He should not have found that agreeable. He found it agreeable. In one afternoon, this niece who kept her aunt's house and read to her in the evenings had seen further into him than the whole of society had managed in 15 years, and had told him so to his face, without malice, and without wanting anything in return.
"Miss Callowell," he said, "I intend to call on your aunt."
"My aunt will be delighted. She adores a duke. She will spend the entire visit steering me toward you like a shepherd with one particularly stupid sheep." Beatrix smiled. "I only ask that you not encourage her. It is unkind to raise hopes one has no intention of fulfilling, and you have no intention of fulfilling them. You are curious about me because I am the first mouse in years that would not run into your trap. When the novelty wears thin, you will go back to your window and your surfeit. And I would rather my aunt not have furnished a trousseau in the meantime."
And with that, she inclined her head precisely as much as courtesy required and not 1 degree more, and went to see to her aunt's tea, leaving the Duke of Vernham standing alone by the long windows in the gold light, unaccountably, thoroughly disarmed.
He called the next week, and the week after that, and by the fourth visit, even he could no longer pretend it was novelty.
Lady Ashcombe was, as predicted, ecstatic. She received the Duke of Vernham as though the sun had condescended to visit her drawing room, and she deployed every stratagem in an old campaigner's arsenal to leave him alone with her niece: remembering urgent letters, discovering she had left her spectacles in the far conservatory, developing sudden and convenient fatigues.
Beatrix bore it all with unruffled good humor and undermined it at every turn—insisting on accompanying her aunt to find the spectacles, ringing for a footman to fetch the letters, and generally refusing to be maneuvered.
"You are making my aunt's life very difficult," Lucian observed one afternoon when Lady Ashcombe had retreated in defeat to take a nap.
"I am making it very interesting," Beatrix said. "She has not had this much sport in years. She will speak of your visits for a decade. I am doing her a great kindness by ensuring nothing comes of them. A decade of hope is worth far more to a woman of 70 than a fortnight of triumph followed by a lifetime of watching me be unhappy."
"You are very certain you would be unhappy."
"I am very certain that men who have never wanted for anything make poor husbands, because they have never learned to value a thing they had to wait for." She said it lightly, but she was watching him, and there was a question folded inside the observation.
Lucian did not answer it at once. He had come over these weeks to look forward to these afternoons with an intensity that alarmed him more than anything Beatrix had said the first day.
He, who had been bored for 15 years, was not bored in this house. She argued with him. She disagreed with his politics, corrected his Latin, mocked his waistcoats, and once memorably told him that his prize hunter was overbred and nervous and would break its own leg within the year if he did not stop showing it off.
She laughed at him constantly and cared for his good opinion not at all. And the effect of this on a man who had been flattered into numbness was like cold water on a sleeping limb: it hurt, and it woke everything up.
"You spoke of a man learning to value a thing he had to wait for," he said. "How long a wait did you have in mind?"
Beatrix set down her sewing. "Your Grace, do not," she said, and for once there was no dryness in it at all. "Do not flirt with the idea of me. You are a very great man, and I am the poor niece who keeps a house. And even if, by some madness, you meant it, the world would make you regret it and me pay for it. You would be pitied and I would be hated. And within a year, you would remember that you could have had anyone, and I would see you remember it. And it would break something in me that I have taken great care to keep whole. I like you. That is the trouble. If I did not like you, I could enjoy this game forever. But I have begun to like you. And a woman who has begun to like a duke is a woman standing at the edge of a very deep well. And I would rather step back now than fall in and be told afterward that I ought to have known better."
It was the most she had ever let him see. He understood all at once that her lightness was not indifference; it was armor worn by a clever woman who had watched her mother drown in exactly this well and had sworn she never would. And he understood with a clarity that rearranged the whole of him that he did not want to play the game either. He wanted to marry her.
The realization did not arrive as a flutter or a fancy. It arrived as a fact, plain and immovable as a wall. And it had been building itself brick by brick over four weeks of being disagreed with by a woman at a window.
"Beatrix," he said—her name, not her title, for the first time. "I have been wanted by a great many people for a great many things, and not one of them ever told me to step back from the well for my own sake. You are the first person in 15 years who has tried to protect me from myself. And you did it while believing you would get nothing for it. Do you understand what that means to a man in my position? It means you are the only person I have met in my adult life whom I can believe. I do not want the game, either. I never did. I only did not know there was anything else to be had."
She had gone quite pale. "You are saying this because it is the one thing I told you that you cannot have. That is all this is. You are Vernham. You want the door that will not open. When it opens, you will lose interest, as you have lost interest in everything else you were given too easily."
"Then do not give it to me easily," he said. "You said a man values what he has to wait for. Make me wait. Make me earn it. Set me any trial you like, and I will meet it. And if at the end you still believe I want only the closed door, I will go and never trouble you again. But I do not think you believe it. I think you are frightened, which is a different thing, and I think you are frightened because you have begun to hope. And hope terrifies you more than any duke ever could."