"She Won't Last a Month Here," the Duke Told His Butler — By Summer She Ran the Whole House
Chapter 22
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The county saw him do it. That was rather the point, though Juliet did not understand it until afterward: he crossed his sister's ballroom, full of every family in the district; he stopped before his grandmother's brown-haired companion in her borrowed gray gown; he bowed to her as a man bows to a woman he means the whole county to remark.And he said, so that a good many people heard it: "Miss Eldstone, will you dance?"She had not danced in three years. Her feet remembered before her head did. And halfway down the set in the candlelight, the Duke spoke low under the music.The county was watching. The roses she had cut were going brown at the edges in the warm room."They will talk of nothing else for a twelvemonth.""They will, Your Grace. You have quite ruined me. A companion cannot dance with a Duke and stay a companion.""No," he agreed. "She cannot." He turned her under his arm, correct as a clock. "I have thought a great deal these three weeks about what she might become instead.""Have you?""I have. My grandmother recommends the position of Duchess. She recommends it with some force. She says the house cannot spare you, and that she cannot spare you, and that I am a great fool who took a year to see what a mare saw in an afternoon." The almost smile. "She is frequently right. It is her most trying quality."Juliet's heart was going very hard under the gray gown. She kept her feet in the figure; she kept her voice light, because if she did not keep it light, it would break."And what does the Duke recommend, sir? Setting his grandmother aside."The music turned them. He looked down at her, and the shut face was all the way open now—awake and unguarded and afraid: a man who had learned this spring exactly how much a house can lose while its master will not look."The Duke recommends nothing," he said. "The Duke has learned his lesson about signing what is put before him without reading it. The Duke will not put anything before you at all." He stopped in the middle of the set, in front of everyone, which was not done, which set the whole gallery whispering. "I will not offer you a marriage of convenience, Juliet. You have £4,000 of your own coming; you need no man's house to shelter in. In three years, you may be free of every soul who ever tried to spend your money or scrub you into silence. You do not need me. That is precisely why I am asking: not because the house needs a mistress—it has one; it has had one since April. Because I would like, for the rest of my life, to be looked at by the one person who was never once afraid of me." His voice went quiet, right down to the bone. "Marry me. As myself, choosing it. Or do not, and stay and run the house I could not, and I will never trouble you with it again. It is entirely yours to say. Everything from here is yours to say."