Every Lady Tried to Impress the Duke—Only One Asked, “Are You Tired?”

Chapter 12

The Brampton assembly had been held in the same ballroom for eighty years, and the ballroom had opinions about it.

The plaster cherubs on the ceiling had watched a hundred county courtships; the great chandelier had been lit for weddings and elections and one famously contested waltz. When the Duke of Marnfeld entered on the arm of a woman from Brackley in a pale blue dress, the entire room performed the particular motion of a pond when a large stone lands in the middle of it: a widening ripple of silence, a convergence of looks, a general rearrangement of faces into politeness.

Frederick Ashcombe was the center of the first ripple.

He had placed himself, with tactical genius, near the orchestra, where the light was best and the view of the doors unobstructed. He bowed as Eleanor passed. “Miss Linden,” he said, in the carrying tone of a man who wishes to be observed being gracious. “How delightful to see you again so soon. I had not thought to find you dancing.”

“Mr. Ashcombe.” Eleanor kept her voice level and did not slow. “I had not thought to find you anywhere I was.”

A titter ran through the nearest circle of mothers. Frederick’s smile tightened by a fraction, which was the most genuine expression she had seen on his face in three years.

From her post at the refreshment table, Lady Amara watched the exchange with the satisfaction of a spectator whose plot had moved in from the cold. She had not come to Brampton for the dancing. She had come to see whether the winter had made the duke regret his eccentricity, and to ensure—quietly, through a word here and a sigh there—that the county remembered the story of the girl who had been discarded before.

By the second dance, it had moved from a glance to a whisper.

“The Linden girl—yes, the one in blue—I have it on the best authority that she was engaged to Mr. Ashcombe and he gave her back her ring within the month. The family lost everything—canal shares, I believe—and she has been angling for a great house ever since. One cannot blame her, poor thing, but one does wonder what she has told the duke…”

Eleanor heard it. She had spent two years hearing variants of the same sentence in the same county, and she had developed, over those years, a particular discipline: she did not defend herself, because defense was admission; she did not explain, because explanation was a plea; and she went on dancing, because leaving the floor was surrender.

She danced with the vicar’s son, and an elderly baronet, and a silent farmer who trod with painful accuracy on her toes. She danced with everyone except the two men who mattered, and all the while she kept one small, fierce piece of her attention on the duke—who had been standing at the edge of the floor with the frozen courtesy of a man who had heard the whispers, and had not once looked toward Ashcombe, and had not once come to her side.

He hears it, she thought, and the thought cost her more than the whispers. He is hearing it, and he is standing still, and I do not know what he is thinking. Oh, I know what he is supposed to think. I have been rehearsing this moment since December. But I do not know him well enough to know which of us he will believe, and that is the whole of the difference. That is the entire difference between this winter and every winter before it.

The violins slid into a waltz.

Marcus crossed the floor.

He did it without hurry and without hesitation, the way a man crosses a room when he has stopped weighing the cost of the crossing. He reached Eleanor, who had been left momentarily alone by the retreat of the farmer, and he bowed, and he said—loudly, deliberately, in the carrying voice of a man who has decided to be heard:

“Miss Linden. I wonder whether you would do me the honor.”

Every whisper in the room stopped, because a room cannot whisper properly while it watches.

Eleanor looked up at him. The candlelight made his face merry and grave at once.

“You have heard what they are saying,” she said quietly, so that only he could hear.

“I have heard lies,” he said, just as quietly, “being told about a woman I am courting. I have heard them for half an hour now.” He held out his hand. “I do not intend to stand at the edge of a dance floor and let her listen to them alone.”

“You do not know the truth of it,” she said. “You have only my account.”

“I have your account.” His hand did not move. “I have four months of your conduct, and your laughter, and your refusal to be purchased, and your honesty about the one wound I know of—and I have asked you, Eleanor, to walk onto a bridge with me, and you have been walking all winter. Am I to stand here, over a whisper, and watch you doubt the soundness of the beams? Dance with me.”

She took his hand.

The floor cleared around them with the particular respect owing to a duke’s waltz, and they danced—not with the practiced brilliance of the London ballrooms, but with the simple, unearned ease of two people who had learned each other’s tempo in a small front room in Brackley, where the rules of the world did not apply.

“Frederick Ashcombe was my betrothed,” she said, into the space above his shoulder, so that only he could hear. “He gave me back my ring when my father’s fortunes failed. I have not seen him since until today. That is the whole of the truth, and it is the truth I have been trying not to tell you, because it sounded like a story, and I have hated this story for two years.”

“Eleanor.”

“Please, let me finish. There is a difference between what is owed to you and what is owed to the world, and I have been”—she felt her voice waver and pinned it down—”I have been afraid that if I told you about him, you would see the version of me that he describes. The version that keeps a box for the poor and angles for great houses.”

“A woman cannot angle for a great house without having been bought,” Marcus said. “I know which version of you I have been courting. I was there for the entire winter.”

They danced a full circuit in silence, and the silence was the best conversation they had had yet.

“You should know,” he said at last, “that I have known about the whisperings for a fortnight. My land agent heard them first at the harvest supper. The whole county has been performing this particular country dance for weeks, and I have been refusing to join it, because I have been waiting to see whether you would tell me yourself.” He smiled, and the smile was entirely without censure. “You tell me now, at a waltz, in the middle of a ballroom, with half the county hanging on our silence. You have excellent instinct for ceremony, Miss Linden.”

“I have excellent instinct for men who wait,” she said.

He held her gaze over the top of the waltz, and something in her unstitched and re-sewed itself in a new pattern.

From the edge of the floor, Frederick Ashcombe watched them, and reached, in the pocket of his waistcoat, for the velvet box in which—as a contingency, as a hedge, as the last card of a player who had believed himself unbeatable at his own table—he had carried, all evening, a ring.