“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 6 

“You did not need to defend me so thoroughly,” Avisia said once they were alone again on the frosted path, though she could not entirely keep the warmth from her voice.

“I found I wanted to,” he said simply. “Which I confess surprises me nearly as much as it appears to surprise you.”

Tamson found them then, breathless from having run the length of the churchyard in her Sunday boots, her face alight with the particular delight of a sixteen-year-old confronted with genuine romance for the first time in her young life.

“Avisia! Is it true? Papa says you are to be a duchess, and I told him he must be exaggerating because you have never once mentioned a duke in any of your letters — not in three years — and I read every one of them twice.”

“It is rather a recent understanding, Tamson.” Avisia was aware of the Duke beside her with an attention that made her considerably more careful with her wording than she might otherwise have been. “But yes. It is true enough.”

Tamson turned her bright, unguarded gaze on the Duke himself, entirely without the deference an experienced courtier might have shown him.

“You will be kind to her, your grace. She has been kind to everyone else her whole life and had precious little of it returned. What with Mama gone and Papa’s health what it is — and I should like to know that someone means to be kind to her for a change, before I let myself be glad about any of this.”

“Tamson —” Avisia began, mortified.

But the Duke only crouched slightly so that he met the girl’s eyes on a nearer level, and answered her with a gravity that suggested he took the question exactly as seriously as it deserved.

“I mean to try, Miss Tamson. With everything I have. I cannot promise you I will always succeed — I am told I have a talent for cold correctness that wants considerable improvement. But I promise you I mean to try every day. And I would rather you held me to that promise than let me forget it.”

Tamson studied him a moment longer, weighing the answer with the same unguarded seriousness her sister had shown him in the library three weeks before. Then, apparently satisfied, she produced a smile of such open delight that it settled, Avisia thought, something in the Duke’s own careful composure that had been braced for judgment and found warmth instead.

They rode back to the hall with considerably less silence between them than they had carried on the journey out. Avisia recounting, at his gentle prompting, small stories of her sister’s childhood and her father’s long, patient ministry in the parish. And the Duke listening with an attentiveness she had not expected of a man reputed across three counties to care for nothing beyond his accounts and his solitude.

“You asked me once,” he said as the hall’s gray towers came into view above the bare elms, “why I chose you for this arrangement when I might have found any number of women with better claim to grandeur and less to lose by the pretending. I told you it was because you would not mistake the pretense for anything real. I begin to think that was not the whole truth even then, though I did not have the honesty to say so at the time.”

“What was the whole truth, your grace?”

He did not answer at once, watching the hall grow nearer through the carriage window. When he spoke again, his voice had gone quieter, more careful, as though he were feeling his way toward a confession he had not planned to make so soon.

“I have watched you for three winters, Miss Elfenstone, doing careful, unhonored work that no one troubled to thank you for, without once complaining of it. And I have thought more than once that a man might do a great deal worse than to build his life beside a woman who does not need to be watched to do the right thing well. I did not admit that to myself as a reason when I asked you in the library. I find I cannot honestly deny it as one now.”

Avisia held that confession carefully, the way she might have held a fragile thing passed to her without warning. And did not answer it at all beyond a small, private smile that she let him see, and that he returned briefly, before the carriage drew up before the hall’s great doors, and the careful correctness settled over him once more — the way it always did, the instant they came within sight of watching eyes.

By the second week of Advent, Orwater Hall had begun — cautiously, and then all at once — to remember how to be a house at Christmas.

Avisia had not planned it so. She had only asked Mrs. Bell on her third morning whether the great hall might not want dressing for the season the way the account books described it having been dressed in years past. And Mrs. Bell had looked at her with an expression Avisia could not at first read, and had said only: “His grace has not asked for the boughs to be cut since the year the old master died, miss. But I have kept the greenery lists all the same.”

So Avisia and Lucy and half the household staff besides tramped out into the home wood on a bright, hard-frosted morning to fill three wagons with fir and holly and long ropes of ivy — Lucy shrieking with a delight that carried across the whole clearing when a startled hare bolted from beneath a holly bush. And even Mr. Fenwick, the Duke’s steward, a dry and careful man of fifty who Avisia had privately thought incapable of levity, was persuaded to climb a low branch after a particularly fine spray of berries, and returned to earth with his coat torn and his dignity considerably improved by having lost it.

The Duke found them at it in the late afternoon, riding back from some errand of business in Sethbury. And Avisia watched him rein in at the edge of the clearing and simply sit his horse a long moment, watching. His niece laugh with her whole body for what was — Avisia understood without being told — very possibly the first time in two years. His staff at ease in a way she suspected his grief had not permitted them to be for a great while. Watching, too, though he would not have named it so, the woman he had hired to perform a betrothal directing the whole glad chaos of it with red cheeks and pine needles caught in her hair.

“You have conscripted my entire household into cutting greenery,” he said when he had at last come close enough to be heard. And there was something in his voice she had not heard there before — not quite accusation, not quite wonder — some unsteady thing between the two.

“I have conscripted your household into remembering Christmas, your grace. The greenery is merely the excuse.”

She held out a sprig of holly heavy with berries, without quite thinking about whether the gesture crossed some line of theirs she had not yet learned the shape of.

“Will you carry some back? Or will the Iron Duke of Orwater be remembered as the only man in the county who refused to help decorate his own hall?”

He took the holly. His fingers brushed hers in the taking of it, bare skin against bare skin in the cold air, both of them having shed their gloves for the work of the wood. And neither moved to correct the contact for a moment longer than the exchange of a sprig of holly strictly required.