Arthur did not flinch. He turned to look at her father with a calm, unhurried authority that made her father's fury look small. "I believe," Arthur said quietly, "that the lady is already spoken for."
Daphne looked at Arthur's dark eyes, at the steadiness in them, at the way he was watching her and not her father, as if what she decided in the next five seconds was the only thing that mattered.
She thought about the earl's hands. She thought about two buried wives. She thought about iron doors closing.
She lifted her chin. "In that case, Your Grace," she said clearly, "I accept your proposal."
Her father made a sound like a man who had swallowed something sharp. The earl went the color of an old beet.
Arthur looked at her for one long moment, and something shifted in his expression: surprise, and then something warmer and more careful than surprise. Then he said quietly, "I am the luckiest man alive."
Two
The scandal was instantaneous and total. A duke's public declaration, witnessed by no fewer than eleven people crowded behind her father in the doorway, could not be quietly undone. Arthur outranked the earl. A verbal agreement made before witnesses carried weight that a betrothal contract did not easily overrule.
Earl Cranbrook raged. Her father threatened. Arthur's solicitor appeared the very next morning and began the paperwork with the efficiency of a man who had been waiting for something to do. Within a fortnight, Daphne Ashworth became Daphne Pemberton, Duchess of Blackwood.
The ceremony was small, formal, and held in the cold stone chapel of Blackwood Hall. She signed her name with a steady hand, though her heart was doing something uncomfortably fast.
Blackwood Hall rose out of the late October fog like something from a painting: old gray stone, wide wings spreading on either side of the entrance, rows of tall windows reflecting the overcast sky. It was enormous, and it was severe, and it did not smile. She found she preferred it to her father's gilded London townhouse, which had always smiled too brightly and meant very little by it.
That first evening, Arthur came to her in the drawing room and sat across from where she stood near the fire. He looked at her with the same directness she remembered from the garden.
"No pretense. There are things I should have told you before the ceremony," he said. "I will tell you now."
He told her plainly: the wound he had taken during the war eleven years ago to his left leg and side. It had refused to heal properly, plagued by persistent, deep infection. The physicians had tried everything they knew; nothing had worked. Hence the nickname; hence the isolation.
"I stepped in because I watched you for the better part of an hour in that ballroom," he said. "You were kind to the wallflower girl near the pillar when no one else noticed her. And then I watched the earl take your hand, and I watched your face." He paused. "I thought it was a very great waste."
Daphne studied him. He was telling her this without drama, without asking for anything that mattered.
"What are you offering me?" she asked directly.
"A marriage of convenience, if that is what you want," he said. "Your own rooms, your own income, absolute freedom to live as you choose. I brought you here to give you safety, not to replace one cage with another." He paused. "Or, if you choose to stay truly, friendship, and the possibility of something more in time, if it comes to that honestly."
"I gave my word," Daphne said, "in front of witnesses and in that chapel. I don't run from things I have agreed to." She looked at him steadily. "And I do not find you entirely disagreeable, which helps."
Something shifted in his expression—careful, warm, held back.
"Arthur," he said. "My name is Arthur."
"Arthur," she said.
They shook hands on it, which was probably the most sensible way two strangers had ever begun a marriage.
She asked Mrs. Holt to show her the library. It was extraordinary: two floors of shelves, a rolling ladder, a fireplace large enough to stand in. She ran her fingers along the spines and felt, for the first time in weeks, something close to peace.
The peace lasted three days before the arrangement became complicated.
It began with furniture. The front drawing room chairs faced a cold wall instead of the window. She rearranged them.
Arthur appeared in the doorway, looked at the chairs, and said, "I had those placed there for a reason."
"What reason?" she asked.
He thought about it. "I cannot currently remember," he admitted.
"Then they stay here," she said cheerfully, "where the morning light is better."
He stood in the doorway a moment longer, watching her. She did not look at him, but she felt the weight of it, quiet and steady, and found she did not mind it at all.
That, she recognized with some alarm, was precisely the problem. She was not minding things she should probably mind: the sound of his voice reading aloud in the evenings; the way his face changed when she made him laugh; the brief, warm weight of his hand on her arm on the stairs. She began minding very much that she was starting to care for him.
Caring for someone who was running out of time felt like building a house in a flood plain: beautiful, foolish, and likely to end in ruin.
She decided to find him a cure. She simply did not tell him yet.