She Fled Her Faithless Suitor Into a Dark Room, Unaware England’s Most Feared Duke Was Hiding There — Before She Even Learned His Name, He Did Something That Left Everyone Speechless.

PART 3

It did not matter what had actually happened. It did not matter that she had fled here in innocence, and the Duke had been protecting her. A young unmarried woman found in a dark room, alone with a man, at a house party, at night — she was ruined, comprehensively and finally, and no explanation on earth would save her, because society did not care what had happened. Only what it looked like. And it looked like the end of Pride Ambrose.

She felt the blood leave her face. She opened her mouth, though she had no idea what she would say, what could possibly be said — and the Duke of Jarnis stepped very slightly in front of her, so that his shoulder was between her and the staring crowd. A gesture of shelter so instinctive and so complete that she felt it in her chest like a hand laid over her heart.

“Ah, Lady Bracewell, and company,” he said, in a voice of perfect, bored, unassailable calm. “You are just in time. You may be the first to wish us joy.”

He paused, and Pride felt the whole world tilt on the edge of what he would say next.

“Miss Ambrose has done me the very great honor of accepting my hand in marriage. We stepped in here to have the matter settled privately, away from the crush, and Mr. Renwick — an old friend of the family — was kind enough to be the first to congratulate us. Were you not, Renwick? Yes. There it is, all quite settled. The Duke of Jarnis is to be married. You may tell whomever you like. I find I am too happy to keep it a secret one moment longer.”

She held her peace until the last of them had withdrawn, until Lady Bracewell had gasped and beamed and rushed away to spread the most delicious news of the season, and Renwick had slunk off in confusion, and the door was shut again, and Pride Ambrose was alone with the man to whom she was now, in the eyes of all the world, engaged to be married.

Then she rounded on him.

“You have lost your senses,” she said. “You have announced our engagement to Lady Bracewell, who is the greatest gossip in England, which means that by breakfast it will be known in three counties, which means it cannot be unsaid. Do you understand what you have done? You have bound yourself to a woman you met a quarter of an hour ago, whom you know nothing of, to spare her a scandal that was not even her fault. And you cannot take it back, and I will not hold you to it. Now we are both of us in a far worse case than we were ten minutes ago, when I was merely a jilted girl in a dark room. You have ruined yourself to save me. It is the most gallant and the most idiotic thing I have ever seen anyone do, and I will not permit it.”

“You will not permit it,” the Duke repeated, and there was that dry amusement again, warmer now. “Miss Ambrose, I have been the Duke of Jarnis for two-and-twenty years, and in all that time I do not believe a single soul has told me what I will and will not permit. I find it refreshing. Do go on.”

“Do not laugh at me. This is my life you have spent.”

“I am not laughing at you.” He said it gently, and she stopped, arrested by the change in his voice. “Sit down, Miss Ambrose, there in the other chair. Let me tell you what I have done and why, and then you may rage at me all you like — but at least you will be raging at the truth of it, and not at your own supposition.”

He waited until she sat, warily, on the edge of the chair, and then lowered himself back into his own, the firelight on his strong, forbidding face.

“First — I have not ruined myself. That is your fear, and it is a generous one, and it is wrong. I am the Duke of Jarnis. A duke does not ruin himself by becoming engaged. A duke confers; he does not receive. The world will not say I have been trapped. It will say you have been extraordinarily fortunate — which is unjust, but it is how the world reckons these things, and it means the whole weight of this falls, in the world’s eyes, entirely as a gift to you and not at all as a cost to me. I have risked nothing. You have been saved everything. That is simply the arithmetic of rank. It is monstrously unfair, and tonight it happens to be unfair in your favor, and I suggest we take the gift the unfairness offers rather than quarreling with it.”

Pride opened her mouth and shut it.

“Second,” the Duke went on, “you say I know nothing of you, and that is true, and it is also true that you know nothing of me, and engagements have been founded on a great deal less — but you are wrong that I acted blindly. I have been watching you for the last quarter of an hour, in the dark, in a crisis — which is a far more revealing quarter hour than a whole season of drawing-room acquaintance, for in a crisis a person cannot perform. They can only be what they are. And in the last quarter hour I have seen you flee a man who wronged you rather than weep over him. I have seen you tell a total stranger the plain truth of your humiliation without varnish or self-pity. And I have seen you, when I announced our engagement, think first not of your own rescue but of my supposed ruin, and rise up to forbid me to sacrifice myself for you. Do you understand how rare that is? I have spent two-and-twenty years among people who think first, last, and only of themselves. I sat down in this dark room tonight to escape three hundred of them. And into my refuge burst the one person I have met in a decade who offered a rescue and immediately tried to give it back, because she feared it cost the rescuer too much. I did not act blindly, Miss Ambrose. I acted on the best evidence I have gathered about any human being in ten years. It happened to arrive very fast. But it was evidence, and it was good, and I trusted it.”

She stared at him. The fire ticked and settled.

“Third, and last,” the Duke said, more quietly. “You say you will not hold me to it, and I honor that, and so I will offer you the same freedom I would want offered to me. The engagement is announced. It cannot be unannounced tonight without ruining you, which defeats the entire purpose. So it stands, for now. But hear me — I hold you to nothing. If in a month, or three, you find you cannot bear me — and I am, I am reliably informed, a difficult man to bear, cold and solitary and set in my ways — then you shall cry off. You, not I. It will do you no lasting harm, and I will let it be understood that the fault was mine, some coldness, some unreasonableness, and you shall walk away with your reputation intact and my good wishes. No one shall ever say you were jilted, or trapped, or ruined — only that you were, for a season, the young woman who was engaged to the Duke of Jarnis, and found she could do better. That is the worst case, Miss Ambrose, and it is not a bad one.”

He paused, and something crossed the forbidding face she could not quite read.

“The best case is that we suit. That the evidence I gathered in the dark proves sound. That a mishap in an unlit room turns out to be the most fortunate accident of two solitary lives. I do not say it will. I say only that it might — and that I find, to my very great surprise, for I opened this house tonight intending to speak to no one and vanish to my own study at the earliest possible moment, that I should like to find out. Will you let us find out? No promises, no trap. Only a betrothal of convenience, entered to save your name, with a clear door out at your own hand whenever you wish it — and if we are lucky, a chance to discover whether the door is one either of us will ever want to use.”