“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 6 

He did not ask her what the flicker had meant. He told himself it was nothing — a stray thought, a moment’s fatigue, the ordinary shadow that crosses any face at the mention of an ending — and did not examine too closely why he minded so much that he could not make himself believe it.

There was, besides, the matter of her father, which Winston had expected to find a burden and found instead a strange, unlooked-for gladness. Mr. Glennville was a sharp, dry, well-read old man wasting slowly in a failing body, and in his years of illness he had been talked over and talked down to and pitied by a great many people, and truly spoken with by almost none. Winston took to sitting with him of an evening. The old man played a wicked hand of piquet, had opinions about the folly of the last three governments, and did not care in the least that Winston was a duke — treated him, in fact, with exactly the tart, affectionate rudeness he treated his daughters.

“You are not the ogre they paint you,” Mr. Glennville observed one night, dealing the cards with his ruined hands. “You are only a man who has been left too much alone with too much to guard. I know the look. I had it myself, after my wife died, until Sidwell shamed me out of it. She has a gift for that — shaming the grief out of a man without his noticing it has gone.” He fixed Winston with a bright, shrewd eye. “You will mind how you go with her, your grace. Bargain or no bargain. I am ill, not blind.”

He said no more, won the hand, and left Winston sitting up a long while afterward with the cards in his hand and the old man’s words going round in him like a bell.

It was in the third week that the first shadow fell across the pleasant time — and it fell, as shadows so often did in that country, in the shape of a very handsome woman in a very fine carriage.

Miss Aramenta Vain came to call at Foscliffe with her mother, ostensibly to offer felicitations, and she offered them with a smile so sweet and so sharp that Winston felt Sidwell stiffen at his side the moment the girl entered the room.

“Miss Glennville,” Aramenta said, taking both of Sidwell’s hands in a warm clasp that did not reach her eyes. “How I have longed to meet you properly. It was all such a whirl at Harwick, was it not? One hardly sees. You must tell me everything. I do so want us to be friends. I have known dear Winston since we were quite small — you understand, our families are very old friends — and I feel almost a sister’s interest in whoever should finally win him.” The smile sharpened by a degree. “It has been such a long wait, for so many of us. You cannot imagine the disappointment in half the drawing rooms of the county. But then, you are so wonderfully unexpected. However did you manage it? One is dying to know your secret.”

It was beautifully done. Every word a blade wrapped in silk — the reminder of old intimacy, the hint that Sidwell was an interloper who had somehow cheated better women of their due, the sly little dig at manage it, as though there had been some trick, some scheme, some grasping cleverness in a portionless girl’s capture of a duke.

Winston opened his mouth to freeze the woman where she stood. He did not get the chance. Sidwell got there first.

“Do you know,” Sidwell said warmly, returning the clasp with every appearance of delight, “I have wondered that myself. I have no secret at all, I promise you. I am the last person in England anyone would have picked, and no one is more astonished than I. I think it must simply be that I laughed at him.” She turned a fond, mischievous look up at Winston that struck him unprepared, somewhere beneath the ribs. “No one had laughed at him in years, you see. Everyone was so busy being impressed. I dare say the poor man was starved half to death for someone who would tell him when he was being ridiculous. It is not a secret you could copy, Miss Vain. One either finds a man absurd or one does not, and I am afraid I find him terribly absurd, and there is an end of it. But how kind of you to want to be friends. We shall be glad of you — Foscliffe is so very quiet. And Winston tells me you have known each other since you were small. You must come often and tell me all the mortifying things he did as a boy. I collect them.”

The room, which had gone very still, breathed again. Mr. Glennville chuckled openly from his chair. The Dowager, by the fire, did not open her eyes, but the corner of her mouth curved. Aramenta Vain, thoroughly and publicly disarmed, could do nothing but retreat with a hard, bright light in her eyes that Winston did not at all like the look of.

Later, when the Vains had gone, he found Sidwell alone on the gallery, looking out at the sea going dark.

“She means to make trouble,” Sidwell said at last, without turning. “That one. She looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird it has decided is not quite out of reach. She wanted you, I think — or wanted the being a duchess of you, which is not the same, but does the same damage when it is thwarted.” She was quiet a moment. “She will dig, Winston. Women like that always dig. And there is a great deal to find, is there not? A false engagement is a fragile thing. It wants only one loose thread pulled hard enough.”

“Then we shall give her nothing to pull.”

He said it steadily, but the steadiness cost him — because standing there beside her in the failing light, with three good weeks behind them, he was becoming afraid, genuinely, coldly afraid of a thing he had not reckoned with when he made his tidy bargain on the terrace. He was afraid that the loose thread Aramenta would find, if she dug long enough, would not be the falseness of the engagement at all. It would be that it had, somewhere in these weeks, without his leave, and against every term of the agreement, quietly and entirely stopped being false — on his side of it, at least — and that was a thread he did not know whether he could bear to have pulled.