The Duke of Wintersea stared at her.
In all the bleak machinery of the past months—the physicians with their long faces, the lawyers with their deeds, the careful arithmetic of his own extinction—no one had spoken to him as though he were a man who might be frightened. They had spoken to him as a title, an estate, a problem to be settled before it spoiled. He had encouraged it. It had been easier to be a problem than a man.
And now this impoverished girl in a three-year-old cloak had looked through all of it in the space of a quarter hour and named the one thing he had told no one: the cold animal fear that woke him at 3:00 in the morning and sat on his chest until dawn. And she had offered, as a condition of marriage, not to leave him alone with it.
"You drive a hard bargain, Miss Ellery," he said at last, and his voice was not quite steady.
"No," she said, "I drive an honest one. They are often mistaken for the same thing."
They were married in the village church three weeks later, in the dead of January, with snow on the gravestones and the Duke's tenants crowded into the pews to see the dying lord take a bride.
He stood at the altar, gaunt and gray-faced, and when the parson asked the question, he answered it in a clear, cold voice that carried to the back of the church. And when he took her hand to set the ring upon it—his mother's ring, a plain band of old gold he had not thought to give anyone—he felt her fingers steady beneath his own and was ashamed of how much he wanted them there.
They rode back to the great house through the falling snow in the closed carriage, and he watched her looking out at the white fields with a stillness that was not fear and not sorrow, but something he could not name. And when he asked her awkwardly whether she had any regret of what she had done, she turned from the window and considered him in the failing light.
"I have left a cold house full of people I love and could not feed," she said, "for a cold house full of a man I do not yet know. I cannot call that regret. I have only traded one winter for another, and this one at least has a library."