She looked at his offered arm as though it were a snake. Then, because she was, he was fast learning, a woman who understood the difference between the fight she wanted and the fight in front of her, she laid her hand upon it light as a leaf, and lifted her chin another quarter inch, and let the Duke of Foscliffe walk her the whole length of that blazing, murmuring, merciless ballroom, with her head held like a queen's.
At the tall doors she paused. The night air came cool through them, smelling of the box hedges and the river beyond.
She turned to him, and now at last in the shadow of the doorway where no one could see, her composure cracked, not into weeping, but into a single unsteady breath and a whisper he would remember for the rest of his days. "I only wanted," Sidwell Glennville said, "to laugh at one ball. Just one. I did not think it would cost me everything I have."
And the Duke of Fossliffe, who had come to Harwick that night with a heart of Greystone and a reputation to match, discovered that it was possible, after all, for that heart to break on behalf of someone else entirely.
"It will not cost you everything," he heard himself say. "I give you my word. Come out into the air with me, Miss Glennville, and let me try to make this right, or at least less wrong than my grandmother has made it. I am not, whatever they tell you, quite so cruel as all that."
She studied him a long moment in the doorway's shadow. This severe and famous man with a surprised new softness in his face, and something in her seemed to decide to gamble one more time on the strength of one waltz.
"Prove it," she said. And they stepped out together into the dark.
The terrace at Harwick ran the length of the house in pale flagstones, and beyond its balustrade the gardens fell away in dark tiers to the river, where the moon lay broken on the water. Winston walked Sidwell to the far end, past the reach of the lit windows, and there he let go of her arm, and stood a careful, courteous distance from her, hat in hand, though he wore no hat, feeling for the first time in a decade entirely at a loss.
"Tell me plainly how bad it is," Sidwell said. She had her back to the balustrade, and hands folded before her, and she had command of herself again, though he could see the price of it in the set of her jaw. "You are a duke. You have been managing scandals since you were in leading strings. I have a father who cannot leave his chair without help and a sister of 19 who has not yet had her season, and I have precisely no money, and I would rather know the whole shape of the thing at once than have it doled out to me in kindnesses. How bad is it?"
He respected that. He respected it enormously. "Bad," he said. "Not fatal, but bad. By tomorrow noon, every drawing room within 40 mi will know that the Duke of Foss Cliff danced the betrothal waltz, and that his grandmother named the bride. My family's custom is not law, as I told you. But the announcement is a fact and a public one, and it was made by a woman whose word has ordered this county since before either of us was born. If we contradict her, we do not merely embarrass ourselves. We call the Daaja Duchess of Foss Cliff a liar before 200 witnesses, and we invite every soul in that room to decide for themselves what really passed between us in the dark."
"Nothing passed between us in the dark," Sidwell said. "We are standing 6 ft apart, discussing my ruin like two clerks over a ledger."
"They will not know that. They will know only that a girl of no fortune danced with me and was named my bride and was then set aside within the hour. There is no version of that story in which you emerge unharmed. If I cast you off, you are the jilted woman, and men will draw their conclusions, and no respectable house will receive you, and your sister's season is finished before it is begun," he said it flatly, because she had asked him for the truth, and not for comfort. "If you cast me off, it is a little better for you, and a great deal worse for me. But the county will still whisper that you must have something to make a duke wish to be rid of you so quickly. The Doija knew all of this. She has forgotten more about the management of a ballroom than I will ever learn. She did not spring this trap by accident."
Sidwell was quiet a moment. The river talked to itself below them. "Then she wanted this. She said she wanted you married. And when you would not choose, she chose for you. She waited for you to dance with the first woman foolish enough to say yes and she sprang it," a short disbelieving breath, "and I walked into it holding a cup of negus. You could not have known."