"I had asked for an heir," he said unsteadily, "to outlive me. I find I would rather, after all, simply live with you for as many years as I am given, and I am told now there may be a great many."
He took both her hands in his, his mother's ring bright between them.
"Stay with me, Marguerite. Not because I am dying—I find I've given up dying, it does not suit me—but because I cannot now imagine a single morning worth waking to that does not have your face in it. I married you to get an heir and save my house. I will keep you because you gave me back my life, and I mean to spend the whole of that life proving to you that the bargain was the best I ever struck."
She was weeping now and laughing through it, and she let him draw her in against the worn velvet of his coat. Outside the library window, the snow ran in rivulets off the eaves, and the snowdrops opened their white heads to the sun, and the long winter of the Duke of Wintersea was over at last.
The years did come, as the physicians had grudgingly allowed.
It was more than a twelvemonth later, on a soft green morning when the windows of the library stood open to the spring for the first time in living memory, that the Duke of Wintersea sat in his mother's chair by the cold and unnecessary hearth with his wife beside him, and a small, fierce grip closed tight about one of his fingers, holding fast to the plain old gold of his mother's ring as though it had no intention of ever letting go.
He had asked once in his despair for an heir to come after he was gone. He had been given instead a reason to stay, and a small new pair of eyes, gray as his wife's and steady, to watch him stay.
"You drove a hard bargain, Duchess," he murmured, his eyes not leaving the tiny hand wrapped round his own.
"No," said Marguerite, leaning her head against his shoulder in the spring light, "an honest one. They are so often mistaken for the same thing."