“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 8 

“What did you do?”

“I ended it quietly. I have always been good at quiet. I gave out that we did not suit, and let her keep her name, because I found I could not bring myself to ruin even her. And then I came here to Foscliffe, and I decided—” he drew a breath of the cold sea air “—that I had been a fool once and would not be a fool twice. That the fault had been in my believing, in my laughing, in my leaving myself open to be read and used. So I closed. I made myself into exactly the man the county now fears — cold and hard and impossible to reach, because a man who cannot be reached cannot be deceived, and cannot be made a fool of, and cannot be hurt. It has answered very well. It has answered for eleven years. No one has got near enough to lie to me in all that time, because no one has got near me at all.” He looked at her. “You will observe the flaw in the design. No one has got near me at all — until a girl laughed at me across a bowl of negus, and I forgot for the length of one waltz to keep the gate shut.”

The sea came on. Somewhere above, a gull cried and was answered.

“That is not cruelty,” Sidwell said at last. “That is a wound that never closed, dressed up as cruelty so no one would touch it. Oh, Winston.”

And she did a thing then that undid him entirely. She reached up — bare-handed, having drawn off her glove somewhere on the beach — and laid it against the side of his face, against the hard jaw of the cruel Duke of Foscliffe, as one might touch something that had been hurt a long time ago and never comforted.

“You poor man. You built a whole fortress against being made a fool, and never once considered that the loneliness would cost you more than any fool’s bargain ever could.”

He could not move. Her hand was warm and small against his face, and the whole of the cold sea and the cold years seemed to gather at the edge of that one point of warmth. He was aware of his own heart doing something painful and alive against his ribs. He was aware of how close she stood, of the wind bringing him the faint clean scent of her, of her lips parted on the last word, and her eyes gone dark and uncertain as she understood, a half-second after he did, exactly how near they had come, and how far past the terms of any bargain.

“Sidwell,” he said. It came out rough. He did not know what he meant to say after it.

He only knew that he had turned his face without deciding to, so that his mouth was very close to the palm of her hand, that she had not taken it away, and that the whole careful architecture of eleven years was, in this one instant on a shining beach, one breath from coming down.

The groom’s voice came thin down the wind. “Your grace — the tide, your grace. She comes quicker along here. You’ll want the path.”

They sprang apart as though scolded. Sidwell turned away at once, snatching her glove back on, her face flaming. Winston stood a moment breathing hard, his own composure in pieces on the sand, the cold rushing back into the place her hand had warmed.

The tide had indeed come in with the treacherous coastal speed he had grown up respecting, and just now entirely forgotten. Another quarter hour and the beach would be gone. He had nearly drowned them both, standing there like a boy, because a woman had touched his face and told him she understood.

“We should go up,” he said. His voice was not quite his own.

“Yes,” Sidwell said, not looking at him. “Yes, we should. The tide.”

They climbed the cliff path in silence, single file, the groom ahead with the horses, and did not speak of it — not that day, nor the next, not the thing that had almost happened on the beach. But something had changed, and both of them knew it, and the not-speaking was itself a kind of speech.

Winston lay awake that night listening to the sea, understanding with a clarity that frightened him that he had broken the first and only rule of his own survival. He had let someone near. He had let her all the way in. He had told her the thing he had told no one — and worse, immeasurably worse, he had wanted, on that beach, with a want eleven years of stone had done nothing to blunt, to close the last small distance and kiss Sidwell Glennville, as though the bargain had never existed, and the three months were forever.

In three months, by the terms he himself had written to protect her, she was going to leave.

He turned his face to the dark and admitted it to himself at last — the thing he had been outrunning since the terrace — that he was in love with the woman he had promised to let go, and that he had no notion under heaven how to keep from letting her go without breaking the one promise that had made her trust him in the first place.

Aramenta Vain came often to Foscliffe in the days that followed, and then the week after that, always smiling, always watching. She did not pounce. She sat through the long bright afternoons with her tea and her needlework, and she listened, and she noted the things that did not fit — the sorrowful complicity in Mr. Glennville’s face whenever the wedding was spoken of; the single trunk Sidwell had brought to a house she meant to be mistress of; how the future Duchess never once, in all Aramenta’s talk of settlements and gowns, spoke of the future at all, but turned the conversation always gently to the present day. A woman in love with a duke plans. A woman merely fond of one enjoys. Aramenta Vain knew the difference, having planned all her life.

In the end it was not cleverness that gave her the thread to pull, but chance — a dismissed housemaid, sore about it, carrying to the Vains’ kitchen door, for the price of a shilling, the tale of an odd thing overheard on the night the Glennvilles first came: the young lady and the master on the terrace, and not a word of love between them. Only talk of a bargain. And three months, and parting by mutual consent when the season was done.