Fossliffe stood where the land ran out. Winston had lived there all his life and had long since ceased to see it, but on the Thursday the carriages came grinding up the last of the cliff road. He found himself watching Sidwell's face at the window instead. And so he saw in house new. The gray pile of it rising against the gray sea, the hundred windows catching the last of the light, the gulls wheeling and crying over the walled gardens, the whole great weathered bulk of the place clinging to the edge of England with its heels dug in against the wind. He had thought it a cold house, watching her lean toward the glass, lips parted, he was not so sure.
"Oh," Sidwell said softly to no one. "It is like a house in a story. It ought not to be real."
"It is very drawy," Winston said. "And the chimneys smoke when the wind is easterly, and there is a room in the west wing that no fire has ever once warmed. Do not let it charm you. It has no heart."
She turned from the window and looked at him. He had ridden the last stage inside the carriage opposite her at his grandmother's pointed suggestion and said, "Everything has a heart. Some things only keep it better hidden than others." And she went back to the window before he could decide whether she was speaking of the house.
They were installed with a ceremony that his grandmother orchestrated to the last footman. Mr. Glennville, Sidwell's father, was carried up to a warm south-facing room with a view of the water and pronounced it in a thin voice full of pleasure, the finest sick room a man ever malingered in. Sidwell's sister, Prudence, 19, pretty, and so plainly overwhelmed by the scale of the place that she kept whispering and walking on tiptoe, was given over to the daajger, who took one look at her, and declared she would do very well, and swept her off toward a discussion of gowns that made the girl's eyes go round as saucers.
And Sidwell herself was shown to a chamber in the east wing, so grand that when Winston looked in an hour later to ask whether she had all she required, he found her standing in the middle of the enormous room with her few belongings still in their single trunk, looking small and mutinous.
"I cannot sleep in this," she informed him. "The bed is the size of a fishing boat. There is a painting of a man on a horse who watches me. I shall lie awake all night being judged by a foss."
"That is my greatgrandfather," Winston said. "He judged everyone. Do not take it personally." He came in a few steps, leaving the door correctly open, for there were maids in the passage, and the whole point of the exercise was that nothing improper should ever be seen, and stood regarding the portrait with her. "I can have you moved. There is a smaller room."
"No," she said it quickly. "No, it is only strange. It is all so much. I keep waiting for someone to discover I am not meant to be here, and turn me out into the road." She laughed at herself a little unsteadily. "Is that not absurd, a grown woman? But I have spent my whole life being the person who is grateful to be allowed to stay, a companion, a poor relation. And now there are people who curtsy to me, Winston, actual curtsies, and I have to remember not to curtsy back to the housemaids. And it is the most extraordinary. I do not know how you bear it. Being looked at so, being someone people arrange themselves around."
"Badly," he said. "I bear it badly. It is why they think me cruel. It is easier to be thought cruel than to be looked at kindly and found wanting." The admission was out of him before he had weighed it, and he was startled by it, and looked away toward the window and the gray line of the sea. "You will grow used to the curtsies. You will find they mean nothing. The trick is to remember that the person curtsying to you this month will be the first to whisper against you the next, and to be neither warmed by the one nor wounded by the other."
Sidwell was quiet. Then she said, "That is a very lonely way to live. You keep saying that word to me."
"Because you keep proving it true." But she said it gently, and when he looked back at her, she was not pitying him. He could not have borne pity. She was only regarding him with that clear gray attention, as though he were a lock she had half a mind to pick. "Well, if I am to be looked at, I had rather be looked at beside someone who understands how tiresome it is. Come. Your grandmother expects us in the long gallery in an hour to be admired by the neighborhood, and I have nothing to wear that will not disgrace you, and we may as well begin our performance. How am I to address you before company? I refuse to call you your grace across a dinner table. It sounds as though I am sneezing."
And so the pretense began, and it was—Winston had braced himself for a trial, and it was not a trial. It was, God help him, the pleasantest fortnight of his adult life. They courted. They did it in full view of the county, which came in a steady stream up the cliff road to inspect the Duke of Foss Cliff's astonishing choice of bride. And they did it at first with a great deal of private stage management, a look here, a hand offered there, a low word timed for a watching audience. But the strange thing, the thing that crept up on Winston so gradually that he was weeks understanding it, was how little management it came to need. He did not have to remember to seek her out at breakfast. He simply found that breakfast was the best part of the day, and Sidwell the reason. He did not have to manufacture the low words. She said something dry and wicked about a visiting baronet, and he laughed before he thought to check himself, and the laugh was real, and so was the pleasure of it.