The guest room she had been assigned was pleasant enough, the bed good, the curtains heavy, but Madeleine lay in the dark and felt the familiar restlessness move through her, the one that came from being surrounded by people who did not see her, or who saw her only as a problem. She rose before the household and slipped out into the grounds as the sky went from black to pewter.
The gardens at Fernside Hall were formal at the front and wild at the back. She chose the wild. There was a kitchen garden behind the east wing, then a meadow, then a line of old beeches at the property's edge. She walked until the house was small behind her.
"You do not sleep either."
She stopped.
The Duke of Whitmore was leaning against one of the old trees, his coat folded over his arm, his collar open. He looked less like a force of nature in the predawn light, and more like a person who had run out of somewhere better to be.
"Not in strange houses," she said. "Not well."
"I don't sleep well in any house." He was quiet a moment. "Strange ones are worse. Familiar ones merely give you better excuses to stay awake."
She considered retreating. The sensible part of her said she should, but her feet did not move. They had developed a habit of disagreeing with the sensible part.
"What keeps you awake?" she asked.
He looked at her, and she had the impression that people did not usually ask him direct questions—that they moved around him carefully, the way one moved around something that might shatter, or might bite.
"The choices that brought me to where I am," he said after a pause.
"And where is that?"
He looked back at the house. "Here. Attending a celebration for a family I barely know, at dawn, because it was preferable to remaining in my own home with my own thoughts."
Madeleine considered this. "That is an unusually honest answer."
"You seem to prefer honesty to courtesy. I thought I would try it."
She felt something catch in her chest. She had not expected to be seen, not this clearly, not by someone who had no reason to look. "What gave me away?" she asked.
"What you said last night, about the cautionary tale." He turned toward her. "Most people, when embarrassed, retreat into something bland, something forgivable. You said the true thing instead. It cost you something to say it."
"Everything true costs something," Madeleine said. "That is why most people choose fiction."
He was quiet—not the uncomfortable quiet of someone searching for a response, but the quiet of someone taking a thing seriously.
"The woman I was to marry," he said at last. His voice changed with the words, flattened slightly, the way voices did when something had been turned over so many times it had worn smooth. "Her name was Annelise."
Madeleine said nothing. She understood that silence was what was required.
"She died of a fever the December before our wedding. We had been engaged eight months. She was beautiful. Everyone said so. I believed it, in the way one believes things one has been told often enough." He paused. "I have spent five years grieving what I thought I lost, and it is only recently that I have begun to understand that I was also grieving what I never had. That she was kind to me and not always kind to others, and I did not see the latter because I was not the one she turned it on." His jaw tightened. "I tell myself I would have seen it eventually. I am not certain that it is true."
Madeleine felt the weight of what he had offered her: the risk of it, the cost of it.
"Thank you for telling me that," she said.
"Why thank me? It reflects no credit on me."
"It reflects honesty. That is credit enough." She met his eyes. "You said you saw something in me last night, that I choose truth over safety. You choose it, too. You just do it more quietly."
He stared at her for a long moment. Then, barely more than an exhale: "You see a great deal, Miss Forsyth."
"I have had nothing to do for three seasons but watch. You develop an eye."
Something in his face shifted. Not a smile, but something that preceded one, the way a horizon lightens before the sun actually appears.
"I should tell you," he said, "that I heard more of what your cousin said last night than you may realize. I was in the corridor before I entered the room."
Madeleine went still. "How much more?"
"Enough." His voice was quiet and certain. "Enough to understand what you live with in that family."
"She doesn't mean to be cruel." The words came automatically, the old reflexive defense.
"She does," he said gently. "I think that is precisely what you cannot bring yourself to believe, and I think that disbelief is the kindest thing about you, and I think it has caused you a great deal of harm."
Madeleine said nothing. She looked at the beeches, at the light coming through the leaves. She was not going to cry. She had not cried in front of another person in four years, and she was not going to start now, in a meadow at dawn, with a man she had met the previous evening.