"One waltz with me and you'll be my wife," the Duke said, and he watched the girl before him tip back her head and laugh as though he had told the finest joke in threeount.
She laughed the way water laughs over stones, easy and bright, and entirely without fear. The Duke of Fossliffe, who had not been laughed to his face in 11 years, found himself absurdly, unaccountably charmed.
"You are very bold, sir," Sidwell Glanville said, pressing two gloved fingers to her lips to steady the mirth, "to promise a woman marriage on the strength of a waltz you have not yet danced. Suppose you tread on my hem. Suppose I tread on yours. Shall we still be wed by supper?"
"I do not tread on hems," the Duke said.
"No," she agreed, looking him over with a candle that would have made a bishop cough. "I dare say you would consider it beneath you."
Around them, the great ballroom of Harwick Hall blazed with a thousand candles, and the cream of the county turned upon its own axis in silk and satin, and every one of those turning heads had at one point or another that evening angled itself toward the tall, dark figure by the eastern pillar to see whether the Duke of Foss Cliff would deign to dance at all. He had not danced in 11 years. It was one of the many things whispered about him behind fans and behind hands. That the Duke did not dance. That the Duke did not smile. That the Duke had a heart like the cliffs his house was named for. All gray stone and cold spray and nothing living upon it. They called him cruel. He had let them. It was a useful thing, a reputation. It kept the mothers at bay and the fortune hunters at a decent distance, and it meant that a man might stand at a ball with a glass of untouched claret and be left entirely blessedly alone.
Except that tonight he had not been left alone. Tonight his grandmother had come. Winston, Duke of Foscliffe, had said the outrageous words for a reason, and the reason was standing 40 ft away in violet and diamonds with an expression of tender, ruthless triumph on her powdered face. The Daaja Duchess had spent the better part of an hour steering a parade of eligible young women past his pillar the way a farmer drives geese to market, and he had repelled each of them with the flat gray courtesy that had earned him his name, and he had thought himself safe.
Then the last of the geese had scattered, and in the gap left behind he had seen a young woman standing alone by the long windows, quite plainly dressed in pale green, holding a cup of negus she had clearly no intention of drinking, watching the whole glittering circus with an expression of such frank private amusement that he had crossed the floor before he knew his feet had moved. He had meant to say something cutting. He had a great many cutting things ready to hand. They came to him the way sums came to a clerk. What he had said instead, apropos of nothing, apropos of the way she had lifted one eyebrow at a countess mincing past in ostrich plumes, was: "One waltz with me and you'll be my wife." He had said it to see what she would do. He had not expected her to laugh.
"You needn't look so wounded," Sidwell told him now, for something must have shown on his face. "It was a very good line. I shall remember it. When I am a wrinkled old woman, I shall tell all the young ladies that a duke once had to marry me across a bowl of negus. And they shall none of them believe me, and I shall not care in the least." She set the cup down on the sill behind her with the neat efficiency of a woman well accustomed to putting things away. "There. Now you may return to your pillar. You have been very brave and I shone you spoke to me."
"You are not going to swoon," the Duke observed.
"I have never swooned in my life. It seems a great deal of trouble and someone always has to carry you." She tilted her head. "Is that what usually happens? You say your terrible sentence and they swoon and you feel gratified?"
"They usually," he said slowly, "go quite white and find they are wanted urgently by their mothers."
"How lonely for you." She said it lightly, but the two words dropped into him like a stone into a deep well, and he heard them go all the way down.