She Was Offered to the Highest Bidder to Settle Her Father’s Debt — Then the Ruthless Duke Laid Ten Thousand Pounds on the Table and Did the One Thing No One in That Room Had Imagined

PART 2

“My condition,” he said, “is that the lady is not for sale, was never for sale, and that any man here who repeats otherwise will answer to me for it.”

He drew a folded paper from his coat.

“The ten thousand is not a bid. It is the discharge of the Carr debt in full — four thousand to the estate’s creditors, and the remainder settled upon Miss Carr herself, to her sole use, answerable to no husband, no guardian, and no court. My man of business has drawn it. It wants only my signature.”

He looked without warmth at Sir Cassius.

“Which I will give at your writing desk now, before witnesses, so that not one of these gentlemen may pretend afterward that he misheard me.”

The silence that followed had a texture. Sabine could hear the candles hissing, a moth somewhere batting the glass of a shade, and far off across the fields the low grumble of summer thunder that had been threatening all week and never come.

“You cannot mean to simply give—” Sir Cassius’s pleasant face had come apart at last.

“I mean exactly that. It is the single unthinkable thing that could be done in this room, and I find I have a taste for it.” His voice dropped, and only Sabine, standing nearest, caught the edge beneath it. “You summoned buyers, Vain. You did not reckon on a man who would rather ruin your market than shop in it.”

Lord Merik heaved himself upright, purple. “This is an outrage. To make fools of us—”

“You made fools of yourselves,” the Duke said, “the moment you sat down to it. I merely arrived.”

He glanced around them, unhurried, and one by one they found somewhere else to look. The carpet. The cold grate. Their own hands. Sir Rodrik Ames had gone the colour of tallow.

“Go home, gentlemen. There is nothing to be had here. There never was.”

They went. That was the part Sabine would remember afterward, lying awake in the short hot dark before dawn — how quickly seven grown men who had bargained over her found their hats and their carriages and were gone into the blue night, muttering, not one of them meeting her eye.

Sir Cassius rounded on her the instant the last carriage cleared the gate.

“You knew him.”

“I have never spoken to him in my life.”

“You arranged this. You wrote to him — you, or that viper of a companion of yours.”

“I did not know his name until he stood in your doorway,” Sabine said, and it was the plain truth, and she watched it fail to reach her uncle at all.

Fear had got into Sir Cassius now — the particular fear of a man who has counted money that has just walked out of his hands — and fear made him careless of the mask he usually wore so well.

“Four thousand would have cleared me,” he said, low and vicious. “Cleared me, do you understand? And instead he settles it on you. A girl who cannot keep a still tongue in a room full of her betters.” He laughed, and there was nothing in it. “Do you imagine that is charity? Do you imagine a man like Ravensmore gives away six thousand pounds for the pleasure of a fine gesture? No. He wants something. And when he names it, you will wish to God you had taken Merik and his gout. Because Merik, at least, I understood.”

Across the room the Duke had seated himself at the writing desk as though the house were his own, drawn the candle nearer, and begun to read the paper over with a slow attention that suggested he trusted no man’s drafting but his own. He did not appear to be listening.

Sabine was quite certain that he heard every word.

“Sign it, Vain,” he said without looking up, “or don’t, and I will settle the debt with your creditors directly, and let them explain to you why. It makes no difference to me. It makes a great deal to you.”

Sir Cassius snatched the pen. For a long moment he stood over the paper, the muscles working in his jaw, and Sabine understood that he was doing sums — measuring his rage against his ruin, and finding, as such men always did, that his own skin weighed more than his pride.

He signed.

The Duke set his own signature beneath her uncle’s — his hand broad and sure, the pen small in it — shook the sand over the wet ink, and sat back. And only then, with the thing done and irreversible, did he turn in the chair and look at her again.

“You are not what I was told to expect,” he said.

“I cannot think what you were told,” Sabine answered, “since until an hour ago I did not know you existed to be told anything by.”

“No.” Something moved at the corner of his hard mouth and was gone. “I imagine you did not.”

He rose, gathered the paper, and crossed to her — and held it out. Not to Sir Cassius. Not to the empty air. To her, into her own two hands.

“This is yours. Read it when you are able. It says what I said. Six thousand pounds in trust in your name that no man may touch but you. Not your uncle. Not a husband, should you ever be fool enough to take one.” He paused. “Not I.”

The paper was warm from the candle and from his coat. The ink was not yet fully dry. It smudged faintly under her thumb, and she read three lines of the close clerk’s hand — settled solely and absolutely upon Miss Sabine Carr, spinster of Car Court — before the word swam, and she had to stop.

“Why?”

It came out barer than she intended. She was Sabine Carr, who had stood through an auction of her own person without a tear, and she heard her voice do the one thing she had not permitted it to do all evening, and she hated the crack in it.

“Why would you do this? Men like you do not do this. My uncle is right about that much. You have not thrown six thousand pounds into a stranger’s lap to be admired. So tell me the price, your grace, and let me decide tonight whether I can pay it — because I am very tired of being spent by other people while they discuss the terms over my head.”

The Duke looked at her for a long moment.

Outside, the thunder that had circled the county for days finally broke its promise.