"Good God, man, you look like a corpse propped up at his own wake. Why do you not sit? There are chairs for the—" He laughed. "—for the infirm along the wall. No shame in it. We all understand."
A little knot of listeners had gathered, sensing sport. Nathaniel felt their eyes.
"I am quite comfortable standing, thank you," he said. His voice was low and even, the voice of a man who had given orders under fire.
"Are you?" Anstey's smile widened. "Only I wondered—forgive me—whether you can still manage it long. They say the leg's near useless. Damned bad luck. Still, one supposes a man in your condition must be grateful merely to be upright. The dancing days are behind you, eh? Behind us all one day, but sooner for some."
He turned to his audience, pleased with himself. "We must be gentle with our wounded heroes. Give them a chair and a rug and a fond memory of the men they used to be."
The listeners tittered. It was exactly calibrated. Not quite an insult one could call out, wrapped in false kindness, designed to make a proud man small before a crowd. Nathaniel had met the type on both sides of the channel. He said nothing, because there was nothing to say that would not make it worse. And he fixed his eyes on the middle distance and endured as he had endured worse, and told himself that in an hour he would be home, and that the opinion of Percival Anstey was worth less than the mud he had marched through.
But something in him had gone very cold and very still, the way it went before a charge. And he knew that if he stood there one moment longer, he would either say something unforgivable or let them see, at last, what their kindness cost him, and he could not permit either.
He turned to go.
And a voice, clear and quiet and quite unafraid, said, "Your Grace, would you honor me with the next dance?"
The whole knot of people went silent. Nathaniel turned.
It was the girl with the tray. She had set it down somewhere. Her hands were empty now and folded before her apron, and she was standing in the middle of the polished floor where no servant had any business standing, looking up at the Duke of Deverell with color high in her cheeks and her chin lifted and terror in her eyes and not one particle of it in her voice.
For a moment no one breathed. It was an impossible thing she had done. A maid, a servant, addressing a duke, asking him to dance, breaking every rule of precedence and place and decorum in a royal ballroom before half the peerage of England. It could cost her her position. It could cost her worse. Lady Anstey's mouth had fallen open. Somewhere a fan snapped shut like a pistol shot.
Nathaniel looked at her. He looked at the fear she was mastering and the courage it was costing her and the reason she was doing it, which was written plainly in the way she had placed herself between him and the sniggering crowd—a slip of a girl in a servant's apron shielding a wounded duke with nothing but her own body and her own nerve.
"I cannot dance, I am afraid," he said, and he was surprised at how gentle his own voice came out. "My leg, you will have heard. Everyone has heard."
"I have heard a great deal of nonsense tonight, Your Grace," the girl said steadily, "and I have decided not to believe any of it. I do not think a man dances with his leg. I think he dances with his partner, and I should be very glad of the honor if you are willing to be patient with a partner who has never danced a step in a room like this in her life and will very likely tread on your foot."
Something moved in Nathaniel Crane's chest that had not moved in eighteen months. "What is your name?" he asked.
"Eleanor, Your Grace. Eleanor Shaw."
"Miss Shaw." The Duke of Deverell shifted his cane to his left hand and held out his right, and across the whole silent, staring, scandalized ballroom, he inclined his head to a housemaid with the same grave courtesy he would have shown a princess. "The honor would be entirely mine."
The music had stopped between sets. Now the leader of the little orchestra, an old man who had played at court for forty years and had seen a great many things, looked at the duke and the maid standing in the middle of the floor, and looked at the frozen, appalled faces of the fine people all around, and made a decision of his own.
He lifted his bow. He did not strike up a quadrille, which needs many couples and much moving about. He struck up instead a slow waltz, a simple, stately, forgiving thing, all gentle turns and small steps, the kind of dance a man might manage with a bad leg and a cane and a great deal of care. Nathaniel understood the kindness of it at once and was grateful and did not show it.