“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 8 

It was three days later, once her father had been pronounced stable and improving and she had returned to the hall to resume the season’s preparations, that Lady Imogen found the Duke alone in his study and closed the door behind her before he could object to the privacy.

“You went to Wickmare yourself,” Imogen said without any preamble. “In your own carriage, with hot bricks, and sat the whole day at a dying parson’s bedside. That is not the conduct of a man performing an engagement. Peveral, I have known you a long time. I know precisely what you look like when you are pretending — and what you look like when you are not. And you were not pretending in that parlor.”

“I do not answer to you for how I choose to be kind to a woman in my employ, Imogen.”

“No,” she agreed. “You do not. But you might answer to yourself — before you ruin us both further.”

Something in her voice shifted, the cool composure cracking to show, briefly, an older grief beneath it.

“I was a fool at nineteen, Peveral. I chose land over love because I was frightened of what love without security would cost me. And I have spent every year since Rosemuir’s death regretting it in the particular, precise way one only regrets a thing once it is entirely beyond recovering. I came back to Orwater hoping there might yet be some ember left of what we had, however carelessly I once smothered it. I did not expect to find you had gone and fallen in love with your bookkeeper instead.”

“I have not —” he began. And stopped. Because the denial would not come. Because he found, standing in his own study with the words half-formed, that he could not in honesty finish the sentence.

“You have,” Imogen said softly. And for the first time there was no calculation in her voice at all. Only something that might, in another woman, have been pity. “I would advise you, as someone who once made the opposite mistake and has regretted it every day since, not to let your own rule cost you what my caution cost me. But that is not my place to say, I suppose. And I have said quite enough for one visit.”

She gathered her gloves.

“I shall not trouble you again, Peveral. Whatever I came to Orwater hoping to reclaim, I find it was buried a good deal deeper than I had the right to dig for. I wish you joy of her — if you have the courage to take it.”

She left him alone in the study with the fire burned low. And it was there, an hour later, that Avisia found him — come to bring the week’s accounts as she had done for three years running, and found instead a man staring into a dying fire with an expression she had never before seen on him.

Not the careful correctness. Not the flat competence. Something raw and unresolved. A man caught between the wall he had built and the woman who had begun to see straight through it.

“Your grace,” she said uncertainly, the ledger still in her hands.

“I told you once,” he said, not turning from the fire, “that I would not fall in love with you. I believed it entirely when I said it. I had built my whole life since Edmund died on believing that a man could choose not to feel a thing simply by refusing it permission.”

He turned then. And the look he gave her held nothing of the war left in it at all.

“I find I was wrong, Miss Elfenstone. I find I have been wrong for some time now. And I do not know what to do with the wrongness — because I promised you a rule, and I meant it as a kindness, a way to keep you safe from a man who could not be trusted to love anyone well, myself least of all. And I do not know how to break my own rule without breaking the safety I meant it to give you.”

Avisia set the ledger down very carefully on the nearest table, because her hands had begun to shake and she did not trust the numbers to survive them.

“Perhaps,” she said, “you might ask me whether I still want the safety of a broken rule — before you decide on my behalf that I do.”

He looked at her a long moment, something fierce and frightened both moving behind his eyes. And then he crossed the room in three strides and stopped a bare foot from her, close enough that she could see the war being fought in his face. Between everything he had promised himself two years ago and everything he wanted, standing here in this quiet room, more than he had wanted anything since the carriage had overturned on the Sethbury Road and taken his old life with it.

And then the study door opened without warning.

Mrs. Bell stood in the frame, pale and urgent, with a letter in her hand.

“Your grace — Lady Imogen’s brother is below stairs, asking most particularly to see you both together. He says he has come about the engagement. He says he has proof it is a sham.”

Sir Aldus Fair Haven was a heavier, coarser echo of his sister, without her polish or her sudden, surprising honesty. He stood in the Duke’s study with his hat still on his head and a folded letter held between two fingers as though it were a winning hand at cards he had waited a long while to play.

“I have here a letter from a housemaid formerly of this establishment, dismissed last spring for thieving, who is willing to swear before a magistrate that she overheard Miss Elfenstone here discussing the terms of a paid arrangement with your steward, Mr. Fenwick, on the very night your engagement was first announced to the household. A hundred pounds and a sister’s school fees, I believe, were the figures mentioned. I imagine the ton would find that a very great deal more interesting than a Christmas ball.”

The Duke’s voice came quiet and cold. “Get out of my house, Fair Haven. You will have your answer before the ball. And it will not be the one you are hoping for. I do not pay ransoms for the privilege of my own honesty.”

Sir Aldus left with his threat still hanging in the room, unresolved. And for the whole of the next two days, the Duke said nothing more of it — closeted with Fenwick and with his solicitor, and once, briefly, with his aunt, whose raised voice carried as far as the corridor before the study door was shut against it.

It was on the third evening, in the great hall itself, half-dressed now in fir and ivy for the ball two nights hence, that he called the household together — Mrs. Bell, Fenwick, the maids, the footmen, all of them standing uncertain among the half-hung garlands — and told them plainly what Sir Aldus had threatened, and why it would come to nothing.

“I asked Miss Elfenstone to pretend to be my fiancée,” he said, before them all, his voice carrying the flat, unhesitating certainty she had heard him use against Lady Imogen and Mrs. Cathcart both. “The bargain was mine to propose and mine alone. She did not seek my notice, nor my title, nor my money — I brought all three to her door and asked her to take them in exchange for a kindness to her family that I was glad, and remain glad, to give. If there is dishonesty in this house, it is mine, freely admitted, and I will answer for it to anyone who asks. Miss Elfenstone will answer to no one. Whatever the housemaid overheard, she heard the truth of a bargain I made, not a lie Miss Elfenstone told. I will say so to Sir Aldus, to the magistrate if it comes to that, and to the whole of the ton at the ball itself, should anyone there have the poor manners to ask.”

He looked, then, only at Avisia.

“I would rather the truth cost me something than let a lie cost you anything at all.”

It was not, in the end, a private declaration. It was made before the whole household, in a half-decorated hall, with pine needles still caught in the Duke’s own dark hair from an afternoon spent hanging garland himself. And it was, Avisia thought, watching him say it without a single hedge or softening, more binding than any proposal made in private could have been.

That should have settled it. And for a day, it nearly did.

But three nights later, beneath the mistletoe hung in the long gallery, the Duke leaned down as though he meant to kiss her — and stopped, a bare inch from her mouth, his hand still at her jaw.

“I have told the whole household the truth of our bargain,” he said, low. “I have not yet told you the truth of what I want to ask you next. And I find I am afraid to ask it wrongly. Give me four days, Avisia. Let me be certain I am asking for the right reasons, and not merely because Sir Aldus has frightened me into haste.”

She waited through all four days. She sat with Lucy over her stitching, and rode to Wickmare to see her father sitting up and eating broth with something like his old appetite, and told herself each morning that four days was not so very long to wait for a man to be certain of his own heart.

But by dawn on Christmas Eve — the day of the ball itself — his answer had still not come.

She packed her trunk before the household had properly woken, and left a short note for Anora on the writing desk in the Rose Room, and walked out into the snow before anyone could think to stop her.

He caught her a mile short of Wickmare, riding bareheaded through the snow, his greatcoat unbuttoned as though he had not troubled to fasten it before mounting. In the middle of the quiet, frozen road, with snow catching in his lashes and his heart laid bare before her, he said the words she had stopped hoping to hear.

“I love you. Not as a performance. Not as a term of any settlement. Not as a wall I have decided is safe enough to lower for an afternoon. I love you as I have not let myself love anything since Edmund died — entirely, and with a great deal of fear attached to it, that I no longer wish to let govern me. I told the whole household the truth of our bargain because I could not bear for Sir Aldus’s lie to touch you. I am telling you now the truth of my own heart, four days later than I ought to have, because I was afraid of it, and I am done being afraid. I am asking you, Avisia Elfenstone — not to pretend to be my fiancée any longer. But to truly be it. And then, when you are ready — to be my wife.”

He kissed her then, in the middle of the snow-quiet road. Gently, and then not gently at all. And Avisia Elfenstone, who had come to Orwater Hall three weeks before to pretend at a betrothal for a hundred pounds and her father’s health, understood in the warmth of that single, unguarded kiss that she had gained instead something no settlement in England could have purchased for her.

That night, the Christmas ball was the finest Orwater Hall had seen in a generation. And at midnight, before the whole assembled county — Sir Aldus among them, his letter long since rendered worthless, his face fixed in a rictus of a smile he could not afford to abandon — the Duke of Orwater went down on one knee and asked her again, this time with no pretense at all.

And she said yes.

They were married the following spring in the small stone church at Wickmare, where Avisia’s father — restored now to a careful but steady health — insisted on performing the ceremony himself. And the whole county turned out to see it, filling the little church far beyond its usual Sunday congregation.

And every Christmas Eve after that, for the whole of their long life together, the Duke of Orwater would find his wife somewhere in the crowded, laughing hall — by the hearth, or the punch bowl, or kneeling on the floor to settle some dispute among the youngest guests — and cross to her without fail, and take her hand, and hold it a moment longer than strict propriety required.

He never did learn to dance without counting the steps.

But he never again needed to look past her shoulder while he did it.

THE END