She Climbed Out of a Second-Story Window at Dawn to Escape the Man She Was Being Forced to Marry — But When She Fell Into the Arms of a Feared Duke Who Had Buried His Heart for Twelve Years, Neither Knew That One Desperate Fall Would Change Their Lives Forever

PART 4 

Word of the engagement traveled through the county with the particular swiftness reserved for news too delicious to sit still. By the time Turald called at Belcroft three days later, Mrs. Yarnell reported with mingled pride and terror that she had received no fewer than eleven callers, all professing warm delight at Alfreda’s good fortune, all clearly desperate to extract some detail of the scandal that had produced it.

“They ask such peculiar questions,” Alfreda told him, walking beside him along the low stone wall that bordered Belcroft’s kitchen garden, her bonnet swinging by its ribbons from one hand because she had never in her life managed to keep a bonnet properly tied. “Mrs. Ferris wished to know whether I had climbed the wall or the trellis, as though the precise architecture of my disgrace were a matter of general interest.”

“And which was it?”

“The trellis, if you must know. And it is a testament to my aunt’s neglect of her garden that it held my weight at all, given how thoroughly the roses have strangled it these past two years.”

She glanced sidelong at him. “You are laughing at me, your grace.”

“I am admiring your candor. Most women, having narrowly escaped ruin by way of a rose trellis, would prefer the incident forgotten rather than discussed in architectural detail.”

“I have found that pretending an embarrassment did not happen only prolongs it. Better to own the trellis outright, and let the gossips exhaust themselves on it.”

She stopped walking, turning to face him fully, and something in her expression sobered.

“I have been thinking these three days that you and I have agreed to marry without either of us knowing the first thing about the other. I do not know your favorite season, or whether you take sugar in your tea, or what you think of when you cannot sleep. I know only that you are formidable, and that you caught me, and that you were kind when you might easily have been otherwise.”

“Ask me, then,” he said. “I find I do not object to the examination.”

And so over the following fortnight, she did. Walking the lanes near Belcroft in the mornings when the dew still silvered the hedgerows. Sitting in Ashford Priory’s modest drawing room in the afternoons while he saw to estate business. Riding out together once she confessed shyly that she rode passably well despite having no horse of her own.

She asked him about his father, and he found himself telling her a thing he had told almost no one — about the old duke’s debts and drink, and the slow ruin of an estate that had taken Turald twelve years of unrelenting labor to restore. About the loneliness of inheriting a title at four-and-twenty with a name that opened doors and a treasury that could not fill them.

“That is why they call you cold,” she said one afternoon as they sat beneath the ancient oak at the edge of the Priory’s park, the summer light falling in soft coins through the leaves. “Not because you are unfeeling, but because you have spent twelve years being the only person willing to feel anything useful on your family’s behalf. Everyone else got to grieve or despair or run away. You had to mend it.”

He looked at her for a long moment, struck as he had been struck a dozen times already in their short acquaintance by her uncanny gift for seeing past the surface of a thing to its true shape.

“No one has ever put it that way to me before.”

“No one has ever asked you a proper question before, I expect. Dukes are generally only asked what they think of the weather, or whether they will honor some ball with their presence.”

She plucked a blade of grass and turned it between her fingers, not quite meeting his eyes.

“I should like to be the sort of wife who asks proper questions. If you will permit it.”

“I would permit very little else,” he said, and meant it entirely.

It was in these small, unguarded moments that Turald found himself undone by degrees. She was not beautiful in the way the season’s toasts were beautiful. She owned no fortune, no polished accomplishments, no practiced charm. But she noticed things no one else troubled to notice. She learned the name of every servant at the Priory within a week, and asked after the housekeeper’s ailing mother without being prompted. She spent an entire afternoon teaching herself, from an old book found in Belcroft’s meager library, the proper Latin names of the herbs in her aunt’s neglected garden — simply because she had confessed to him once that not knowing things troubled her more than almost anything else.

She laughed easily and often. And when she laughed at something he said — genuinely, without calculation — he found the sound did something to his chest that he had no ready name for.

He began, without quite deciding to, arranging his days around the hours he might see her. He rode to Belcroft in the mornings on pretexts that grew thinner with each visit. A book he thought she might enjoy. A question about the wedding arrangements that could easily have waited. Once, absurdly, a request for her opinion on curtains for a room she had not yet seen.

Alfreda accepted each excuse with a knowing look, and never once called him on the transparency of it. Which he understood correctly to be its own kind of tenderness.

It was his oldest friend, Captain Robert Ashworth, newly returned from his regiment and staying at the Priory to stand as groomsman, who first gave voice to the doubt that Turald had been carefully not examining.

“You cannot be serious about this,” Ashworth said one evening over brandy. “Turald, you compromised a girl by accident in a lane, and now you sit here mooning over her Latin like a schoolboy. I understand the necessity of the engagement. You had no choice given the circumstances. But you need not convince yourself it is a love match merely to make the obligation easier to bear.”

“I am not convincing myself of anything,” Turald said more sharply than he intended.

“Then you will forgive me for observing that a man does not generally ride four miles before breakfast to discuss curtains with a woman he regards merely as an obligation.”