And so he said nothing, and the days ran out, and he told himself there would be time later once she was free and safe, and could choose him without the whole weight of Foscliffe leaning on the scale, as though love waited politely for the convenient hour. They were in every way but the one that mattered, already as married as two people could be. He knew now how she took her tea and that she read poetry she pretended to despise and that she could not carry a tune to save her life and sang anyway under her breath over the accounts she had somehow taken to keeping for him. She knew that he woke before dawn and walked the cliff path in all weathers and she had begun without asking to be dressed and waiting in the breakfast room when he came in cold from it so that the first face of his day was hers. He had lived alone in that house so long that he had forgotten a house could be otherwise. And now the forgetting was undone, and the thought of the breakfast room empty again, of coming in cold to no one, sat in him like a stone he could not swallow.
One evening he found her in the music room at dusk, not playing, but only sitting at the old piano fort with her hands quiet on the keys. And when he came in, she did not start or arrange herself. Only looked up and said, "It is a great pity you cannot keep me on merely to run your estate. I have grown very fond of your drains, Winston. I shall miss your drains particularly."
She had meant it as a joke. He heard it land wrong in her own ears, even as she said it. Heard the small catch under the lightness. And he stood in the doorway with his heart going and every honest word he owned crowding up behind his teeth and said in the end only that she might keep the account books when she went if she liked for the sake of the drains. She laughed and looked away and he cursed himself the length of the dark passage back to the library and did not sleep.
It was in these same days that Aravain made her last quiet call at Fossliffe, and she made it this time when the Duke was out about the land, and she made it upon Sidwell alone. She was all warmth. She admired the account books. She admired the mended cottages of which the whole neighborhood now spoke. She admired with her sweetest smile how very much at home dear Miss Glennville had made herself. How thoroughly she had learned the house, how well she managed the servants and the tenants and the invalid father and the pretty sister. All of it in so few weeks.
"One would almost think," Aramenta murmured, drawing on her gloves to leave, "that you had planned it. But of course you could not have. It was all the merriest accident was it not one waltz. And here you are, mistress of everything. How fortunate for you. How very, very fortunate." And she pressed Sidwell's hands and went, leaving behind her, as she had meant to a small, cold seed of the question that would sprout to full poison at Harwick.
What does the county see when it looks at a portionless girl who danced one dance and won a duke? It does not see an accident. It sees a scheme. Sidwell stood in the hall after the carriage had gone, and felt the old chill of the poor relation who is never trusted to belong, and told no one, and Winston, coming in warm from the cliffs to find her unusually quiet, put it down to the strain of the coming assembly, and did not ask, and so the seed lay undisturbed, and grew.
The blow, when it came, came at the Mus assembly at Harwick, in the very ballroom where the whole thing had begun. His grandmother had insisted they attend. It would look strange, she said, for the betrothed pair to hide from the county a month after the announcement. And so they came back to Harwick Hall, and the candles blazed, and the county turned upon its axis, and Winston stood with Sidwell on his arm in the doorway, where he had once walked her out into the dark, and thought that he had never in his life been less willing to let a woman go. She was lovely that night. His grandmother had seen to a new gown over Sidwell's protests, a thing of soft gray silk that Sidwell had accepted only when the dowager framed it as a loan. And she stood beside him in it with her chin up and her freckle and her mended courage. And Winston looked at her and thought with a plainness that shook him, I would give the whole of Fosscliffe to keep you, and knew he could not say so.
He was fetching her a glass of negus. He had done it deliberately, the same drink, meaning it as a private joke between them, meaning to make her laugh when he came back around the pillar and heard Arain Vain's voice, low and sweet, and pitched to carry to a small select cluster of the county's most reliable talkers, and heard the words that stopped him where he stood.
"A bargain, my dears, nothing more. I have it on the best authority. There was never any love in it at all. She caught him out in the old family custom or her people did that shrewd invalid father one wonders and rather than face the scandal he struck a bargain with her to play the part for a season and be quietly rid of her when the talk died down. It is all to be ended by mutual consent. You know, the moment it is safe 3 months, they said poor Winston, one almost pities him, trapped into a false engagement with a portionless nobody who saw her chance and took it. And to think we all believed he was in love. He must be laughing at us behind that cold face of his. Or perhaps," the sweet voice dropped, delicious. "Perhaps he is not laughing at all. Perhaps he has come to want what he cannot honorably keep, and she knows it, and holds it over him. She is cleverer than she looks, that one. They always are."
Winston stood behind the pillar with a glass of negus in his hand, and the blood gone to ice in his veins. It was not the exposure that undid him, the county could think what it liked. He had weathered worse. It was that every poisoned word of it was near enough to true to be unanswerable, and that the one word in it that was a lie, the lie that Sidwell had schemed had trapped him, held anything over him, was the word that would do her the most harm, and the word he could least publicly deny. Because to deny it, he would have to explain the whole of the true arrangement, and the true arrangement was itself the scandal.
Araminta had found the loose thread and pulled it with beautiful precision. Whatever he said now, Sidwell was ruined all over again. Not as a jilted woman this time, but as a fortune hunter, a schemer, exactly the thing she had said on the terrace, she would rather die than be thought. He came around the pillar with murder in his cold face, and the little cluster of talkers scattered like starlings. And Araminta Vain looked up at him with wide innocent eyes in a curtsy, and he could not touch her, could not disprove a word, could only stand there with the useless glass in his hand, while the poison spread out through the ballroom in widening rings, and then he saw Sidwell.
She was standing a little way off, quite alone, near the long windows where he had first seen her, and she had heard. He knew at once that she had heard all of it, or enough, because the color had gone out of her face in exactly the way it had gone the night of the announcement, and she was looking at him across the crowded floor with an expression he had never seen on her before, and hoped never to see again. Not anger, not even hurt, but a terrible, quiet understanding, as though something she had been carefully not letting herself believe had just been confirmed in the cruelest possible hearing.