And Nathaniel Crane understood in that moment that he loved her entirely and without hope of recovery, and had loved her most likely since she set down her tray.
He did not speak of it for a long while. He was afraid—a man who had faced cannon was afraid—that she had come to him out of that same fierce compassion that had made her dance with him. A duty owed to her brother's memory and paid to the nearest wounded man. And that beneath the friendship there was only kindness, and that if he spoke of love he would frighten her away or worse, trap her by his rank into a gratitude she would mistake for feeling.
So he said nothing and grew quietly wretched with the not saying until Eleanor, who missed very little, cornered him one evening in the library.
"You have been avoiding me for a week," she said without preamble. "You go silent when I come into a room and you find urgent business elsewhere. And yesterday you fairly fled the conservatory when I came to cut the roses. I am not a fool, Your Grace, whatever my birth. If I have done something to offend you, I would rather you told me plainly than treated me like a ghost you are trying not to see."
Nathaniel set down the book he had not been reading. He looked at her standing there fierce and uncertain in the lamplight, and he thought that he had never in his life met anyone so brave, and that a coward's silence was a poor way to repay it.
"You have not offended me," he said. "The reverse. I have been avoiding you, Miss Shaw, because I am in love with you and I did not know how to be near you without saying so, and I did not wish to say so because I could not bear for you to feel that my rank obliged you to a feeling you do not have. You came to me out of compassion. You danced with me for your brother's sake and stayed to be kind to a broken man, and I will not... I will not turn your kindness into a cage. So, I said nothing. And in saying nothing, I have made you think I was displeased with you, which is the last thing on this earth I am. There. Now, you have it plainly."
Eleanor Shaw stood very still. The color came up in her face as it had that first night in the ballroom. "You great, brave, blind fool of a man," she said, and her voice shook. "You think I danced with you for Thomas?"
"Did you not?"
"I stood up for you for Thomas," she said. "That is a different thing. I put myself between you and those laughing people because of my brother, yes, because I could not bear it. But I danced with you, Nathaniel Crane, and I stepped on your foot twice, and I gripped your hand till my knuckles ached, and I looked up into your face while that old man played us a waltz. And somewhere in the second turn of it, I stopped dancing for Thomas and started dancing for myself. Because I had never in my life felt so much like a person as I did with your hand at my waist, and your eyes on mine. Treating a housemaid like she was the only woman in a room full of duchesses."
"I have loved you since before I knew your Christian name. I stayed at Deverell because I could not make myself leave, and I have spent this whole wretched week thinking you had realized what I was—a servant, a nobody, a girl who forgot her place—and repented of ever bringing me here."
A tear spilled over. "So, do not tell me about compassion, Your Grace. I know the difference between pity and love better than most, God knows, and what I feel for you is not pity."
For a moment, the Duke of Deverell could not move. Then, he crossed the room to her slowly, with his cane in the halting, deliberate gait that no longer, when she was watching, felt to him like a thing to be ashamed of, and he set the cane aside, and he took both her hands in both of his.
"Then I will ask you a second time," he said, "the question I asked you in the ballroom, though I mean something rather larger by it now. Miss Shaw, Eleanor, would you honor me for the rest of my life and yours with the next dance and every dance and every day between?"
"I have never danced a step in a room like this in my life," Eleanor whispered, laughing and crying at once, "and I shall very likely tread on your foot."
"I am counting on it," said Nathaniel Crane, and kissed her.
They were married at Deverell that summer, and the Dowager Countess of Marbeck, who had begun the applause, came all the way north in her ancient carriage to see it done, and pronounced the new Duchess the only sensible woman to enter that family in sixty years.
Society, which had mocked the wounded duke, discovered within a season that it had always thought the match the most romantic in England, that it had personally admired the Duke of Deverell's courage all along, and found the story of the brave girl who danced with him quite the most touching thing it had ever heard. Nathaniel let them think what they liked. He had learned in a harder school than any ballroom what the applause of a crowd was worth and what it was not.
He danced at his own wedding. It was slow and it was careful, and he leaned on his bride more than a little, and no one who saw it ever forgot it. Percival Anstey was not invited.
His leg never healed straight, and there were cold days to the end of his life when it pained him, and he needed the cane and the fire built high. But he was never again, in all the years that followed, a man defined by his wound, for he had married a woman who had looked past it before she ever knew his name, who saw a soldier where others saw a ruin, and who reminded him in ten thousand small unspoken ways across a long and happy life that a man does not dance with his leg.
He dances with his partner. And Nathaniel Crane, Duke of Deverell, danced with his to the end of his days and counted himself, wound and all, the most fortunate man in England.