For a moment, the Duke of Foss Cliffe simply looked at her, at the clear gray eyes, at the unfashionable freckle high on her cheekbone, at the way she stood with her weight easy on both feet, like a person who expected to have to stand a long time, and he was seized by a want so sudden and so unfamiliar that he did not at first recognize it as want at all. He wanted her not to walk away. That was all. It was a small thing and an enormous one. So he did a foolish thing, the first genuinely foolish thing he had done since he was seven and 20.
"Dance the waltz with me," he said. "If I am to be laughed at, I may as well earn it."
Sidwell hesitated. He saw it, the flicker, the calculation. She was not a great heir. That much was written all over her sensible gown and her mended glove, and the very particular way she had of taking up as little room as possible in a crowded place. A girl like that did not dance with a duke and walk away unmarked. There would be talk. There was always talk. But then some quick thing moved behind her eyes. Some appetite for the ridiculous that matched his own buried one. And she smiled. Not the laughing smile now, but a smaller, warmer, more dangerous one.
"Very well, your grace," she said, and laid her hand in his. "One waltz. And when it is done, and I am somehow not your wife, you shall have to admit that you are all bluster and no bite, and I shall have that to comfort me in my old age as well."
He led her onto the floor. Afterward, when he tried to reconstruct it, the Duke could never quite recover the ordinary sequence of the thing, the walking out, the taking of position, the first swell of the music. What he remembered was the moment his hand settled at her waist and hers came to rest on his shoulder and how she looked up at him with the laughter still living in her face and how, God help him, he had smiled back. He felt it happen. He felt the thing in his own face that had been rusted shut for 11 years give way, and it must have altered him profoundly because he saw her startle, saw the laughter check, saw her look at him as though a Greystone cliff had without warning put out a single improbable flower.
"There," she breathed. "You do have a face after all. I had begun to wonder."
He said nothing. He could not. He was dancing, and he had forgotten how much he had once loved to dance. And the woman in his arms was light and quick, and answered every turn before he made it, as though they had done this a 100 times in some other life. The whole vast ballroom wheeled around them in a smear of gold. He was aware dimly, distantly that the crowd had thinned at the edges of the floor, that fans had stilled, that a low murmur was building beneath the music like surf under wind. The Duke of Foscliffe was dancing. The Duke of Foss Cliffe was smiling. It would be, he understood without caring, the only thing anyone in three counties spoke of for a fortnight. He did not know yet how right he was, nor how much worse.
The music was drawing toward its close when Sidwell said, still breathless, still laughing up at him, "Confess. You never expected me to say yes to the dance."
"No."
"And you are sorry you asked?"
"No," he said, and was appalled to find it true.
The final chord came. He turned her once more slowly and brought her to a stop directly before the eastern pillar, directly, as it happened, before his grandmother, and it was only then, as the Daaja Duchess of Foss Cliffe stepped forward with her cane and her diamonds and her small, terrible smile, that the Duke understood he had walked eyes open straight into a trap that was very old and very well-made, and that the maker of it was his own flesh and blood.
"My dears," said the daaja, in a voice pitched with the exquisite precision of a woman who has spent 60 years making herself heard across ballrooms, "how very glad this makes me. How glad it would have made his late grace." She let her gaze travel out over the assembly, gathering them, holding them, an old spider drawing every thread of the room into her hand. "You will all of you know the tradition of our house that no Duke of Foscliffe takes his bride but by the betrothal waltz. The first waltz danced beneath the crest at Harwick under witness. It has been so for nine generations. My own dear husband claimed me by it before this very company's grandmothers." Her eyes came back to Winston and there was love in them and there was iron and there was not one particle of apology. "My grandson has honored the old custom tonight. He has chosen. I give you the future Duchess of Foss Cliffe."