"No."
"But you might have." She looked at him then and there was no accusation in it, only a clear-eyed reckoning. "You knew the custom existed. You knew what a waltz beneath that crest could be made to mean. And you asked me to dance it anyway."
The justice of it landed square. He had asked her out of some starved, sudden hunger to keep her from walking away, and he had not once, in the whole of that reckless minute, remembered the machinery his grandmother had spent a lifetime tending. It was, he thought, the first time in 11 years he had forgotten to be careful, and it had cost this brave, penniless, laughing woman the whole of her future.
"Yes," he said, "I might have. I did not think of it. I have not forgotten myself so thoroughly in a very long time, Miss Glennville, and it seems the one occasion on which I did, I contrived to injure the only person present who did not deserve it. I am sorry. It is inadequate. I know that."
She studied him. Whatever she had expected the cruel Duke of Foscliffe to say when cornered, it was plainly not that, and he watched her recalculate him yet again, she seemed to be doing it about once a minute, and set the new figure carefully beside the old one.
"Well," she said at last briskly, "Sorrow butters no bread. Let us be practical people. There is a way through every wood if you are willing to walk it. What is yours?"
And so on the dark terrace, with the ball roaring softly behind them, the Duke of Foscliffe made her the proposal that would decide both their lives. And he made it to his own surprise more gently than he had ever proposed anything.
"We do not contradict my grandmother," he said. "Not tonight, not tomorrow, not before the county. We let the engagement stand in the eyes of the world entirely. You are from this evening betrothed to me. You will be received everywhere. You will be treated as the future Duchess of Fossliffe because that is what everyone will believe you to be and no drawing room in England will dare to slight my promised wife. Your sister will have a season such as she could never otherwise have dreamed of. Your father will want for nothing. That much I can do at a stroke and I will do it whatever else you decide."
"And in exchange," Sidwell said wearily, "I marry a stranger."
"No." He shook his head. "That is the part I mean to give you. In exchange you do nothing save allow the world to think what it already thinks. We hold the engagement through the season, 3 months, 4. We let the shock die down. We let the county grow so thoroughly accustomed to the idea of us that it forgets there was ever a scandal at all. And then when enough time has passed that no one is watching very closely, we discover that we do not suit amicably by mutual consent. A long engagement quietly allowed to cool as long engagements so often do. No jilting, no wounded party, no story worth the telling. You will be a woman who was engaged to a duke and found she did not care for him, which is a thing that dulls a reputation not at all and rather burnishes it. You walk away whole. Your sister is married by then, or as good as, and you are free."
Sidwell was silent for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had lost its briskness. "You would do that. Bind yourself to a false engagement. Put your own name to a lie before the whole county. Spend your money on a father and a sister who are nothing to you. All to spare a woman you met an hour ago the consequences of your grandmother's scheme."
It was the question he could not answer because the honest answer, because you laughed because you called me lonely and were right, because for the length of one waltz I remembered I was a living man and not a monument, was one he had no words for and less courage. So he gave her a lesser truth which was still true.
"Because it is my fault," he said, "and because I have very few opportunities in the life I have made to do a decent thing, I find I should like to take this one. And because," he stopped, started again more carefully. "Because you have every reason to weep and rail and blame me tonight, and you have done none of it. You have stood on a cold terrace and reasoned with me as an equal while your whole world came down around you. I have known a great many people, Miss Glennville. I have never much admired any of them. I find that I admire you. I would not have you pay for my carelessness. That is all the reason I have, and it is enough."