The Duke Rode Two Days Through Rain to Reach His Dying Aunt—Only to Find Her Well and Her Companion Defying His Every Command, Until One Look Across a Chessboard Made Her Fall for the Man She Could Never Have

PART 6 

He discovered she had been educated far above her station by a scholar father — the late Reverend Ward of a poor living in Somerset, a man of no fortune and enormous library, who, having no son, had taught his only daughter Latin and Greek and mathematics, and the habit of thinking for herself, and had then had the poor foresight to die of a fever when she was nineteen, and leave her with a great deal of learning, no money, and a world with absolutely no use for a clever poor woman except to make her someone’s companion and hope she had the sense to be grateful.

She was not grateful. That was the thing about her that he could not leave alone, worrying at it like a stone in a boot. Every other person in his life was grateful to him or afraid of him or wanted something from him, and usually all three. And here was a woman with nothing, entirely in his power, who could be turned onto the road with a word, and who nonetheless argued with him about Ovid at his own dinner table until his aunt wept with laughter and the footman forgot to serve.

“You are wrong,” he told her one evening in late June over the ruins of a syllabub. “And what is more, you know you are wrong. And what is worse, you are going to go on being wrong out of pure stubbornness, because you have never once in your life been permitted to lose an argument, and you have got out of the way of it.”

“I have never lost an argument,” said Oldwin, “because I have never yet been wrong.”

“You are wrong now.”

“Prove it.”

“I have proven it three times. You have simply declined to be convinced — which is a different thing, and a much less impressive one.” She leaned back, firelight in her hair, which had come a little loose from its pins — as it always did by evening, a few strands escaping to curl at her temple — and she regarded him with that infuriating spark. “Do you know, Your Grace? I begin to think you argue with me not to win, but to keep me at the table. It is the only explanation for a man of your intelligence defending a position this bad this long.”

The table went very quiet. Lady Honoria at the head of it developed a sudden and unconvincing interest in her wine glass.

Oldwin looked down the length of the table at Fay Ward. And for one dangerous heartbeat, the whole clever machinery of his composure simply stopped. Because she was right. And they both knew it. And she had said it aloud in a room with footmen in it, laughing as though it were only another point scored.

He kept her at the table. He arranged his evenings around the certainty of this — of her voice, her nerve, the way she looked at him as though he were a man and not a rank. He had not known he was doing it until she named it. And now that she had named it, he could not unknow it. And the not-knowing had been so much safer.

“You forget yourself, Miss Ward,” he said. It came out lower than he intended. It did not come out cold at all.

“Constantly,” she agreed. But she had gone still, too. The spark in her eyes had changed to something more careful, something aware. A faint color had come up in her plain cheeks. And she was not, he saw, quite so certain of herself as she had been a moment ago. “It is my chief failing. Your aunt despairs of me.”

“I do not despair of you in the least,” said Lady Honoria happily. “I have never been so entertained. Oldwin, your face. Pentworth, more wine for His Grace. He has had a shock.”

The moment broke. The table laughed. But he had seen it — the color, the awareness, the small betraying stillness. And Fay had seen that he had seen it. And something had passed between them down the length of the polished mahogany that neither of them had chosen, and neither of them could take back.

He lay awake that night. The ride was long since no excuse. And he made himself account for it plainly, as he accounted for everything, in cold columns of debit and credit.

He was the Duke of Danahern. He was seven-and-thirty. He was expected — by his family, by his county, by the whole weight of his name — to marry, and to marry well, which meant to marry money and blood in connection. And there was waiting in London, with the patient certainty of a settled thing, Lady Cordelia Ashworth — beautiful, cold, faultlessly bred, the daughter of a marquess. A woman who would run Danahern like a well-oiled clock and never once in forty years of marriage surprise him or contradict him or laugh at him across a table until the footmen forgot their duty.

It was the correct match. Everyone said so. He had, in a fashion, all but agreed to it. It was the Ashworth business he had ridden away from, and it was waiting for him still.

And here, in a north-facing house in Wiltshire, under his own roof, was a penniless clergyman’s daughter in a twice-turned gown who owned nothing in the world but her wits and her nerve — who could never be his duchess, who could never be anything to him that the world would permit. And he had spent the day, he realized, and the day before, and a week of days, ordering his hours around the sound of her voice.

It was impossible. It was worse than impossible. It was beneath him, or it was above him — he could not decide which, and the uncertainty was maddening.

He resolved, lying in the dark, that he would put a stop to it. He would be cold. He would be the duke she accused him of failing to be. He would restore the proper distance between a great house and its dependent. And he would go to London within the fortnight, settle the Ashworth business, and this whole strange, warm interlude would close over like water and leave no mark.

He resolved all this with great firmness at three in the morning.

At eight, he came down to breakfast. And she was there with her account book and her cold tea and the smudge of ink on her hand. And she looked up and said, “You look dreadful. You have been up all night deciding to be horrible to me. I can see it on your face. Do sit down and have some coffee first. You will be so much better at being horrible with coffee.”

And every resolution he had made in the dark went out of him at once, like breath.

He sat down. He had the coffee. He was not horrible to her at all. He was, in fact, so far from horrible that he stayed an hour past his usual time, arguing with her about a poet. And he did not go to London that fortnight, nor the next. And the Ashworth business went on waiting.

And the summer went on pressing down, warm and green, over Danahern. And the Duke of Danahern, who had never in his life lost an argument, began quietly — without admitting it even to himself — to lose the most important one he had ever had.

The one he was having every hour of every day with his own careful heart.