"I know," Sidwell said gently. "That is what I've been trying to tell you. It is not that you are cruel, Winston. You are only alone, and a man who is alone forgets that everyone else is too. You have a whole county full of people who would love you if you would once come down off the horse." She smiled and mounted her own and gathered the reins there. "That is my sermon for the day. You may go back to being terrible now."
"You are staring at me again," she said as they rode down at last toward the beach, the tide far out, the wet sand shining. "You do it more than you know. It is not at all seemly in a duke. People will think you fond of me."
"They are meant to think me fond of you."
"Yes, but you needn't do it when there is no one to see but a groom and a great many gulls." She said it lightly, but she did not look at him when she said it, and there was a color in her cheek that the wind alone did not account for. And Winston, who had spent 11 years reading faces for weakness across bargaining tables, chose for once not to read hers too closely, because he was afraid of what he might find there, and more afraid of what he might not.
They left the horses with the groom at the head of the beach, and walked out over the hard sand, the cliffs rising sheer and gray behind them, the sea a long way off, and coming slowly in. And it was there with no one to perform for that Sidwell asked him the question he had known somehow that this whole day had been walking toward.
"Winston. Why do they call you cruel?"
He walked a few paces before he answered. "Because it is easier than what is true."
"And what is true?"
He stopped. He looked out at the water, and the old greystone of him wanted out of 11 years habit to say nothing, to turn it aside, to let her think the worst, as he had let everyone think the worst, because the worst was armor. And then he looked at her standing on the wet sand with the wind pulling at her hair and her whole clear face turned up to him asking not out of prying but out of some steady willingness to know the actual man and not the reputation, and the armor which had held against the whole county for a decade simply would not hold against her.
"There was a woman," he said, "11 years ago. I was 7 and 20, and my father was newly dead. And I'd just come into all of this," a gesture at the cliffs, the house unseen above them, the whole gray weight of Foscliffe. "And I was, if you can credit it, a good deal more like you than like the man you met at Harwick. I laughed. I danced. I believed, God help me, that people meant what they said. Her name does not matter. She was beautiful and clever and she told me she loved me and I believed her and I asked her to marry me and she said yes." He heard his own voice go flat and careful the way it always did over this, sanding the thing down so it could be handled. "And then 3 weeks before the wedding, my man of business came to me with the discovery that she had been promised the whole time to another man, a poorer man whom she did in fact love, and that she had accepted me only because her family required the match, the title, the money, and meant all along to have the fortune settled and then live her own life quietly elsewhere. It was in her own letters. I read them. She had written to him about me while wearing my ring. She called me..." He stopped. "It does not signify what she called me. It was not kind and it was not wrong."
Sidwell had gone very still. "What did you do?"
"I ended it quietly. I have always been good at quiet. I gave out that we did not suit and let her keep her name because I found I could not bring myself to ruin even her. And then I came here to Fossliff and I decided," he drew a breath of the cold sea air. "I decided that I had been a fool once and would not be a fool twice. That the fault had been in my believing, in my laughing, in my leaving myself open to be read and used. So I closed. I made myself into exactly the man the county now fears, cold and hard and impossible to reach, because a man who cannot be reached cannot be deceived and cannot be made a fool of and cannot be hurt. It answered very well. It has answered for 11 years. No one has got near enough to lie to me in all that time because no one has got near me at all." He looked at her. "You will observe the flaw in the design, which is that no one has got near me at all," he said quietly, "in 11 years until a girl laughed at me across a bowl of negus and I forgot for the length of one waltz to keep the gate shut."
The sea came on. Somewhere above a gull cried and was answered. Sidwell stood looking up at him with her gray eyes bright and something working in her face that he could not name and did not dare to.