SHE WORE NO JEWELS TO THE BALL—UNAWARE EVERY NOBLEMAN THERE HAD COME FOR HER

Chapter 9

He came to call three days later.

She received him in her parlor, with Mrs. Godwin present in the corner with her novel. The Duke sat in the chair across from Clara. He looked at the room carefully — the small fire, the bookshelf, the rosemary plant on the windowsill.

“This suits you,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “I think it does.”

He came to call every week after that. Sometimes they walked in the garden square. Sometimes they sat in the parlor and talked. He told her about his estate in Derbyshire, and the tenants who had been with his family for three generations, and the library that had not been properly catalogued since his grandfather’s time. She told him about her father’s study in Wiltshire, and the way he had read aloud to her on winter evenings, and the pony she had learned to ride on.

She did not ask him why he kept coming. She was afraid of the answer. She was more afraid that the answer would be duty, and she was beginning to realize that she wanted it to be something else.

In the sixth week, he came on a Thursday afternoon. Mrs. Godwin was at the window with her novel. The Duke sat across from Clara, and he did not pick up his tea.

“Clara,” he said.

She looked at him. His face was serious.

“I told you I would not ask until you had time to be your own woman. I have kept my word. But I have been thinking, and I find that I have not been thinking about anything else.”

He reached into his coat and brought out a small box. He did not open it. He held it in his hands.

“I have been coming to see you for nine weeks. I have watched you build a life from nothing. I have watched you refuse to be bitter. I have watched you sit in a room without hiding, without counting the windows, because you are not afraid anymore. I do not think I fell in love with you at the ball. I think I fell in love with you the night you stood up from that dinner table with your head high and walked out of the room. And I have been falling ever since.”

He opened the box. Inside was a ring — a single pearl, set in silver, simple and quiet.

“This was my mother’s,” he said. “She would have liked you. She did not like many people.”

Clara put her hand over her mouth. She could feel the tears coming — the tears she had not cried in five years.

“I am not asking you to marry me because I owe your father. I am asking you to marry me because I cannot imagine a future that does not have you in it. I am asking you because you are the bravest woman I have ever met, and because I want to spend the rest of my life watching you be free.”

He paused.

“Clara Ashworth, will you marry me?”

She looked at the ring. She looked at his face. She looked at the small white scar on his thumb — the hand he had held out to her in the ballroom, bare, waiting.

She had been afraid to believe in things for so long. She had been afraid to hope. She had learned to expect nothing, to want nothing, to count the window panes until the hours passed.

But she was not in that ballroom anymore. She was in her own house, in her own life, and he was looking at her as if she were the only person in the world.

“Yes,” she said.

She reached for his hand, and he held it, warm and steady, and she did not count the windows. She did not need to anymore.