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 5

The Duke was quiet a long while, watching the rain. And then he told her.

“My father,” he said, “was the coldest man I have ever known, and he made it his particular project to freeze the warmth out of me, because he believed sincerely, as a matter of principle, that warmth was weakness, and that a duke who felt things — and worse, who showed that he felt things — was a duke who could be managed, manipulated, made a fool of. He had a saying: ‘A soft heart is an open gate, and an open gate is how the enemy comes in.’ He said it to me a thousand times from the time I was very small, and he set himself to close my gate, by a hundred small cruelties and a thousand cold examples, to teach me that to care for anything was to hand someone a weapon against you.

“When my dog died, when I was seven, and I wept, he did not comfort me. He told me I had made an error — that I had let myself love a thing that could be taken from me — and that the lesson of the grief was not that death is sad, but that love is a mistake. When my mother died, I was twelve. He did not grieve, or let me grieve. He told me she had been a weakness in his life, a thing he had permitted himself against his better judgment, and that her death was, if anything, a simplification. He said that to a twelve-year-old boy about his own dead mother.

“And I believed him, Pride. That is the thing I want you to understand. For most of my life, I believed him. I built the gate exactly as he taught me to build it. I closed myself against everything and everyone, and I called it strength, and I became the cold, forbidding Duke of Jarnis — feared and solitary and safe — and I thought I was the wise one. The one who had learned the lesson. The one no one could hurt, because I had made certain there was nothing left in me soft enough to wound.”

“Oh, Leo,” Pride said softly.

“There is more,” he said, “and it is worse, because it is the part where I proved him right, or thought I had. When I was six-and-twenty, I forgot his lesson once. I met a woman, and I loved her, or thought I did, and I opened the gate. She was after the dukedom. I found it out too late — after I had opened everything, after I had let her all the way in. She did not even want me. She wanted the title, and she was prepared to endure me to have it, and she had said so, to a friend, laughing, in words I was not meant to hear, and did hear. And I closed the gate again that night, and I welded it shut, and I told myself that my father had been right all along — that I had let myself be soft, and love had proved a mistake exactly as he promised, and that the one time in my life I opened the gate, the enemy had walked straight in. I have kept it welded shut for fourteen years.” He turned from the rain and looked at her. “Until a young woman burst through the door of a dark room I was hiding in and told a total stranger the truth of her own humiliation, and then tried to give back the rescue I offered because she feared it cost me too much. And something in the weld cracked. I do not know how else to describe it. Fourteen years shut, and a girl I had known a quarter of an hour reached through the crack without even trying, and I have been unable to weld it up again since — though I have told myself a dozen times that I should. That it is not safe. That my father’s voice is surely right, and yours is surely a trap like the last one.” He drew a breath. “So there is your answer, Pride. My father taught me the gate, and a woman I loved at six-and-twenty taught me to weld it, and I have spent fourteen years believing them both, and now I do not know what to believe — because you do not fit the lesson. You are penniless, and yet you tried to refuse the very thing another woman would have schemed a lifetime to obtain. You break the whole theory, and a man whose entire understanding of the world is breaking is a frightened man, Pride, however cold he looks. I am telling you this so that you understand — when I am difficult, when I go cold, when I retreat, it is not you. It is a boy of seven being told his grief is a mistake. And a boy of twelve being told his mother was a weakness. And a man of six-and-twenty hearing a woman laugh about enduring him for his title. It is fourteen years of a welded gate, and you are standing at the crack in it, and I want, more than I have wanted anything in my life, to open it — and I am more afraid of that than I have ever been of anything, because the last time I opened it, it nearly destroyed me, and my father’s voice will not stop telling me it will destroy me again.”

Pride Ambrose crossed the library, and knelt down by his chair, and took both his cold hands in her warm ones, and looked up into the forbidding face she had long since stopped finding forbidding at all.

“Your father was wrong,” she said. “About all of it. The dog, and your mother, and the gate, and every cold thing he ever taught you. He was not wise, Leo. He was afraid — more afraid than you have ever been — so afraid of being hurt that he chose to feel nothing at all, and called his cowardice strength, and set about making his son as frightened as himself. Because misery wants company, and a frozen man cannot bear to see warmth in anyone, least of all his own child. That is not strength. It is the deepest weakness there is — the refusal to risk. And the woman at six-and-twenty — she was real, and her cruelty was real, and I am so sorry she taught you to weld what your father taught you to build. But one greedy woman does not prove a law of nature, Leo, any more than one faithless suitor proves that all men are Aldous Renwick. It proves only that there are greedy women and faithless men in the world, which we both already knew, and that we had the misfortune to be hurt by two of them. It does not prove the gate should be welded shut. It proves only that you should choose more carefully than you did at six-and-twenty who you open it to.”

She pressed his hands.

“I am not asking you to fling it wide today. I would not. It is welded fourteen years; these things take time. I am asking only that you not weld the crack back up. Leave it. Leave the crack, and let me stand at it, and let us find out slowly — the way we agreed — whether the person on the other side of it is a thief like the last one, or whether she is only a penniless, blunt-spoken girl who thinks you are the warmest man she has ever met, and would very much like the chance to prove your father wrong. That is all. Leave the crack. I will do the rest, as gently as I can, for as long as it takes. I am in no hurry. I have found, rather to my surprise, that there is nowhere in the world I would rather be than kneeling on your cold library floor, holding your cold hands, watching a welded gate decide whether to open. Take your time, Leo. I am not going anywhere. That is the thing your father never learned, and the last woman never meant. Some people stay.”

The thawing of Jarnis became, over that courtship, a thing the whole household watched with a kind of wonder, for they had served the cold duke for years and had long since given up any hope that the great house would ever be anything but cold.

Pride thawed the servants first, without seeming to try. She learned their names — all of them, from the housekeeper to the boy who blacked the boots, which no one at Jarnis could remember a member of the family ever troubling to do. She thanked them, noticed them, asked after the footman whose mother was ill and the maid whose sweetheart had gone for a soldier, and treated the great silent staff of Jarnis not as furniture but as people — so that within a month there was, below stairs, a cautious, growing, disbelieving devotion to the young woman who was to be their duchess, and a corresponding thaw in the whole atmosphere of the house. For a household takes its temperature from the top, and the top had, for the first time in living memory, gone warm.

She thawed the gardens next. She had discovered the succession houses on one of her explorations — great glass houses, once famous, gone to ruin under a duke who never walked in them — and had descended upon the ancient head gardener, a taciturn old man named Foster, who had been quietly keeping a few things alive out of sheer stubbornness for years, without a soul to see them. She had wept, actually wept, at the sight of a white rose he had nursed through a decade of neglect. And old Foster, who had not been thanked or noticed by anyone since the old Duke’s mother died, had found in the young lady a fellow conspirator, and the two of them had set about, over that spring, the resurrection of the Jarnis gardens.

“You are thawing my entire estate,” the Duke told her one evening, “one servant and one rose bush at a time. Foster spoke to me at more length this morning than he has spoken to me in twenty years. He wished to tell me about the camellia. He was quite animated. I did not know Foster had it in him to be animated. I did not, if I am honest, know Foster’s name until you told it to me, which I am now deeply ashamed of. And that is the whole trouble with you, Pride. You make me ashamed of the man I have been — not by reproaching me, but simply by being, in front of me every day, the person I ought to have been all along.”

“You were the person you were taught to be,” Pride said. “There is no shame in that. There is only the question of whether you will go on being it now that you have seen it is a costume. And you are not going on being it, Leo. That is the thing I want you to see about yourself, because you are so busy being ashamed of the cold man that you have not noticed — you have stopped being him. You learned Foster’s name. You have started coming out to the gardens. You laughed at dinner three times this week, I counted. And yesterday, when the boot boy dropped the coal scuttle in the hall with a crash that would once have made the whole house cower, you did not go cold and terrible. You called out to ask if he was hurt. Do you know what the boy did? He nearly fainted. He has served here two years, and the Duke of Jarnis has never once, in his hearing, asked if a servant was hurt. You are changing, Leo. Not because I am changing you — no one can change another person, it cannot be done — but because you are letting the warm man out a little more each day, now that you have someone to stand at the crack in the gate and promise she will not use it as a weapon. That is not me changing you. That is you deciding to trust, and it is the bravest thing I have ever watched anyone do — precisely because it frightens you so — and I love you for it.”

She stopped. The word had come out unbidden into the warm evening room she had made of his cold one, and it hung there between them, and Pride Ambrose, who was never at a loss for words, found herself entirely at a loss.

The Duke of Jarnis had gone very still.

“Say that again,” he said quietly.