"I should go back," she said.
"Yes." He did not argue. "But, Miss Forsyth..." She turned. "...what you said last night about the cautionary tale—it was the most interesting thing anyone has said to me in several years."
She walked back to the house with his eyes on her the entire way.
The celebratory dinner that evening was long and bright and expensive. Her uncle had hired musicians. Georgiana wore ivory silk that made her look like something from a watercolor painting.
Madeleine sat at the far end of the table between a great-uncle who slept through the fish course and a second cousin intent on describing the light over Florence in greater detail than Florence itself probably warranted. She ate and drank less wine than she wanted, and tried not to look to the other end of the table where the Duke sat beside Georgiana's mother, speaking when spoken to and offering nothing he had not been asked for.
Twice during the evening she looked up and found him already looking at her. Both times, the steadiness of it went through her like a note struck on a tuning fork.
An elderly woman across the table caught her eye.
"That's Aunt Edith," her mother had said when they'd arrived. "Your grandmother's youngest sister. Rather sharp, doesn't get out much."
Aunt Edith was regarding Madeleine now with the alert, unillusioned gaze of someone who had organized a great many years of observation into categories.
"He watches you," Aunt Edith said without preamble.
Madeleine looked up from her plate. "I beg your pardon?"
"The Duke. He watches you."
"I'm sure you are mistaken, ma'am."
"I am ninety-one years old, child. The one thing I am not is mistaken about men watching women. I have watched too many men watch too many women to miss it." She took a small sip of her wine. "Does he frighten you?"
"No." The answer was true, and it surprised her.
"Good. He should not. He is merely a man who has had a very bad time of it and has not yet found his reason to stop." Aunt Edith tilted her head. "You might be the reason."
"Aunt Edith."
"I am not romantic, child. I am practical. He is looking for someone honest." The old woman's eyes were sharp as winter light. "You are the only honest person in this room. The mathematics are not complicated."
Madeleine had nothing to say to that. She returned to her plate and tried not to think about eyes finding hers in a room full of candlelight.
She went to the library after the company dispersed because she always went to the library.
The library at Fernside Hall was small and smelled of old paper, and she loved it immediately. She stood at the window with a volume of poetry she was not reading and let herself feel the particular exhaustion of an evening spent being invisible.
"I hoped you might come here."
She did not start. She had half-expected it.
The Duke closed the library door and stood with his hands behind his back, and in the firelight he looked less like a legend and more like a man who needed something.
"We should not be here alone," she said.
"The household is in the kitchens. I checked." A pause. "I seem to be making a habit of checking."
She turned to face him. "What did you want to say?"
"I wanted to say..." He stopped, started again. "I have been thinking about what you said this morning, about truth costing something." He crossed to stand near the fire. "I have spent five years telling myself that my grief was the truest thing about me. That it defined me, explained me. And I think I may have used it as protection, as an excuse not to want anything."
"What has changed?"
He looked at her. "You."
Madeleine's heart moved in a way that was alarming and entirely outside her control. "You met me yesterday."
"I know." His voice was quiet. "I am as surprised as you are. I am not, in the ordinary way, a man who is susceptible to..." He gestured at the space between them. "...to this. But you said something this morning that I cannot put down: that everything true costs something. And I have been thinking that I have been choosing the safety of feeling nothing and telling myself it was virtue. That is a kind of lie I am no longer willing to tell."
Madeleine thought of everything she had swallowed over twenty-four years: every word bitten back, every smile performed, every hour spent trying to be smaller so the space she occupied would not inconvenience anyone.
"I know that lie," she said.