of it landed square. He had asked her out of some starved, sudden hunger to keep her from walking away, and he had not once, in the whole of that reckless minute, remembered the machinery his grandmother had spent a lifetime tending.

“Yes,” he said. “I might have. I did not think of it. I have not forgotten myself so thoroughly in a very long time, Miss Glennville, and it seems the one occasion on which I did, I contrived to injure the only person present who did not deserve it. I am sorry. It is inadequate. I know that.”

She studied him. Whatever she had expected the cruel Duke of Foscliffe to say when cornered, it was plainly not that. He watched her recalculate him — she seemed to be doing it about once a minute — and set the new figure carefully beside the old one.

“Well,” she said at last, briskly. “Sorrow butters no bread. Let us be practical people. There is a way through every wood if you are willing to walk it. What is yours?”

And so, on the dark terrace with the ball roaring softly behind them, the Duke of Foscliffe made her the proposal that would decide both their lives — and made it, to his own surprise, more gently than he had ever proposed anything.

“We do not contradict my grandmother. Not tonight, not tomorrow, not before the county. We let the engagement stand in the eyes of the world entirely. You are, from this evening, betrothed to me. You will be received everywhere, treated as the future Duchess of Foscliffe, because that is what everyone will believe you to be, and no drawing room in England will dare to slight my promised wife. Your sister will have a season such as she could never otherwise have dreamed of. Your father will want for nothing. That much I can do at a stroke, whatever else you decide.”

“And in exchange,” Sidwell said wearily, “I marry a stranger.”

“No.” He shook his head. “That is the part I mean to give you. In exchange, you do nothing save allow the world to think what it already thinks. We hold the engagement through the season — three months, four. We let the shock die down, let the county grow so thoroughly accustomed to the idea of us that it forgets there was ever a scandal at all. And then, when enough time has passed that no one is watching very closely, we discover that we do not suit. Amicably. By mutual consent. A long engagement quietly allowed to cool, as long engagements so often do. No jilting, no wounded party, no story worth the telling. You will be a woman who was engaged to a duke and found she did not care for him — which dulls a reputation not at all, and rather burnishes it. You walk away whole. Your sister is married by then, or as good as. And you are free.”

Sidwell was silent a long moment.

“You would do that,” she said finally, and her voice had lost its briskness. “Bind yourself to a false engagement. Put your own name to a lie before the whole county. Spend your money on a father and sister who are nothing to you. All to spare a woman you met an hour ago the consequences of your grandmother’s scheme?”

It was the question he could not answer honestly, because the honest answer — because you laughed, because you called me lonely and were right, because for the length of one waltz I remembered I was a living man and not a monument — was one he had no words for, and less courage.