He drew Eleanor Shaw into the waltz frame, his right hand at her waist, her hand light and trembling in his, her other hand resting on the arm that did not hold the cane. For he had not surrendered the cane and could not. And she seemed to understand this without being told and adjusted herself to it, taking a little of his weight without ever seeming to. So that to the watching room it looked less like a man leaning on a girl and more like two people simply holding one another up.
And they danced.
It was not graceful. He would not pretend afterward that it had been graceful. He moved slowly, deliberately, turning her in small, careful arcs, his bad leg dragging a fraction on each turn, his jaw set with the concentration of a man doing a hard thing well. She was clumsy and earnest and stepped on his foot twice and apologized both times in a fierce whisper and gripped his hand so hard he could feel her pulse hammering. But they danced.
Around and around the great mirrored floor, alone, watched by the whole of society, a wounded duke and a housemaid, moving together to a slow waltz played by an old man who understood.
"You are shaking, Miss Shaw," Nathaniel said quietly, so only she could hear.
"I am terrified, Your Grace," she said, equally quietly and with a flash of something that was almost humor. "I expect I shall be dismissed before morning and possibly imprisoned, and my mother will be very cross with me, and I find I do not care in the least."
"Why did you do it?" he asked. It was the only question that mattered. "You risked everything for a stranger, for a man who cannot even remember your face in a fortnight most likely. Why?"
Eleanor Shaw was quiet for a turn of the waltz. When she spoke, her voice had lost its tremor.
"Because my brother came home from the war, too," she said. "The same war. He came home without his right arm and half of what he used to be, and he could not find work because who wants a one-armed clerk? And he sat in our mother's kitchen for two years growing smaller and smaller while people who had never left England told him what a shame it was and how brave and moved along quickly so they need not look at him. And he died last winter, Your Grace. Not of his wound. Of being made to feel that his wound was all anyone would ever see. Of being pitied to death by people who thought pity was the same as kindness."
Her chin came up. "And then I stood in that corner tonight holding my tray and I watched them do it to you. The same thing. Exactly the same thing. That man telling you to sit down with the infirm and everyone laughing and you standing there so straight and so alone and I thought—I thought no, not this time. Not while I have breath. I could not save my brother. But I would be damned before I would stand and hold a tray and watch it happen to another good man in front of me and do nothing."
Nathaniel Crane, Duke of Deverell, who had not wept when they set his broken leg and had not wept at the graves of better men than himself, felt his throat close so hard he could not speak for a moment and had to look away over her head at the blur of watching faces until he had command of himself again.
"Your brother," he said at last roughly, "what was his name?"
"Thomas."
"Then we shall dance this one for Thomas," said the duke, "if you will permit it. And you will not be dismissed, Miss Shaw. You have my word on it and my word is not nothing, whatever they may say of the rest of me."
They finished the waltz. When the last note faded, the ballroom was utterly silent. A silence with something uncertain in it now, something shifting. For it is one thing to sneer at a wounded man standing alone, and quite another to sneer at him after you have watched a serving girl place herself between him and your cruelty, and dance with him with tears standing in her eyes. Some of the watchers had the grace to look ashamed. Percival Anstey had gone a dull red and was studying the floor.
And then from the far end of the room, a single pair of hands began to clap.
It was an old woman in the dowager's chair by the great fireplace. The Dowager Countess of Marbeck, eighty years old, sharp as a blade, who had buried two sons in earlier wars and outlived every fool in the room and cared nothing at all for what anyone thought of her. She clapped slowly and deliberately, her rings flashing, her old eyes fixed on the duke and the maid with fierce approval.
And after a stunned moment, another pair of hands joined her, and then another, and then, because a crowd will follow courage once someone braver has shown the way, the applause spread across the great room like a fire catching, until the whole ballroom that had mocked the Duke of Deverell was on its feet applauding him and the girl who had stood with him. And something none of them could quite have named, but all of them in that moment felt.
Nathaniel stood in the middle of it with Eleanor Shaw's hand still in his, and did not let go.
He kept his word, better than his word. Before the night was out, he had spoken privately with his hostess and with Eleanor's employer, and by the terms he set—terms no one cared to refuse a duke, especially a duke the whole room had just applauded—Eleanor Shaw was released from service into a position of his own devising. He would not have her a maid. He offered her first a place assisting the steward's wife at Deverell at a wage that made her weep, and she took it and came north.