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

Chapter 7

The Duke did not sit. He stood near the door, his hands at his sides, and looked at her as if he were memorizing the shape of her.

“You are well,” he said.

“I am well. Your cousin has been kind.”

“She has been just. It is more than I expected.”

He nodded once. He looked down at his hands, then back at her.

“I told you I would find you.”

“You did.”

“I said I would not leave you to bear it alone.”

“You did.”

He drew a breath. She saw it lift his shoulders and settle them again.

“I spoke to your aunt,” he said. “I rode to Heavenreach the morning after that dinner. I asked to see her. She received me in the yellow room. She would not tell me where you had been sent. I asked her three times.”

“She would not say.”

“No. I went home. I set my steward to finding out. It took him nine days. Your aunt covered her tracks well. I rode as soon as I knew.”

“You should not have,” Viven said quietly. “You have made an enemy of her. Society will speak.”

“Society is speaking already,” he said. There was, for the first time, something like the beginning of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Petra Marchmir is engaged to a Mr. Lowther of Kent. It was announced last week. She did not, I understand, weep long.”

Viven pressed her lips together. She did not smile. She almost smiled.

“Mr. Lowther has a very great deal of money,” the Duke said. “More than I have, I am told, though I doubt it. Your cousin will do well by him. Your aunt will do well by the settlement. I do not think either of them is thinking of you at all just now.”

“That is a mercy,” Viven said.

“Yes,” he said. “It is.”

He crossed the small room at last, slowly, and stopped a proper distance from her. “May I sit?”

He sat in the chair opposite hers. He put his hands on his knees. He looked at his hands, and then at her.

“I have come to ask you a question,” he said. “I do not ask it lightly. I ask it because I have thought about it for three weeks, and I have found no other question worth asking.”

She waited.

“Would you consider,” he said, “in time, becoming my wife?”

The wind moved in the window. The fire in the small grate cracked softly. Somewhere down the hall, Hesper set a tray down on a wooden table, and the small sound of china carried through the quiet house.

Viven did not answer at once. She had thought, if this moment ever came, that she would know what to say. She did not know. She had lived nine years in a house that had told her she was nothing. She had been told two weeks ago that she was a stain to be burned out of linen. She had caught a falling child, and she had walked in a long gallery in the dark, and she had ridden three days in a closed carriage without weeping.

She was not the same woman she had been a month ago. She did not yet know who she was becoming.

“Your Grace,” she said, “may I speak plainly?”

“I would not have ridden three days for anything less.”

“I am poor. I have no family that will speak for me. My aunt has cast me out. My cousin Hesper is kind, but she is old and she has no rank. You will lose friends by this marriage.”

“I have lost most of them already in the last three weeks. The ones I have kept are the ones worth keeping.”

She drew a long breath. “I do not know you.”

“No,” he said. “You do not.”

“I know that you are a duke. I know that you are quiet. I know that you saw me in a yard and did not turn away. I know that you kept a promise made in a dim gallery to a woman who had nothing to give you. That is all I know.”

“It is a beginning,” he said.

“It is a beginning,” she agreed.

She looked at her hands. He looked at his. The fire settled in the grate.

“I will not answer today,” she said at last.

“I did not ask you to answer today.”

“I will stay with my cousin here on the moors. I will walk on the beach in the afternoons. If you would like to write to me, you may. If you would like to visit, when it does not shame you to visit an old widow in Northumberland, you may. I will not be your secret. And I will not be your rescue. If in time we come to know one another, and if in time you still wish to ask, I will give you an answer.”

He looked at her a long time. His face did not change, but something in his eyes shifted. It was not disappointment. It was, she thought, something closer to relief.

“That is a wise answer,” he said. “Wiser than I deserved.”

“It is only fair.”

“May I write?”

“You may write.”

“May I come at Christmas?”

“You may come at Christmas.”

“May I bring a small gift when I come?”

“A small one. Nothing that will embarrass my cousin.”

“Nothing that will embarrass your cousin.”

He rose. He did not reach for her hand. He seemed to understand that he had not yet earned the right to touch her. He bowed once, in the small, correct way of a man who had been raised well and had not forgotten it.

“Miss Ashkam. Until Christmas.”

“Until Christmas, Your Grace.”

He went out. She heard him in the hall, thanking Hesper. She heard the front door open and shut. She heard the sound of a horse being led away across the wet gravel.

She sat quite still by the fire and looked at the small stocking on the arm of the chair. She found that she was smiling, in a small, private way, at nothing at all.

Hesper came in with the tea tray. She set it down. She looked at Viven.

“You did not accept him,” Hesper said.

“No, Cousin.”

“Good,” said Hesper. “A duke who is worth having is a duke who will wait.”