“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 5 

“Oh,” said the Dowager, eyes gleaming, “you have no idea, my dear. No idea at all.”

She swept out to call for her carriage, well satisfied — leaving her grandson and his false betrothed standing in the gilded light, each of them realizing, at precisely the same moment, that a bargain made to end in three months had just acquired a great deal more time, a great many more witnesses, and a house full of the very customs that had caught them, in which to somehow keep from being caught in truth.

Foscliffe stood where the land ran out.

Winston had lived there all his life and had long since ceased to see it, but on the Thursday the carriages came grinding up the last of the cliff road, he found himself watching Sidwell’s face at the window instead. And so he saw his own house new — the gray pile of it rising against the gray sea, a hundred windows catching the last of the light, the gulls wheeling and crying over the walled gardens, the whole great weathered bulk of the place clinging to the edge of England with its heels dug in against the wind.

“A cold house,” he said, watching her lean toward the glass, lips parted.

“I am not so sure.” She turned. “It is like a house in a story. It ought not to be real.”

“It is very drafty. The chimneys smoke when the wind is easterly. There is a room in the west wing that no fire has ever once warmed. Do not let it charm you. It has no heart.”

“Everything has a heart,” she said, and went back to the window before he could decide whether she was speaking of the house at all.

They were installed with a ceremony his grandmother orchestrated to the last footman. Mr. Glennville was carried up to a warm south-facing room and pronounced it, in a thin voice full of pleasure, “the finest sickroom a man ever malingered in.” Sidwell’s sister, Prudence — nineteen, pretty, overwhelmed by the scale of the place — was swept off by the Dowager toward a discussion of gowns that made the girl’s eyes go round as saucers. And Sidwell herself was shown to a chamber in the east wing so grand that when Winston looked in an hour later, he found her standing in the middle of it, her few belongings still in their single trunk, looking small and mutinous.

“I cannot sleep in this,” she informed him. “The bed is the size of a fishing boat. There is a painting of a man on a horse who watches me. I shall lie awake all night being judged by a Foscliffe.”

“That is my great-grandfather. He judged everyone. Do not take it personally.” He came a few steps in, leaving the door correctly open. “I can have you moved. There is a smaller room.”

“No.” Quickly. “No — it is only strange. It is all so much. I keep waiting for someone to discover I am not meant to be here, and turn me out into the road.” She laughed at herself, a little unsteadily. “Is that not absurd, a grown woman? But I have spent my whole life being the person who is grateful to be allowed to stay — a companion, a poor relation. And now there are people who curtsy to me, Winston. Actual curtsies. And I have to remember not to curtsy back to the housemaids. It is the most extraordinary — I do not know how you bear it. Being looked at so. Being someone people arrange themselves around.”

“Badly,” he said. “I bear it badly. It is why they think me cruel. It is easier to be thought cruel than to be looked at kindly and found wanting.”

The admission was out of him before he had weighed it. He looked away, toward the window and the gray line of the sea.

“You will grow used to the curtsies,” he went on. “You will find they mean nothing. The trick is to remember that the person curtsying to you this month will be the first to whisper against you the next — and to be neither warmed by the one nor wounded by the other.”

Sidwell was quiet. Then: “That is a very lonely way to live.”

“You keep saying that word to me.”

“Because you keep proving it true.” But she said it gently, and when he looked back at her she was not pitying him. He could not have borne pity. She was only regarding him with that clear gray attention, as though he were a lock she had half a mind to pick.

“Well. If I am to be looked at, I had rather be looked at beside someone who understands how tiresome it is. Come — your grandmother expects us in the long gallery in an hour, to be admired by the neighborhood, and I have nothing to wear that will not disgrace you. We may as well begin our performance. How am I to address you before company? I refuse to call you ‘your grace’ across a dinner table. It sounds as though I am sneezing.”

And so the pretense began. Winston had braced himself for a trial. It was not a trial. It was, God help him, the pleasantest fortnight of his adult life.

They courted in full view of the county, which came in a steady stream up the cliff road to inspect the Duke’s astonishing choice of bride. At first it took a great deal of private stage management — a look here, a hand offered there, a low word timed for a watching audience. But the strange thing, the thing that crept up on Winston so gradually he was weeks understanding it, was how little management it came to need. He did not have to remember to seek her out at breakfast; he simply found that breakfast was the best part of the day, and Sidwell the reason. She said something dry and wicked about a visiting baronet, and he laughed before he thought to check himself — and the laugh was real, and so was the pleasure of it. His grandmother, watching, purred like a cat over cream. Winston told himself the Dowager was being deceived along with everyone else, and did not examine too closely his growing suspicion that he was the one deceived, and that the person deceiving him was himself.

Sidwell threw herself into the fraud with a relish he found dangerously endearing. Within a week she knew the name of every servant from the butler to the boy who trapped rats in the granary, and the staff of Foscliffe — who had served a grave, gray master for eleven years and grown grave and gray themselves — began, under her, to thaw. He heard laughter in the kitchen passages. He came upon a housemaid singing. He found his own dour steward, Mr. Corrant, explaining the drainage of the lower meadows to Sidwell with an animation Winston had not known the man possessed — because she had asked, and had actually wished to know, and had remembered the answer.

“You are managing my house,” he accused her over the chessboard one evening, some two weeks into her residence. They had fallen into the habit of chess after dinner — the Dowager dozing by the fire, Mr. Glennville and Prudence at cards across the room. It was all very domestic. It was all a performance. It felt like neither.

“I am doing no such thing. I am learning it. There is a difference. When I go, you shall have to run it yourself again, and I want it in good order for you.”

Something crossed her face as she said it — quick, involuntary, gone almost before he could name it, there and then folded away behind the ordinary business of the board.

“Your move,” she said, too lightly. “And do stop scowling at the board as though it has insulted your mother. You are going to lose either way. You may as well lose with grace.”

He moved his bishop and lost it in three turns, and thought, long after the candles were out and the house had gone quiet around him, not about the game at all, but about the look that had crossed her face at the words when I go — and about a house that was, by every account but her own, no longer only his to run.