“Pretend to be my fiancée until Twelfth Night,” the Duke of Orwater said, “and I will see your father’s physician paid and your sister’s schooling secured.” He forgot to add one thing: that neither of them would fall in love. He was wrong about that, too.

PART 3 

“You will move into the hall tomorrow,” the Duke said, his voice gone brisker, the momentary warmth folded away somewhere she could not follow it. “My aunt will see you properly outfitted. It will not do for my betrothed to be taken for a poor relation, whatever the truth of the matter. Mrs. Bell will show you to the Rose Room.”

He paused at the door, his hand on the latch, not quite looking back at her.

“Thank you, Miss Elfenstone. For your father’s sake, I am glad of it. For my own — I am sorry to have needed to ask.”

He was gone before she could answer. And she stood alone in the library a long while after, the ledger still open before her, the snow thickening beyond the glass, turning that final sentence over and over as though it might, examined closely enough, reveal itself to be something other than what it plainly was.

The first crack, however small, in the wall he had built with his own one rule not an hour before.

She did not sleep well that night in her father’s narrow house in Wickmare, packing by candlelight the few gowns fit to be seen and the one that was not. And she told herself twice — and then a third time — that a hundred pounds and a term of schooling were reason enough for anyone to agree to anything. And that she would remember, when the pretending grew difficult, precisely what the Duke of Orwater had asked of her. And precisely what he had not.

Her father, when she told him only that she had accepted a position at the hall through Christmastide to help prepare the ball and keep the ducal accounts in order, studied her over his spectacles with the particular searching look of a man who had buried a wife and had learned, in the years since, to read a daughter’s face for what she did not say.

“You have always been careful, Avisia,” he said. “Be careful now.”

“I am always careful, Papa.”

“I did not say cautious,” he said, and coughed, and reached for her hand, and did not let go of it for some time.

Orwater Hall by daylight was a different creature entirely from the cold, candlelit library Avisia had left the night before. A great gray house of a hundred windows set among bare elms, its forecourt already busy with wagons of fir being unloaded for the coming ball, its front doors thrown open by a footman who bowed to her as though she had always belonged there.

Avisia stood a moment on the step with her single trunk beside her, feeling every inch the vicar’s daughter she was, and reminded herself that she had agreed to be looked at, and must therefore learn quickly how to bear it.

The Dowager Duchess Anora received her in a small sitting room with faded blue silk. A woman past sixty with her nephew’s dark eyes gone silvershot and a directness that made Avisia understand at once where the Duke had learned his bluntness — though age had softened hers into something nearer to warmth.

“So,” Anora said, setting down her tea and studying Avisia from crown to hem with an attention that felt less like judgment than like being read. “You are the young woman my nephew has decided will save us all from Imogen Fair Haven.”

“I understand I am to be his fiancée for the season, your grace.”

“You understand a great deal more than that, I think. Or Peveral would not have chosen you.” Anora’s mouth curved. “He is not a fool, whatever else the county says of him behind their fans. He would not hand so delicate a matter to a woman without sense enough to manage it. Tell me plainly, Miss Elfenstone — did he explain the whole of it, or only the part that suited him?”

“He explained. Lady Imogen. And Edmund. And Lucy.” Avisia hesitated. “He asked one condition of me before he would say anything else at all.”

“That neither of you fall in love.”

Anora said it without surprise, stirring her tea as though the words cost her nothing. “Yes. He would. My nephew has spent two years building a very careful house out of grief and duty, Miss Elfenstone, with every stone set exactly where it will bear the most weight and the least feeling. And he means for this arrangement to be one more stone — useful, loadbearing, and entirely without warmth. I will not pretend to you that I think he will succeed in keeping it so. But I will not tell him that either, because he would only build the wall higher.”

She set down her cup.

“Now. You will want to meet Lucy before you meet anyone else in this house who might tell you lies about her uncle’s disposition.”

Lucy Marchman was found in the nursery, on her stomach on the hearthrug, constructing an elaborate and structurally doubtful stable out of carved wooden animals. She looked up at Avisia with her father’s fair coloring and her uncle’s dark, assessing eyes, and said without any preamble whatsoever:

“Are you going to marry Uncle Peveral?”

“I am going to pretend to, for a little while.” Avisia said it because she had promised herself in the carriage that she would not lie to this child, whatever the terms with the Duke required of the county at large. “Would that trouble you very much?”

Lucy considered this with the grave seriousness only a six-year-old can properly summon.

“Mama and Papa used to dance in the hall before Christmas,” she said. “There isn’t any dancing now. Is there going to be dancing again, if you pretend to marry him?”

“There is going to be dancing,” Avisia said, and something in her chest ached at the plain, unguarded want in the child’s voice — want that had clearly gone unspoken in this house for two long years, because no one had thought to ask a grieving six-year-old what she missed. “A great deal of it. Would you like to help me learn, so that I do not embarrass your uncle in front of the whole county?”

Lucy’s face transformed entirely. The wariness gone in an instant, replaced by the particular delight of a child handed a purpose.

“I know all the steps,” she announced. “Papa taught me. Before —”

She stopped. The sentence folding on itself.

Avisia knelt on the hearthrug beside her without thinking twice about the state of her one good gown.

“Then you shall teach me,” she said.

And watched the child’s face steady itself again. Grateful and a little astonished, as though kindness offered without conditions were a foreign language she was only now being taught to read.