“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 7

The weather broke at the end of the third week, and out of the clear cold that followed the rain, Winston proposed, on an impulse he did not examine, to show Sidwell the whole of Foscliffe — not the house, which she already knew better than he did, but the land: the home farm, the tenant cottages, the long gray beach below the cliffs where a man could walk a mile at low tide and meet no one but gulls. He told himself it was necessary to the performance. He did not tell himself the truer thing — that he wanted her to himself for a whole day, out from under the watching portraits and the watching county, in the one part of his inheritance he had ever loved.

They rode out after breakfast with a groom trailing at a respectable distance, and the day was one of those rare bright, washed ones the coast throws up after a storm. Winston, who had ridden this ground a thousand times alone and grim, found that riding it beside Sidwell Glennville turned every familiar thing into something he had never properly seen.

She was off her horse before he could hand her down, admiring a litter of pups at the home farm, interrogating the farmer’s wife about the failed cheese and the flooded pasture — and the woman, who had curtsied to Winston in stiff terror for eleven years, was soon laughing with Sidwell over the churn like an old friend. At the row of cottages by the mill, she remembered — she had heard it once in passing from the steward — that old Mrs. Tur’s chimney smoked, and she said so, and turned to Winston and told him plainly he would see it mended, as though the disposal of a duke’s masons were the most natural thing in the world for her to command. He heard himself say yes, of course, at once, and saw the old woman’s astonished gratitude, and understood with a strange lurch that Sidwell had just done more good on his land in one morning than he had managed with all his grim, conscientious stewardship in a decade. He had governed Foscliffe like a debt to be paid. She moved through it like a woman among neighbors.

They came, midway through the morning, upon the cottage of a widower named Howlerton, whose roof had gone in the storm, and who was, when they found him, up his own ladder in the raw wind, trying to lash a tarpaulin over the hole with hands too old and too cold for the work. Winston would have ridden past with a note to the steward — he had a system for such repairs, and a duke did not, as a rule, dismount to hold a tenant’s ladder.

Sidwell was off her horse and steadying the foot of it before he had finished framing the note in his mind, calling up to the old man in a voice of such cheerful command that Howlerton came down without argument and let her send the groom up in his place.

“You’ll finish it properly,” Sidwell told Winston, low, while the old fellow fetched a jug. “And you’ll send Corrant tomorrow with slates and a mason. And you’ll do it because he is seventy and alone and too proud to ask, and because a roof is not a favor — it is the least a landlord owes. And while the groom finishes, you are going to go in and sit with him and drink whatever dreadful thing he pours you, and let him tell you about his son who went for a soldier. Because I can see from here that no one has sat with him in a very long time. It costs you nothing but an hour, and it is worth more to him than the whole roof.”

“You have known this man for four minutes.”

“I have known a hundred like him,” she said. “So have you. You simply rode past them.” She said it without unkindness, and took his arm, and steered him in under the mended lintel.

Winston, Duke of Foscliffe, who did not sit in tenants’ cottages, sat for an hour on a three-legged stool, drinking cider that could have stripped paint, listening to a lonely old man talk about a soldier son, and found to his considerable disquiet that he did not want to leave.

“I have held this land eleven years,” he said roughly, when they came out at last, the roof sound above them, the old man standing straighter in his doorway than he had for a year, “and never once done that.”

“I know,” Sidwell said gently. “That is what I have been trying to tell you. It is not that you are cruel, Winston. You are only alone, and a man who is alone forgets that everyone else is too. You have a whole county full of people who would love you, if you would once come down off the horse.” She smiled, mounting her own. “That is my sermon for the day. You may go back to being terrible now.”

“You are staring at me again,” she said as they rode down at last toward the beach, the tide far out, the wet sand shining. “You do it more than you know. It is not at all seemly in a duke. People will think you fond of me.”

“They are meant to think me fond of you.”

“Yes, but you needn’t do it when there is no one to see but a groom and a great many gulls.” She said it lightly, but she did not look at him when she said it, and there was a color in her cheek that the wind alone did not account for.

They left the horses at the head of the beach and walked out over the hard sand, the cliffs rising sheer and gray behind them, the sea a long way off and coming slowly in. It was there, with no one to perform for, that Sidwell asked him the question he had known somehow this whole day had been walking toward.

“Why do they call you cruel?”

He walked a few paces before he answered. “Because it is easier than what is true.”

“And what is true?”

He stopped. He looked out at the water. Every instinct of eleven years told him to say nothing, to turn it aside. Then he looked at her — standing on the wet sand, wind pulling at her hair, her whole clear face turned up to him, asking not out of prying but out of some steady willingness to know the actual man and not the reputation — and the armor that had held against the whole county for a decade simply would not hold against her.

“There was a woman,” he said, “eleven years ago. I was seven-and-twenty, and my father was newly dead, and I’d just come into all of this.” A gesture at the cliffs, the house unseen above them. “And I was, if you can credit it, a good deal more like you than like the man you met at Harwick. I laughed. I danced. I believed, God help me, that people meant what they said. She was beautiful and clever, and she told me she loved me, and I believed her, and I asked her to marry me, and she said yes.” He heard his own voice go flat and careful, the way it always did over this — sanding the thing down so it could be handled. “And then, three weeks before the wedding, my man of business came to me with the discovery that she had been promised the whole time to another man — a poorer man, whom she did in fact love — and that she had accepted me only because her family required the match, the title, the money, and meant all along to have the fortune settled and then live her own life quietly elsewhere. It was in her own letters. I read them. She had written to him about me while wearing my ring.”