“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 9 

The maid had thought little of it. Miss Vain, hearing it, went very still, and then very bright, and paid the shilling, and paid a second for silence, and went home to think.

Winston knew none of this. He knew only that the days were going by too fast, and that every evening across the chessboard he meant to say something true to Sidwell, and every evening failed. He was a man who had built his life on saying nothing. He found now that he had the most important thing in the world to say, no practice at all in the saying of it, and his own promise standing in the road. He had told her on the terrace that she owed him nothing — that no charity and no obligation would touch her, that she would walk away whole and free. If he now declared himself, what was he but one more man using her situation to get what he wanted? He had rescued her from a trap. He could not now become the trap.

So he said nothing, and told himself there would be time later, once she was free and safe and could choose him without the whole weight of Foscliffe leaning on the scale — as though love waited politely for the convenient hour.

The blow, when it came, came at the assembly at Harwick, in the very ballroom where the whole thing had begun. His grandmother had insisted they attend; it would look strange, she said, for the betrothed pair to hide from the county a month after the announcement. And so they came back to Harwick Hall, and the candles blazed, and the county turned upon its axis, and Winston stood with Sidwell on his arm in the doorway where he had once walked her out into the dark, thinking he had never in his life been less willing to let a woman go.

She was lovely that night — his grandmother had seen to a new gown, gray silk, which Sidwell had accepted only when the Dowager framed it as a loan. He was fetching her a glass of negus — the same drink, meaning it as a private joke — when he came back around the pillar and heard Aramenta Vain’s voice, low and sweet, pitched to carry to a small, select cluster of the county’s most reliable talkers.

“A bargain, my dears. Nothing more. I have it on the best authority. There was never any love in it at all. She caught him out in the old family custom — or her people did, that shrewd invalid father, one wonders — and rather than face the scandal, he struck a bargain with her to play the part for a season and be quietly rid of her when the talk died down. It is all to be ended by mutual consent, you know, the moment it is safe. Three months, they said. Poor Winston — one almost pities him, trapped into a false engagement with a portionless nobody who saw her chance and took it. And to think we all believed he was in love. He must be laughing at us behind that cold face of his. Or perhaps—” the sweet voice dropped, delicious “—perhaps he is not laughing at all. Perhaps he has come to want what he cannot honorably keep, and she knows it, and holds it over him. She is cleverer than she looks, that one. They always are.”

Winston stood behind the pillar with a glass of negus in his hand and the blood gone to ice in his veins. It was not the exposure that undid him — the county could think what it liked. He had weathered worse. It was that every poisoned word of it was near enough to true to be unanswerable, and that the one lie in it — that Sidwell had schemed, had trapped him, held anything over him — was the word that would do her the most harm, and the word he could least publicly deny. To deny it, he would have to explain the whole of the true arrangement, and the true arrangement was itself the scandal.

Aramenta had found the loose thread and pulled it with beautiful precision. Whatever he said now, Sidwell was ruined all over again — not as a jilted woman this time, but as a fortune hunter. Exactly the thing she had said on the terrace she would rather die than be thought.

He came around the pillar with murder in his cold face, and the little cluster of talkers scattered like starlings. Aramenta looked up at him with wide, innocent eyes and a curtsy, and he could not touch her, could not disprove a word, could only stand there with the useless glass in his hand while the poison spread through the ballroom in widening rings.

Then he saw Sidwell.

She was standing a little way off, quite alone, near the long windows where he had first seen her, and she had heard. He knew it at once, because the color had gone out of her face exactly as it had the night of the announcement, and she was looking at him across the crowded floor with an expression he had never seen on her before and hoped never to see again — not anger, not even hurt, but a terrible, quiet understanding, as though something she had been carefully not letting herself believe had just been confirmed in the cruelest possible hearing.

He went to her at once. She let him come.

“Before he could speak,” she said, in a low, steady voice worse than any weeping, “is that what I am, then? Behind the chess and the beach and the — is that all it has been to you, and to your grandmother, and the whole of it? A trap you were kind enough to spring me from, and a scheme you are too honorable to shake off?”

Her gray eyes searched his, and he saw that she was not asking about Aramenta’s malice at all. She was asking about him.

“You have been so careful, Winston. So very careful never to say the thing I thought — these last weeks — I let myself think.” She stopped. Her chin came up. “But of course you would be careful. Three months, and then, by mutual consent, and no charity to touch me. You said it yourself on the terrace. I ought to have listened better. I ought never to have let myself forget it was a bargain. That was my folly, not yours. You have kept your word to the letter.”

“Sidwell.” His voice broke on it. “You do not understand. I have wanted to speak. I have wanted every night to—”

“Do not.” She said it very quietly, and it cut him off more surely than a shout. “Do not, out of guilt, or kindness, or because you cannot bear to be the villain, say to me now, on a crowded floor, a thing you have not once been willing to say in the safety of your own house across a chessboard. I could not bear that from you of all people. You told me on the beach what it did to you to be lied to by someone you had let near. Do not think I would do the same to you in reverse — pretend, out of pity for my situation, to feel a thing you have taken every possible care never to feel.”