"I was not protecting you," said Sidwell.
"I was protecting myself exactly as I have protected myself for 11 years. And I dressed my cowardice up as honor because that is the only trick I have ever truly known. You saw it on the beach. You named it a wound wearing the mask of cruelty. And last night at the ball, I let that same coward silence stand while a spiteful woman called you a schemer. And I let you walk away believing I had never felt a thing. When the truth is that I have felt more in one month with you than in the whole gray desert of the 11 years before, and that I do not want the season to end, or the bargain to be kept, or you to go, I want you to stay. Not as a duchess, not by any custom or trap, as yourself chosen married to me because you wish to be, or not married to me at all, if you do not, but either way, knowing past all doubting that you were loved. That is the word. That is all of it. That is everything I have."
The [ __ ] leaves whispered overhead. Sidwell stood very still, and he watched her face, and he watched the god on it tremble. And he made himself say nothing more. He who had hidden behind saying nothing all his life now held his tongue and simply let himself be seen, which was the harder and the truer thing.
"You told me," she said at last unsteadily, "on the terrace, that you did not do things gracefully. Being thanked, you said you had no practice." Her eyes were swimming now, and she did nothing to stop them. "You have no practice at this either. It was a terrible speech, Winston. It went on far too long, and you insulted yourself the whole way through it, and you are standing in the road in your shirt with a horse you have half killed, and I," her voice cracked clean across, "and I believe every word of it. That is the trouble. That is exactly why I believe it. A careful man could not have made a speech that bad. Only a fool in earnest could."
"Then be a fool with me," he said. "I have it on the best authority that it is the only thing worth being."
And Sidwell Glennville laughed. That bright water over stones laugh that had undone him across a bowl of negus a lifetime and a month ago, laughed with the tears running down her face, and closed the last small distance in the road herself. And Winston gathered her in against his barethroated shirt with a groan that came all the way up from the gray stone foundations of him and kissed her at last. There in the beech shade, with her father cheering weakly from the carriage, and her sister openly weeping for joy, and the poor blown horse cropping the verge, kissed her the way he had wanted to on the beach, and every day since, thoroughly, and without one particle of caution. A man 11 years starved coming at last to the table.
"I have one condition," Sidwell said against his mouth when she could speak.
"Name it," he said. "Anything."
"You will have to court me truly this time publicly. Convincingly," she drew back just enough to look up at him, her wet eyes dancing, her hand flat against his hammering heart. "I warned you at Haric I should mark your performance hard. Well, now it is real your grace, and I shall mark it harder still. You shall have to smile every day. You did it once. I have seen that you can."
"Every day," he swore. "For the rest of my life. God help me. Agreed to all of it."
He cleared her name that same week. And he did it as he had told the daager he would plainly before the county at the next assembly where he stood up beneath the very crest that had caught them and told the truth to the whole gathered room. He told them his grandmother had trapped them both. He told them of the false engagement and of the bargain made to protect a woman who had done nothing but laugh at the right moment. And then he told them, looking not at the county, but at Sidwell, where she stood in her gray silk with her chin up, the bargain had failed utterly. Because he had gone and fallen in love with his false betroth against every term of his own agreement, and meant now to marry her in earnest, if she would still have a man foolish enough to say so out loud in a ballroom. And he added in the flat gray voice that had frozen a hundred conversations, that any soul present who wished to name Sidwell Glennville a schemer was welcome to do so to his face at their earliest convenience at dawn and that he was reckoned a fair shot.
No one took up the offer. Aramain, he noted, had found urgent reason to be wanted by a mother and left early and troubled Foscliffe no more. She married a baronet in the spring and was by all accounts exactly as content as such women ever are.