SHE CAUGHT THE FALLING CHILD FROM THE COLLAPSING BALCONY—UNAWARE THE DUKE SAW EVERYTHING

Chapter 4

After dinner, Petra played the pianoforte. She played well, with precision and pride, her fingers moving across the keys with the confidence of a woman who had never been told she was not good enough. The Duke listened with his hands folded and his eyes half-closed. He thanked her when she was finished. He did not ask her to play again.

He crossed the drawing room, navigating the small tables where the older women sat with their cards, and stopped in front of Viven. She had taken up her embroidery hoop out of habit, because it was easier than sitting with her hands empty.

“Miss Ashkam,” he said.

She rose. “Your Grace.”

“Would you walk with me in the long gallery a moment? There is a portrait there that I understand belonged to your father.”

It was a lie. There was no portrait of her father in the long gallery. Her father had been a poor man who owned two coats and a horse and had died with nothing but debts. But she understood that the lie was for the room, not for her.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

She set down the embroidery hoop and walked with him out of the drawing room. Every eye in the room followed them.

The long gallery was cool and shadowed. A single row of candles burned at the far end, their flames standing straight in the still air. The floor was old oak, dark with age, and it creaked under their feet in the same three places it had always creaked. The air smelled of beeswax and dried roses, and under that, faintly, of the old stone of the walls. Viven had walked this gallery a hundred times alone. She had never walked it with anyone.

The Duke matched his stride to hers. She noticed this and did not know what to do with it.

He stopped near the middle of the gallery where the light was low. He did not pretend to look at a portrait.

“I frightened you at dinner,” he said. “I did not intend to. I thought about it for days. I could not think of a way to say it that would not carry weight, so I gave up on saying it lightly.”

“You did not frighten me,” she said. It was true. He had surprised her. He had not frightened her. She was not a woman who was easily frightened. She had been frightened only once in the last four days, and that had been in the yard, and it had been for a child, not for herself.

“I was in the lane,” he said. “I heard the stone begin to move. I saw you come out of the kitchen door. I saw you drop your book.”

“It was not much of a book.”

Something crossed his face that might have been a smile. It was gone before she could be sure.

“You did not know I was there,” he said. “That is why I could not stop looking.”

She looked down at her hands. There was a small mark on her palm where the scrape was healing. She curled her fingers over it.

“I came here tonight,” he said, “because it was expected that I would. I came here believing I would say a certain thing to your aunt before the evening ended. I no longer intend to say it.”

She lifted her eyes.

“I do not know what I intend,” he said. “I know only that I could not sit at that table and eat a pheasant while pretending I had not seen what I saw. I have been called a cold man by many people, Miss Ashkam, and most of them are right. But I am not so cold as that.”

“Your Grace,” she began.

“Callum,” he said. “In this gallery. Only for a moment. Only if you wish.”

She did not say his name. It was too great a thing to say his name. But she did not look away. That was as much as she could give him just then, and he seemed to understand it.

“I do not know what happens next,” he said. “I make no promises I cannot keep. I owe things to my name and my house — things I did not choose. But I will not marry a woman I have not chosen. Not now. Not after Tuesday.”

She thought about Petra in the drawing room, playing the pianoforte. She thought about her aunt’s face at the dinner table.

“You will make an enemy of this house, Your Grace.”

“Yes.”

“You will make an enemy of my aunt.”

“Yes.”

“That will fall on me,” she said, “after you have gone home.”

He was silent a long moment. In the silence, she heard the clock in the hall, the faint sound of the pianoforte from the drawing room, and further off, a dog barking at the stables.

“I know it,” he said at last. “That is why I will not leave you here alone.”

She looked at him and did not understand what he meant, and was afraid to guess.

“I mean,” he said, choosing his words with care, “that I will not act tonight in a way I cannot follow through on tomorrow. I will act carefully. I will act correctly. But I will act. You will not be left to bear this alone. I give you my word.”

“Your word,” she said quietly.

“It is not much yet,” he said. “In time, I hope it will be more.”

She held his eyes then. Neither of them looked away. The candle at the far end of the gallery guttered and steadied. A moth turned once around the flame and vanished into the shadows. Somewhere in the house, a door opened and closed.

Viven felt her breath in her throat and the pulse at her wrist and the small ache in her scraped palm, and she understood without being able to name it that a thing had been said in this dim gallery that could not be unsaid. Her life had turned a corner in the dark, without asking her leave.

“I should go back,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “So should I.”

They walked back together. At the door of the drawing room, he paused and said in his low, level voice, “Thank you for walking with me, Miss Ashkam.” He said it loudly enough for the room to hear.

Then he went in. He crossed to her aunt. He thanked her for the dinner with the same steady courtesy. He left within the hour.

When the front door closed behind him, her aunt turned in a slow, careful way. She looked at Viven with an expression Viven had not seen on her face in nine years. It was not anger. It was worse than anger. It was the look of a woman who had just understood that a small, quiet piece of furniture in her house had begun, quite without permission, to move on its own.

“Viven,” her aunt said. “Go to bed.”

Viven went to bed. She did not sleep for a long time. She lay in the narrow room with the small window and listened to the house settle around her. She thought about the Duke’s voice saying, “I give you my word.” She thought about the balcony and the child and her aunt’s face.

She understood that whatever came next would be hard. She was not afraid of hard things. She had lived nine years in this house. She knew how to be quiet and how to be steady, and how to do a small thing well when no one was watching.

Whatever came next, she would meet it as she had met the falling child. Without thinking. With her arms open. Taking the weight on her own bones if she had to.

She slept at last, and dreamed of stone dust and a small hand pressing hers.

In the morning, everything changed.