He had taken off his coat, like half the men there; his shirt sleeves were rolled and there was hay in his hair. He looked tired, and poorer, and much more like himself.
"Dance with me," he said.
She looked at him. "Out of pity?"
"No."
"Then why?"
He thought about it honestly, which was the thing about him she had not expected and could not stop noticing. "Because I said I would ask you nothing until you had seen whether I meant it. And it is Michaelmas, and the minute-book is signed, and I am asking. Only for a dance. The rest can wait as long as you like."
"And if I like a long time?"
"Then I shall learn patience. Haverstock says it will be good for me. So does Miss Prestwick, who writes to me about compound interest and signs herself, with very great respect, my creditor's daughter. She tells me her lieutenant has been asked to dine in Russell Square, which she considers a victory of Wellingtonian proportions." He held out his hand, ungloved. "I am not chasing you, Honora. I am standing still, and hoping."
She laid her hand in his.
"Perhaps," she said, "I know something you do not."
"About me?"
"About me." She let herself smile—not the cynical smile, nor the sly one, but something she had not worn since she was very small and had found a nest in a hedge. "That I have been watching you for twelve years from a very great distance. And that I am tired of the distance."
He drew her into the set. As they went down the line under the swinging lanterns, Honora glanced up once—out of habit, out of memory—towards the old granary gallery at the end of the barn, where the fiddlers had played in the late Duke's day.
The Dowager Duchess stood there alone, in grey, with her hands resting on the rough wooden rail. She was looking down at them. Her face was not soft; it would never be soft. But it was not cold either. After a moment she inclined her head, very slightly, the way one acknowledges a debt that can never be fully paid but has at last been entered in the book.
Honora held her gaze, and did not smile, and did not look away. Then she turned back to the dance, and to the man in front of her, and to the long, uncertain, unfinished road of the rest of it.