“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 4

So he gave her a lesser truth, which was still true.

“Because it is my fault,” he said, “and because I have very few opportunities, in the life I have made, to do a decent thing, and I find I should like to take this one.” He stopped, started again more carefully. “And because you have every reason to weep and rail and blame me tonight, and you have done none of it. You have stood on a cold terrace and reasoned with me as an equal while your whole world came down around you. I have known a great many people, Miss Glennville. I have never much admired any of them. I find that I admire you. I would not have you pay for my carelessness. That is all the reason I have, and it is enough.”

The moon had moved on the water. Somewhere behind them a door opened and shut, a gust of music and laughter came and went.

Sidwell looked at the Duke of Foscliffe for a long time, and he let her look, and found he was unaccountably holding his breath.

“There would have to be conditions,” she said finally.

“Name them.”

“I will not lie to my father. He is ill, not simple, and I have never deceived him in my life, and I do not mean to begin. He will know the truth of it. He can keep a secret — he has kept graver ones.”

“Agreed.”

“And you will settle nothing on me that I have not earned. On my sister, on my father — that is charity, and I will swallow my pride and let you, because pride is a luxury I cannot presently afford them. But not on me. I will not be bought, even by a kindness. When this is over, I walk away with exactly what I brought — myself, my good name, and nothing more.”

Something in him wanted to argue. Something wiser did not.

“Agreed.”

“And,” she said, and here for the first time a ghost of the old laughter came back into her face, thin but real, “you will have to court me. Publicly. Convincingly. You will have to be seen to like me, your grace — which I am given to understand does not come naturally to you. I warn you now, I shall be watching your performance closely, and marking it hard. If we are to sell the county a love match, you cannot stand about looking as though you smell fish. You shall have to smile. You did it once tonight. I have seen that you can. I shall hold you to it.”

And the Duke of Foscliffe, Winston, who did not smile, who had a heart like the cliffs, laughed. It came out of him rough and unpracticed, like a hinge that has not turned in years, and it startled them both. Sidwell put her hand quickly to her mouth, as though to catch her own answering grin before it escaped.

“Agreed,” he said, when he had recovered himself. “God help me. Agreed to all of it.”

“Then we have a bargain.” She put out her hand — her small, gloved, mended hand — as a man might, to seal a deal. After a startled instant, he took it and shook it once, gravely. The absurdity of the two of them shaking hands upon a false engagement, on a moonlit terrace, struck them at the same moment, and they stood there grinning at each other like a pair of conspirators.

“I ought to know,” he said, still holding her hand, “the Christian name of the woman I am to marry, for the sake of my performance.”

“Sidwell.”

He turned it over. A plain name, an old name, unfashionable as her freckle and her gown, and it suited her entirely, and he found he liked the shape of it in his mouth more than he had any business liking.

“And you have mine, I think,” she said. “Winston.” She echoed it back to him solemnly, then spoiled the solemnity with a crooked look. “It is a very grand, very grim, very ducal sort of name. It sounds like a fortress. I shall have to find something to call you that does not make me feel I am addressing a defensive earthwork.”

“You will not,” he said. “Winston will do.”

“We shall see.”

She reclaimed her hand at last, and drew closer against the river chill, and for a moment the enormity of the thing they had just agreed to seemed to settle over them both — the months of pretense ahead, the two families, the two lives now roped together by nine generations of custom and one reckless minute of laughter.

“Winston,” she said, more quietly. “Thank you. I do not know yet whether you are a good man, or merely a guilty one. But you did not have to offer me any of this. And you did. I shan’t forget it, whatever comes.”

“You may find,” he said, “that I am not much accustomed to being thanked. I may not do it gracefully.”

“No,” she agreed. “You may not. We shall have to practice that as well.”

She smiled at him one last time in the moonlight, and it went into the Duke of Foscliffe like warmth into a cold room — and he understood, distantly, the way he had understood in the ballroom, that he had promised to give this woman up in three months’ time, and that it was going to be the hardest thing he had ever agreed to do. He had no notion, yet, of how thoroughly he did not mean it.

He escorted her back through the doors. His grandmother was waiting in the gilded anteroom, upright on her cane, watching them come in from the dark side by side, with the light of a general who has taken the field.

“Miss Glennville,” said the Dowager Duchess of Foscliffe, “you will come to us at Foscliffe. It is not to be borne that my grandson’s promised wife should be lodged anywhere but under our own roof while the settlements are drawn. You will bring your father, of course — the air on the cliffs is very fine for an invalid. And your sister — we shall bring her out ourselves. I will send the carriage Thursday.”

It was not an invitation. It was a deployment.

And Winston, watching Sidwell absorb the fact that the trap had a second set of jaws she had not seen close, watched her also lift her chin and meet his grandmother’s eye and answer without a tremor, in a voice as smooth as cream.

“How very kind, your grace. We should be delighted. My father will be so glad of the sea air, and I confess I am eager to see Foscliffe. I have heard,” she added, with an innocence so perfectly pitched that Winston had to look at the floor, “that it is a house very much given to old traditions.”