For one long ringing, unbearable moment, the ballroom was perfectly silent. Then it broke into gasps, into a scatter of stunned applause, into the hiss and rustle of 200 people turning to their neighbors at once. And Winston felt Sidwell go rigid beside him, felt her hand tighten convulsively upon his sleeve, and heard her say very low, in a voice from which every trace of laughter had drained clean away, "What is she talking about, Winston? What does she mean?"
He looked down at her. The color had gone out of her face at last, not from any swoon, but from something far worse, a dawning disbelieving horror, as she understood, before he could tell her that the joke had teeth, that the game had rules she had not been shown. That she had laid her hand in his and danced a dance, and that the whole watching world now believed upon the word of a duchess, and the weight of nine generations, that she had promised to marry a man whose Christian name she had learned not 10 minutes before.
"I did not know," he said. It was the truth and it was useless. "Miss Glennville, on my honor, I did not know she would—"
"Is it true?" Her gray eyes searched his, wild now. "The custom. Is it a real thing or is it some cruelty? Some sport?"
The word cruelty went into him like a blade because he had spent 11 years earning it and had never once until this moment minded the wearing of it.
"It is real," he said quietly. "It is a private tradition of my family, and it has no force in law. But this room—" he did not need to finish.
This room was the law that governed people like Sidwell Glennville. This room could unmake a girl of no fortune with a single lifted eyebrow, and every soul in it had just watched her dance the betrothal waltz of Fosscliffe, and heard the Daaja Duchess name her the next mistress of the house.
"Then I am ruined," Sidwell said. "Whichever way I turn, if I deny it, I am the woman who was jilted by a duke, or worse, the woman who threw herself at one and lied about it after. And if I do not deny it..." she stopped.
She looked up at him, and to his lasting astonishment, there was no plea in her face, no tears, only a fierce and steady taking of the measure of her situation, the way a good general looks at ground he did not choose.
"And if I do not deny it, I am promised to marry a man they call cruel, whom I have known for the length of one waltz, and who was 5 minutes ago making sport of a girl beside a bowl of negus."
"I was not." He caught himself.
Around them the crowd pressed nearer. Ara vain, who had been steered past his pillar not half an hour before, stood white-lipped at the edge of the floor with her mother's hand a claw upon her arm. His grandmother was watching him with the serene confidence of a woman who has already won. And Sidwell Glanville stood in the wreckage of her own good name, with her chin up and her eyes dry, waiting to hear what the cruel Duke of Foscliffe would do to her now.
He offered her his arm. "Not here," Winston said low, for her alone. "Whatever is to be done, it will not be done for the entertainment of 200 people. Take my arm, Miss Glennville. Walk out with me as though nothing in the world is the matter, and let them make of it what they will. It is the only kindness I can give you in this room, and I am aware it is a poor one."