"Because this room is the first place I have ever been safe. Because you are my wife, and if you and I are to share a life, it will be a life of truth between us, whatever the world demands outside that door. The mask is for them, never for you. Not here. Not now."
He remained on his knees, waiting. The candles guttered. Alina felt the weight of the choice settling over her: the chance to walk out of this room in cold silence, or to reach across the chasm he had opened and see what lay on the other side.
She reached.
Her fingers touched his jaw, turning his face up to hers. His eyes, those guarded gray eyes, were wet with a vulnerability she had not imagined him capable of. She bent her head and pressed her lips to his forehead, a benediction and a question in one.
His breath shuddered out. His hands came up to frame her face with a gentleness that undid her.
"Stay," she said. "And tomorrow you begin to teach me who you truly are."
The owl called again in the darkness. The clock ticked. And the Duke of Ashworth rose to meet his wife, not as a performer, but as a man beginning at last to be known.
Part Five
The household at Ashworth Hall found itself in a state of quiet bewilderment. Mrs. Phelps, the housekeeper, reported to the butler that the Duke had asked for a breakfast tray to be sent to the Duchess's room.
"And not a servant's tray, Mr. Grimes, but the silver service with the roses. And he specified that the eggs should be coddled, not poached, because he recalled that she prefers them so."
The butler, a man who had served the family for thirty years, merely raised an eyebrow and ordered the kitchen to comply.
Thus began a new secret rhythm to the great house. In the private quarters, Alexander Ashworth was transformed. He sought Alina's company with an eagerness that bordered on hunger. Not the hunger of the flesh, though that was present too, but the hunger of a man starved for honest connection.
They breakfasted together in the morning room, the doors closed against the servants, and talked of everything: his plans for draining the lower fields, her opinions on the novels of Miss Austen, the tangled politics of the House of Lords, the way the morning light fell on the lake.
He listened when she spoke, truly listened. His attention was a focused thing that made her feel, for the first time in her life, that her thoughts mattered.
They walked the parkland in the afternoons, his arm linked through hers, and he told her about Beatrice, the full story at last. A young lord, handsome and unscrupulous, had compromised Beatrice at a house party two years earlier. He held letters that could ruin her, and he used them to bleed the Ashworth fortune in exchange for silence.
Alexander had taken on the foppish persona to distract society, to make himself so gaudy a spectacle that no one thought to look closely at his quiet, withdrawn sister.
"I thought if I became the joke, she could become invisible," he said, his gaze on the gray water of the lake. "It worked. The blackmailer has been paid again and again, but she has been safe."
Alina squeezed his arm. "The blackmailer cannot be allowed to continue."
"I know. I am working toward a resolution, but until then, the mask must hold whenever we are among company."
That resolution was tested sooner than Alina expected. A letter arrived, borne by a liveried messenger. The Marchioness of Felbridge, that indefatigable collector of other people's secrets, was in the county and begged the indulgence of calling upon the newlyweds.
She brought with her a small party, including Lady Gresham and the Honorable Mr. Fitch, a waspish gossip who wrote scurrilous verses about his betters.
Alexander read the letter and turned to Alina with an expression of grim resignation. "The performance must begin."
She nodded, though something in her recoiled.
When the guests arrived, the Duke was waiting in the drawing room in a coat of startling yellow, a glass of claret already in hand, his laugh ringing off the ceilings. He greeted the Marchioness with a kiss on both cheeks and a joke about the trials of matrimonial confinement.
Alina, entering behind him in a gown of subdued lavender, saw the flicker of satisfaction in Lady Felbridge's eyes and understood that she was being cataloged as yet another piece of evidence in the story of the Gay Duke's farcical marriage.
The afternoon was an ordeal. Alexander flirted with Lady Gresham, debated the cut of coats with Mr. Fitch, and made arch remarks about the tedium of country life. Alina played the silent, dignified Duchess, offering tea and correct answers to polite questions, ignoring the pitying glances.
She felt the mask settle over her own features as well, a mask of composure, which was its own form of performance.
After the guests departed, Alexander sought her in her sitting room. His coat was already discarded, his face drawn.
"I am sorry."
"That was necessary," she said. "I understand."