She Ran From Her Unfaithful Fiancé Into a Dark Room—Unaware England’s Most Feared Duke Was Inside, Waiting in the Shadows.

Chapter 5

She did not ask permission.

That, the Duke reflected, was the thing about Pride Ambrose that would, in the end, change everything about Jarnis — she never asked permission. She acted on the theory that a room one was obliged to sit in during one’s courtship ought not to be a mausoleum, and so, without a word to anyone, she had the great gilt chairs pushed back, a small comfortable sofa dragged in from some abandoned wing, the books set out where hands could reach them, the fire kept properly lit. She brought in flowers. Actual flowers, from the neglected glasshouses at the far edge of the estate, where the head gardener had been quietly keeping things alive out of sheer stubbornness for years.

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 argued and laughed.

“You are colonizing my house one room at a time,” he observed one afternoon, watching her tuck her feet up on the sofa she had installed entirely at home. “First the morning room, then 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. 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.”

She looked at him across the room, and there was nothing dry about her voice now.

“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.” She smiled. “I intend to take it off you. Consider yourself warned.”

The Duke of Jarnis did not answer. He found, rather to his astonishment, that he could not answer. He sat in his newly warm room, in the middle of his own house, and discovered that his eyes were stinging in a way they had not stung since he was a boy of seven, and he had to look away into the fire for a long moment to compose himself.

He did not know yet — he would not know for weeks — that this was the first hinge of his whole life turning.

It was Foster who finally showed her the rose.

The head gardener was a taciturn old man, and Pride had found him one gray afternoon wandering the ruins of the great succession houses, his coat patched, his face carved by years of tending things no one would ever see. He had not been thanked or noticed by anyone since the old duke’s mother died, and he did not quite know what to make of the young lady who had descended upon him, without warning, in the middle of his silent afternoon.

She asked about the plants. She asked their names. She asked about the ones that had died and the ones that had lived.

And then, at the far end of the tumbledown glasshouse, she stopped.

A single white rose.

It stood in a pot of cracked earthenware, in a corner of the ruined house where the roof had fallen in and the light came down in long white shafts. It had been nursed, Pride could see at once, through a decade of neglect — fed by hand, watered by hand, protected from the cold by a man who had refused to let it die even when every other thing around it had gone to ruin.

She knelt.

She touched its leaves.

And she wept.

The Duke of Jarnis, who had come looking for her, stood in the doorway of the glasshouse and watched her weep over a flower — this blunt, unmanageable, penniless girl who had told him his house was sad and his reputation nonsense and his warmth a costume — and he understood, with a clarity that went through him like a blade, that he had been wrong about her.

She was not the one being saved.

She was the one who had come to save everything.

Old Foster stood beside him, blinking, and when he spoke at last his voice was rough with years of disuse.

“She kept herself alive through ten years of cold,” the old man said, “with no one to see her and no reason to go on, out of nothing but stubbornness. And now someone’s finally come and seen her, and loved her.” He looked at the kneeling girl in the ruined glasshouse, and his weather-beaten face worked strangely. “It’ll bloom now, Your Grace. You mark my words. It’ll bloom.”