"Sidwell."
"Sidwell." He turned it over. It was a plain name, an old name, unfashionable as her freckle and her gown, and it suited her entirely, and he found he liked the shape of it in his mouth more than he had any business liking. "And you have mine, I think," he said it loud enough.
"Winston." Sidwell echoed it back to him solemnly and then spoiled the solemnity with a crooked look. "It is a very grand, very grim, very dull sort of name. It sounds like a fortress. I shall have to find something to call you that does not make me feel I am addressing a defensive earthwork."
"You will not," he said. "Winston will do."
"We shall see." She reclaimed her hand at last gently and drew closer against the river chill, and for a moment the enormity of the thing they had just agreed to seemed to settle over them both, the months of pretense ahead. The whole county to be deceived, the two families, the two lives now roped together by nine generations of custom and one reckless minute of laughter.
"Winston," she said more quietly. "Thank you. I do not know yet whether you are a good man or merely a guilty one. But you did not have to offer me any of this, and you did, and I shan't forget it, whatever comes."
"You may find," he said, "that I am not much accustomed to being thanked. I may not do it gracefully."
"No," she agreed. "You may not. We shall have to practice that as well." And she smiled at him one last time in the moonlight, and it went into the Duke of Foss Cliff like warmth into a cold room, and he understood distantly the way he had understood in the ballroom that the whole county would talk, that he had promised to give this woman up in 3 months time, and that it was going to be the hardest thing he had ever agreed to do, and that he had agreed to it before he had the smallest notion of how thoroughly he did not mean it.
He escorted her back through the doors. His grandmother was waiting in the gilded ante room, upright on her cane, watching them come in from the dark side by side with the light of a general who has taken the field. Whatever she read in their two faces evidently pleased her, for the small, terrible smile deepened, and she inclined her head to Sidwell with a graciousness that would have honored a princess.
"Miss Glennville," said the Daaja, Duchess of Fossliffe, "you will come to us at Fossliffe. It is not to be borne that my grandson's promised wife should be lodged anywhere but under our own roof while the settlements are drawn. You will bring your father, of course. The air on the cliffs is very fine for an invalid. And your sister, we shall bring her out ourselves. I will send the carriage Thursday."
It was not an invitation. It was a deployment. And Winston, watching Sidwell absorb the fact that the trap had a second set of jaws she had not seen close, watched her also lift her chin and meet his grandmother's eye and answer without a tremor in a voice as smooth as cream.
"How very kind, your grace, we should be delighted. My father will be so glad of the sea air, and I confess I am eager to see Foscliffe. I have heard," she added, with an innocence so perfectly pitched that Winston had to look at the floor, "that it is a house very much given to old traditions."
The Dajger's eyes gleamed. "Oh," she said, "you have no idea, my dear. No idea at all." And she swept out to call for her carriage, well satisfied, leaving her grandson and his false betrothed standing in the gilded light, each of them realizing at precisely the same moment that a bargain made to end in three months had just acquired a great deal more time and a great many more witnesses and a house full of the very customs that had caught them in which to somehow keep from being caught in truth.