She Sat on a Stranger’s Lap to Hide From Her Former Love — Then Two Hundred Guests Fell Silent When Charlotte Realized the Man Beneath Her Was the Feared Duke Hosting the Ball.

PART 6

The six weeks were not idle — that was the worst of it. He did four things, and every one was a way of not doing the thing that mattered. He had two hundred pounds set aside in a drawer in the second week with no notion how it might reach a companion in Bath without insulting her, and it sat there while he looked at it perhaps forty times. He wrote to Lady Basset in the third week, four correct lines asking after her health; she answered in four correct lines; neither of them mentioned Charlotte Ray, and he read the reply nine times looking for something that was not there.

In the fifth week he went so far as to order his horses for Bath, and countermanded it in his own stable yard. That was the one he could never afterward get past. He stood there at eight in the morning and worked out, in about a minute and a half, that he could be in Bath in three days, could tell her the whole truth in a front parlor, could come home again and say nothing to his own county — and it would work. She would have an apology, and the truth, and possibly an offer, and the county would go on believing precisely what it already believed, and his cousin Miles would never hear the word fitness spoken over him.

He stood in that yard and understood, with total clarity, that he was arranging to be forgiven privately while she went on paying publicly — and he sent the horses back, and did not go.

I have found out this morning what I actually am, he wrote in his own book that night, a thing he did perhaps four times a year and showed to no one. I would have gone to Bath this week if the going could have been the whole of it. What I will not do is stand up in a room of forty men. And that is not, in truth, about the trust — I have been telling myself it is the trust for five weeks, and it is perhaps a third true. It is that I have been the cold Duke of Renford for six years, and I have grown used to it, and a man who is cold at a distance is admired and never has to be looked at closely — and she is looked at, by everyone, every day, and has said nothing.

Miles came about the drainage on the low ground — genuine business, an hour of it, entirely civil — and at the end, hat in hand, said, “Gabriel. The Ray business.”

“There is no Ray business.”

“There is a great deal of Ray business, and I have heard of it in four houses, and I have not raised it with you for six weeks, which I think you will admit is more than most of your acquaintance has managed.” Miles turned his hat over in his hands. “I am not asking what happened; it is not mine, and I do not want it. I am telling you that Lady Basset put that woman out within the week, that she is in Bath, that the whole county knows it, and that you have written to no one about it. And I am telling you what is being said of you now is not that you are a rake. It is that you are cold — which has been said for six years, which I have never believed, and which is about to become the settled opinion of this county within another month, if you do nothing.”

Gabriel Hail sat behind his own desk and said, without any warning to himself, “My leg had gone.”

Miles stopped, hat in his hands. “I beg your pardon.”

“At the ball. My leg had gone, and I could not stand, and my own man was thirty feet off, coming to take me into supper in front of two hundred people. That woman sat down on my lap because she was getting away from another man entirely — and then she looked at my hand and knew, inside four seconds, exactly what it was. She stayed forty minutes. She told me where to put my hand so it should look like what everyone assumed it was. She told me how to rise so nobody would watch me struggle. And she was ruined by breakfast, and she is in Bath now at twenty pounds a year — and I have known since the Monday exactly what I owe her, and I have not paid one penny of it. Because the day I say this aloud, you go back to Fitzhugh with it, and I spend the rest of my life managed by four men in an office.”

The room went very quiet. Miles set his hat down on a chair and sat beside it.

“How long?”

“Salamanca. A scarring at the hip. It comes four times a year, lasts a quarter of an hour or an afternoon, and there is nothing to be done, and I have known it for six years. It has been getting worse for two. Four people know — my man, my agent, a physician in Bath, and now a companion at twenty pounds a year. And you.”

Miles was quiet a long moment. “Why in God’s name did you not tell me two years ago?”

“Because you went to Fitzhugh.”

“I went to Fitzhugh because you told me nothing. I came home from India and found my cousin refusing every appointment in the county, leaving dinners at nine, giving no reason to anybody — I did what any man would do. I asked, twice, whether the estate was in order, and told you I was asking both times, and you sat there and let me. Four words, Gabriel, at any point in eighteen months, and I should have shut the whole thing down inside a week. Do you know what I actually feared? That you were drinking, or that money was gone. I have lain awake over it and never said so to anyone, and gone on being civil to you at dinner and asking about drainage.”