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 4

Pride Ambrose looked at the Duke of Jarnis across the dying fire — this cold, forbidding, feared man who had just, in the space of a quarter hour, dispatched her faithless suitor, saved her reputation, offered to shoulder the whole blame should she tire of him, and confessed that he should like to find out whether they suited. And she found that her heart, which had been racing with fear and then with anger, was now racing with something else entirely. Something that felt absurdly, dangerously like hope.

“Yes,” she said. “All right. Let us find out. But I warn you, Your Grace, I am also difficult to bear. I speak my mind, always, whether it is wanted or not. I have no fortune and no great connections, and I have just been humiliated by one man who found me interchangeable with my cousin. So I am in no mood to be anyone’s convenient anything. If we are to find out whether we suit, we find out honestly. Both of us. No gallantry, no performance. You be as cold and solitary and difficult as you truly are, and I shall be as blunt and penniless and unmanageable as I truly am, and we shall see what is left standing when neither of us is pretending. Those are my terms.”

“Miss Ambrose,” said the Duke of Jarnis, and for the first time that night he smiled — a real smile, slow and startled, transforming the forbidding face entirely — “I do believe those are the first terms anyone has offered me in twenty years that I have wanted, with my whole heart, to accept.”

The finding out began the next morning, and it did not go at all as either of them expected — which the Duke reflected afterward was the first sign it was going to work. He had expected his convenient betrothed to arrive subdued, grateful, on her best behavior. Nearly everyone was, in his experience, on their best behavior around the Duke of Jarnis, and their best behavior bored him to the edge of madness. A person on their best behavior is a person you cannot see.

Instead, Pride Ambrose arrived at the appointed hour, was shown into the morning room where he waited, looked about her at the cold and formal grandeur of it, and said, “Good heavens, does anyone actually live here, or is it kept purely to intimidate visitors? Because it is doing an excellent job of the second and no job at all of the first. There is not a single thing in this room that suggests a human being has ever sat in it for pleasure. Is the whole house like this?”

“The whole house,” said the Duke, “is exactly like this.”

“Then no wonder you fled to a dark room to escape a party. You have no cheerful room to flee to. You have escaped one cold room into another your entire life. It is very sad, actually, when one thinks about it.”

The Duke of Jarnis looked at his betrothed of eighteen hours, who had just walked into his ancestral morning room and diagnosed the central sorrow of his existence in under a minute, and felt the ground shift under him in the way it had shifted in the dark room the night before. The sense of a person who saw more than they were shown.

“You are very frank, Miss Ambrose.”

“I warned you I would be. Are you regretting it already? We are not an hour into the finding out, and you have gone quite still.”

“It is a very good sign,” said the Duke slowly. “It is only that I am unused to it. People do not, as a rule, tell me that my house is sad. They tell me it is magnificent. They have been telling me it is magnificent for two-and-twenty years, and I have believed them, more or less. And it took a penniless young woman I met in the dark eighteen hours ago to walk in and tell me the truth — that it is magnificent and sad, both at once, and that I have escaped one cold room into another my whole life. I do not think anyone has ever said a truer thing to me. It is a most uncomfortable sensation. I find I want a great deal more of it.”

And so it went. She argued with him, teased him, refused absolutely to be intimidated by his rank or his coldness or his splendid sad house, and told him the truth about all of them, cheerfully, relentlessly, until the Duke of Jarnis found himself doing a thing he had not done since he was a boy — laughing, in his own house, in daylight, at something a person had said.

She reorganized his morning room without asking, on the theory that if she was to be obliged to sit in it during their courtship, she would not sit in a mausoleum. She had the great gilt chairs pushed back, a small comfortable sofa brought from some abandoned wing, books set out, the fire kept properly lit, and flowers — actual flowers — brought in from the neglected succession houses. Within a month, the coldest, most formal room in the coldest, most formal house in the north of England had become, improbably, a place where two people sat and talked and argued and laughed.

“You are colonizing my house one room at a time,” he observed some weeks in, watching her tuck her feet up on the sofa she had installed entirely at home. “First the morning room, then I have no doubt the library, and then the small dining room, and before I know it there will not be a single cold, sad, grand room left for me to brood in.”

“Good,” said Pride. “Your reputation is nonsense anyway. You are not forbidding at all. You only look forbidding, which is a very different thing, and I worked it out within about a minute of meeting you in the dark. When you offered to charge me for laundering your waistcoat — a truly forbidding man does not make jokes to frighten girls out of weeping. He simply lets them weep and is annoyed. You made a joke because you saw I was distressed and wished to distract me from it, and you disguised the kindness as dryness because you have spent your whole life disguising your kindnesses as dryness, because somewhere along the way someone taught you it was not safe to be seen to be kind. I have not worked out who yet, or why. But I will. We are finding out, after all. And that is the thing I am finding out about you, Your Grace, one cold room at a time — that you are the warmest man I have ever met, hidden inside the coldest one. The whole forbidding Duke of Jarnis is a costume you put on so long ago you have forgotten you are wearing it. I intend to take it off you. Consider yourself warned.”

He learned her history in pieces over that courtship, the way one learns the history of a person one is coming to love — not in a single telling, but in fragments, dropped and gathered until a whole shape emerges. She had been the only child of a country parson of small means and large heart. Her mother had been the daughter of a gentleman who had married the parson for love against her family’s wishes, and never once regretted it. Pride had grown up in a small, warm, shabby house full of books and music and laughter and very little money, and had been happy in a way she had not fully understood was rare until it was taken from her — for her mother had died when she was seventeen, and her father two years later, and Pride had been left at nineteen an orphan, with no fortune and no near relations save a wealthy uncle and aunt who took her in out of duty and made her understand, every day, that duty was all it was.

“I will not paint them worse than they were,” she told him, when he asked. “I have too much respect for the truth. They fed me and clothed me and gave me a season, and expected in exchange that I would be grateful and quiet and marry the first respectable man who offered, so that I might be got off their hands. That was the whole of their kindness — a roof, a season, and the clear understanding that I was a problem to be solved, and the solution was a husband, any husband, as quickly as could be managed.”

She looked at the fire.

“And so I met Renwick, who was respectable and handsome and paid me attention, and my aunt urged the match with an enthusiasm that had nothing to do with my happiness and everything to do with the prospect of my removal. And I very nearly took him. That is the thing I have not told you. I nearly married Aldous Renwick — not because I loved him. I did not. I liked him, which is a different and lesser thing — but because I was nineteen and orphaned and poor and tired of being a problem, and he was a solution, and everyone I depended on wanted me to take the solution and be grateful. I nearly did it. And then I found him on his knees before my cousin, with my own proposal in his mouth. And it woke me like cold water. It showed me exactly what I had nearly done — married a man who found me interchangeable with the next girl. Sold myself into a loveless bargain to stop being a burden, exactly as my mother’s family had tried to sell her, before she married my father for love instead. And I thought, standing in that conservatory, watching him propose to my cousin — I will not. I would rather be a problem forever than marry without love the way the whole world is telling me to. My mother married for love against everyone’s wishes and was happy in a shabby house for twenty years. I would rather have twenty years in a shabby house than fifty in a grand one with a man who could not tell me from my cousin. And I turned, and I fled, and I ran into a dark room. Into you.”

The Duke of Jarnis was quiet a moment. “So when you tried to give back my rescue that first night,” he said slowly, “and when you offered to cry off and walk away from the dukedom with nothing, it was not a strategy, or a noble gesture performed for effect. It was simply the same thing you did in the conservatory. It was you refusing, again, to be part of a loveless bargain — even a magnificent one. You would no more have married me for the dukedom than you would have married Renwick for the escape. It is the same refusal. It is the deepest thing in you.”

“It is the deepest thing in me,” Pride agreed. “I grew up hearing how my mother’s family tried to sell her, and failed, because she chose love and was proved right by twenty happy years. And I watched my aunt try to sell me, and I nearly let her, and I was saved only by a man’s faithlessness showing me the pit before I fell in. I made a vow, fleeing that conservatory — not a vow to catch a duke, I did not know you existed — a vow to myself that I would never, whatever it cost me, marry without love. Never be interchangeable. Never be a solution to someone’s problem, a bargain in someone’s ledger. So you see, Your Grace, the very thing the world whispers about me — that I schemed to catch a dukedom — is the precise opposite of the truth. Which is that I would sooner die poor than marry for anything but love. They have me exactly backward. They always do. It is the one comfort in being slandered — the slander is so often the exact opposite of the truth. The thing you are accused of being is the very thing you have most refused to be. I am not a schemer who caught a duke. I am a girl who refused to sell herself twice, and was given, for the refusing, the one thing selling herself could never have bought — a man she loves, who loves her, in a warm house for fifty years, if we are lucky. The world will never understand it. It does not need to. You understand it. That is enough. That is everything.”

She found out who had taught him in the end, though it took her the better part of two months — and he told her only because she asked him plainly, on an afternoon when the finding out had gone deep enough that plain asking was possible.

“You said someone taught you it was not safe to be kind,” she said. They were in the library now — she had colonized it, as he had predicted — and the rain was on the tall windows, and she had asked him gently why a man so warm should have built himself so cold. “Who was it? I have been trying to work it out for weeks, and I cannot, and I find I do not want to guess wrongly about a thing that matters so much. So I am asking instead. Who taught you?”