“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 7 

“Lucy has not laughed like that,” he said quietly, watching his niece now rather than Avisia, “since before the accident.”

“She told me,” Avisia said, matching his quiet, “that her parents used to dance in the hall before Christmas. And that there has been no dancing since. I did not think it my place to ask more than that.”

Something crossed his face — grief, still raw after two years, despite every careful stone he had set against it. For a moment she thought he might turn from her, retreat into the correctness that was his habitual armor. Instead, he said:

“Edmund was driving too fast on the Sethbury road — because Cordelia was laughing at something, and he always drove faster when she laughed. As though he could not bear for the moment to end before he had wrung every last second from it.”

He stopped himself visibly, the way a man stops himself at the edge of a cliff he has walked toward without quite noticing.

“I have thought more times than I can count that if I had been in the carriage instead — if I had simply been a duller brother, a slower driver —” He stopped. “Forgive me. That is not a confidence I intended to burden you with, Miss Elfenstone. It is not part of our arrangement.”

“No,” Avisia agreed gently. “It is not part of our arrangement. I asked anyway. And you answered. Because I think some part of you has been waiting two years for someone to ask.”

She did not reach for his hand, though she wanted to. She had learned already, in two short weeks, the precise distance he could bear before he retreated behind formality again. And she judged, watching his jaw, that they stood very near its edge.

“You are not responsible for your brother’s happiness in the last moment of his life, your grace. I hope you know that — whatever the rule between us permits me to say it.”

He did not answer her directly. But he rode back to the hall at a walk beside the wagons, rather than cantering ahead as his errand’s urgency might have justified. And when Lucy, tired and pink-cheeked and glowing, fell asleep against Avisia’s shoulder in the jolting wagon bed, Avisia looked up to find him watching the two of them with an expression he made no particular effort to smooth away before their eyes met.

The message came at dawn, carried on foot by a boy from Wickmare, too breathless with running to do more than gasp out that the Reverend Elfenstone had taken a turn in the night, and that the physician had been sent for but had not yet come.

Avisia was down the stairs and into her cloak before she had properly finished reading the letter, the ring on her finger cold against skin gone suddenly numb with fear. She did not see the Duke until she reached the stable yard, already shouting for a horse to be saddled — and found instead that he was there before her, his own mount already being led out, his greatcoat thrown on over a shirt still open at the collar as though he had dressed in the space of a single minute.

“I have sent word to Dr. Hilleran in Sethbury already,” he said before she could ask how he had known, “and told him to spare no expense and no delay, and to charge the whole of it to my account rather than wait for your father to protest the cost. My own carriage is being brought round for you now — it will be faster and warmer than riding, and I have ordered hot bricks put in it. Besides —” He paused, meeting her eyes. “I am coming with you. Unless you would rather I did not.”

“You need not. This is no part of our arrangement, your grace.”

“I am aware of precisely what is and is not part of our arrangement, Miss Elfenstone.” Something in the low urgency of his voice silenced her more thoroughly than any argument could have. “This is not that. Get in the carriage.”

The road to Wickmare had never seemed so long. Avisia sat rigid against the squabs with her hands knotted in her lap, and the Duke sat across from her, saying nothing at all for the better part of a mile. Until at last, without any evident calculation, he reached across the narrow space and closed his hand over both of hers. Still and warm and entirely steady.

“Hilleran is the best physician in three counties,” he said. “I have used him for Lucy and for my mother’s rheumatism, and I trust him with lives that matter to me. Your father will have the very best care that money and my name together can command — and I promise you it is considerable.”

He paused.

“I am sorry. I know ‘sorry’ does very little against fear. But I am sorry all the same. And I did not want you to sit in this carriage without someone saying it to you.”

She did not trust her voice. So she only turned her hand beneath his and gripped it hard. And he let her. And did not once suggest that the gesture exceeded the terms of their bargain.

Her father, when they reached the small vicarage, was pale and short of breath, but conscious. Propped against a mound of pillows with Tamson white-faced beside him. Dr. Hilleran arrived within the hour, on a horse ridden nearly to lather — summoned by a rider the Duke had sent ahead at a gallop the moment Avisia had climbed into the carriage.

The examination was long and grave, and ended with a diagnosis of a weak heart, long strained by a lifetime of insufficient means, and a winter chill settled badly on already tired lungs. “Serious,” Hilleran said carefully, “but not, with rest and warmth and proper nourishment through the season, beyond hope. He will want a fire kept through the night for some weeks yet, and food richer than a country parson’s stipend generally runs to. And no undue exertion of any kind.”

“He shall have all of it,” the Duke said before Avisia could speak. “Send whatever is needed from the hall’s own stores — coal, meat, wine, if it will help him. And bill the whole of your attendance to me directly. I do not want the Reverend troubling himself over accounts while his heart mends.”

Avisia, standing in the cramped hallway of her father’s house, watching the Duke of Orwater arrange with brisk and unhesitating generosity for a country parson’s comfort as though it were the most natural thing in the world, felt something in her chest crack open that she had been holding very carefully shut for two weeks.

“You did not have to do all this,” she said when he had gone and Tamson had been sent to sit with their father, and they stood alone a moment in the small, cold parlor.

“The settlement already provides for his physician.”

“The settlement provides for a debt paid,” he said. “This is not that.”

He looked at her then with an intensity that made her want, unaccountably, to step back from it.

“I find I do not much care to distinguish between the two any longer, Miss Elfenstone. Whatever the terms we agreed to in my library a fortnight past — your father is unwell, and I have the means to ease it, and I find I want to ease it a great deal more than the arrangement between us strictly requires. I do not know what to call that. I am not certain I wish to know.”

“Peveral.”

She said his given name — unused between them until that moment — slipping out unbidden in the rawness of the morning. And watched something in his face open at the sound of it, undefended, before he caught himself.

“That is not part of the performance either,” he said quietly.

“No,” she agreed. “It is not.”