Chapter One

“What manner of gentleman keeps an actress at Richmond, yet escorts his wife into a ballroom upon his own arm?” Alethea asked, placing her cup in its saucer with a care far greater than the porcelain required.

Cecily Ansell took her time arranging her skirts along the window seat before she troubled to answer. “The sort who is heir to a marquessate, my dear. Men of that description are not ruined by the things that would ruin you or me inside a single season.”

“Then, I do declare that creation is but a flawed engine, and I cannot bring myself to admire its grand designer.”

“You may be as averse to its design all you please. Lord Darrow will be at the Hartfields’ on Thursday regardless, and so will his wife, and so, I am reliably told, will the actress, though in a plainer gown and situated in a further room.” Cecily let her gaze travel across the drawing room, to where the man in question was laughing at his own remark. “The wife has learned to smile through the whole performance. I have not yet decided whether to pity her or to study the method.”

“A respectable man would not require her to learn it.” Alethea kept the firmness in her voice and made no attempt to soften it. “He would simply not keep an actress at Richmond, and there would be nothing for her to smile through.”

“And there, in one sentence, you have arrived at all your difficulty.” Cecily’s smile went a degree gentler. “You have divided all of mankind into respectable men and the other kind, and you carry the two lists about with you as though they were stitched into the lining of your reticule. It is a very tidy arrangement. It will not survive its first contact with an actual husband.”

“I have met respectable men, Cecily. I am not describing a creature out of a fable.”

“You have met men who have not yet given you occasion to move them from the one list to the other. That is not at all the same thing.” She said it without heat, the way she said most true things, and reached over to straighten a fold of Alethea’s sleeve that did not need straightening. “Consider only Sir Henry Vaudrey, whom you would have sworn on the plate was the soundest man in Kent, until his brother’s widow was turned out of the dower house within the month of the funeral and nobody could quite say why. He was respectable in every room where being otherwise would have cost him. That is the most common sort by a wide margin, and you insist on not believing in it.”

“I insist on believing that a man’s conduct is a fact about him, and not a coat he puts on for the weather.”

“A gentleman’s public manners belong to the drawing room. His private conduct belongs to his soul. You, my dear, have seen precious little of the private man.” Cecily patted the sleeve and withdrew her hand. “The world holds rather fewer respectable men than your governess allowed you to imagine, and a great many more who are simply respectable where it pays. You are thirty years old, my dear, and you have refused every offer that was ever put to you, and refused each one upon the same ground, which is that the man did not survive the sorting. Four times I have watched you do it. I have admired the principle on each occasion and credited it upon none. When they wed you at last, and they will, you would be wiser to expect the second sort and be pleasantly astonished by the first.”

“That is a bleak sermon to preach to a woman over her own tea.”

“It is a kind one, which you will understand in about ten years. Now tell me who has come in, since you have been watching the door since I sat down and pretending the whole while to watch me.”

Alethea allowed the matter to rest, because holding on to it would have obliged her to argue a thing she fully intended to continue believing regardless. She turned the topic to gowns, to the Hartfields, and to whether they were to be inflicted with that dreadful lobster once more; thus the warning glanced off her without taking root, and was, within the quarter-hour, utterly erased from her mind.

The gathering was not quite a party. Her father called it an evening. The rooms were full, and the candles were good, and a quartet in the next room produced music that nobody attended to.

Into the middle of it came Philip Arden, and Alethea observed, with the mild interest she kept for the enemy’s relations, an entire room of Selwyns fail to dislike him.

He had come with the Dowager, which was itself a small piece of daring, an Arden crossing a Selwyn drawing room on the arm of the oldest Arden alive. He did it lightly, and admired the pictures without flattering them, and when old Lady Marbury asked him outright whether he did not find it strange to stand among the enemy, he laughed as though she had paid him a compliment.

“I find it a great relief, ma’am,” he said. “I have spent nine and forty years being the second-best Arden in every room I entered, and I had begun to think it a settled condition of the blood. Here at least I am merely an Arden, which is the first promotion anyone has offered me in a decade.”

“You are very frank about your own disappointments, sir,” the old woman said, pleased.

“It is the one estate I have entirely to myself, ma’am. I should be a poor steward if I did not show it to visitors.”

Half the room laughed with him. Alethea, against a lifetime’s instruction, found she had half laughed with them.

He found her by the window a little after, and did not ask her for anything, which she marked at once, because everyone else that evening had wanted a thing from her and had circled toward it through three minutes of weather.

“You are Lady Alethea,” he said. “Do not trouble to be pleasant to me. I am the cousin nobody thought to warn you about, and I have made it my whole business this year to be no trouble to anybody, which I find is the surest way to be remembered later as a great comfort.”

“That is a remarkably honest ambition.”

“It is the only one left me. My cousin has the title, the estate, all my grandmother’s affection, and now, I am given to understand, a bride out of the very house that has spent thirty years trying to see us all hanged.” He said it with such perfect good humour that it took her a beat to hear the shape underneath the words. “I am to be a groomsman, apparently, and to look delighted. I intend to be very good at it. A man must be good at something.”

“You do not sound as though the match pleases you.”

“It pleases nobody, Lady Alethea, which is the one genuinely reconciling thing about it.” He inclined his head, and there was nothing in his face but a rueful, tired kindness. “Whoever takes the place as the new grace will want a friend in that house once they are inside it. I only mean to say I am the least dangerous man in it, and offer my services whenever needed.”

She nodded graciously in agreement and smiled gently, and he drifted off to be pleasant to somebody else. She thought no more about him that night than the fact he was the single Arden she had ever met whom she could imagine liking. She would have cause, within the year, to remember she had thought it.

***

Her father sent for her before the candles were half burned.

The library had been cleared of everyone not required, which told her more than any announcement could have done. The Earl of Selwyn stood at his own cold hearth and did not trouble to have it lit. The Dowager Duchess of Rothmere, who was called Lady Helena by most people because she had outlived a duke, buried most of a generation, and declined to be defined by either achievement, sat very upright in the best chair and inspected the joinery. Two solicitors held the table with their papers squared before them. By the far window, a little apart from all of it, stood a tall man in dark blue whom she had never met but knew on sight. There was only one Arden in England who could stand in a Selwyn library and make the room look faintly improved by his consenting to remain in it.

“Alethea.” Her father did not sit. “You will hear this once, and you will hear it out to the end before you say a word, and I will thank you to remember there are people in this room who did not come to watch us quarrel.”

“Then perhaps you had better tell me whom I am entering into matrimony with, Papa, since you have plainly settled it already without troubling to mention it was in question.”

At that, the Duke of Rothmere turned from the window, his raven hair dark against the pale light. His slate-grey eyes made a slow, appraising sweep of her figure, from the hem of her gown to the tilt of her chin, and she tasted the brief, exquisite satisfaction of watching a man realise he had gravely underestimated his obstacle.

“Benedict Arden, Duke of Rothmere,” her father said, and set the name down flat between them. “In six weeks, at Fenwick, under the Archbishop’s special licence, which is applied for already at Doctors’ Commons and will be granted, because it is always granted where the applicant is a duke. The settlement is drawn. It wants only the signatures, and yours is the last of them, and it will be given.”

“Six weeks.” She kept her hands still against her skirts, which cost her a good deal. “You have known these people to be devils since before I drew breath. You have told me so at every dinner of my life. And now you propose to hand me across the boundary in six weeks and call the result a peace.”

“Mr Frayne,” her father said. “Read her the ninth article.”

The elder solicitor drew a single sheet toward him and read it in a voice wholly without weather, having read the thing so often that he had stopped hearing it.

“The disputed lands of Bellmere, comprising the north water-meadows, the borough acreage, and the tenanted farms thereto belonging, shall be held as joint tenants, in equal shares and moieties by the houses of Arden and Selwyn. The said joint tenancy shall subsist only so long as the matrimony between Benedict Arden, Duke of Rothmere, and Lady Alethea Selwyn shall subsist and be maintained, and shall be further conditional upon the birth of a living heir of the said matrimony within three years of its solemnisation. Should the matrimony be dissolved, or should no living heir be born within the term so prescribed, the joint tenancy shall thereupon determine, and the whole of the disputed lands shall revert to arbitration.”

He set the sheet down, folded his hands upon it, and looked at nobody.

“You will forgive me,” Alethea said, into a silence with an edge on it, “if I require a moment. I have just been read the terms of my own breeding, in a clean hand, by a man to whom I have never been introduced, while my father warms himself at a fire he has not troubled to light.”

“Lady Alethea.” The second solicitor, younger, cleared his throat, a duty he had plainly spent the whole evening dreading. “If it assists you to know what is refused along with it. The suit between the houses stands upon the boundary, upon the disputed borough, and upon eleven years of arrears claimed by each side against the other. An arbitration of the whole would run four years at the very least, and neither estate, I am obliged to say, could carry the costs of it and remain whole. This article is not the harshest instrument in the settlement. It is the one that spares six hundred families a slow ruin.”

“And the borough?” she said. “You have slid it in among the water-meadows as though it were a hedge nobody would miss. My father has wanted that borough since before I could read my letters. Am I to understand it comes to us jointly, or comes to us at all?”

“Jointly, my lady, and only while the article holds. Should the article fail, the borough returns to the suit along with everything else.”

“So I am not merely to enter into a matrimony with an Arden. I am to be the single thread by which my father’s borough hangs, and to be reminded of the fact every quarter-day for three years together.”

“That is a harsh construction to put upon it, Lady Alethea.”

“It is an accurate one, Mr I do not think I have your name?”

“Loft, my lady.”

“It is an accurate one, Mr Loft, and I observe you have contradicted the temperature of it and not one word of the substance.”

“You cannot settle thirty years of hatred by placing me in the middle of it and calling the result a peace,” she said, turning from the solicitor to the man who had drafted the thing. “Call it a truce, or a hostage traded across a boundary, and I will not argue with you. You will not, in my hearing, call it a peace, because a peace is something two parties want, and I have been asked at no stage what it is that I want.”

“Six hundred tenants have no interest whatever in what you want,” her father said, and there was no unkindness in it. “Nor, if I am to be honest, have I the luxury of a great deal of interest in it myself. You are not being asked to be happy, Alethea. You are being asked to be wedded, which is a far commoner request, and by every account considerably easier to satisfy.”

The duke had said nothing through all of it. She turned on him now, because he was the nearer target and because his silence had stretched well past courtesy and begun to feel deliberate.

“And you, Your Grace? Are you content to stand at that window and let it be arranged over your head as though you were a parcel of the borough acreage yourself? Or do the Ardens purchase their peace so cheaply that a whole duke may be spent on it without one word of complaint?”

“I was informed of the bride some hours after I was informed of the date, Lady Alethea.” His voice was low and very even, and a held-down anger moved under the evenness that had nothing to do with calm. “I would not have you imagine I am enjoying any greater freedom in this room than you are. We differ chiefly in that I have had some years’ more practice at concealing the fact, and I was, until you turned round, under the pleasant impression I was doing it rather well.”

“Your family bought this peace. Do not stand there and feign the victim in my presence.”

“My family accepted a price that yours named,” he said. “If you wish to know who first laid the sum on the table, I would direct your enquiries a little nearer the cold hearth than the window.”

Her father’s jaw worked, and he did not deny it.

“I look forward,” the Dowager said, into the small unpleasant gap that opened after, “to a great-grandson. I have been very patient on the subject, and I am eight and seventy, and patience at my age is an extravagance I can no longer afford. The two of you may glare at one another across every breakfast between here and the grave for all it concerns me, provided only that you glare across a full nursery while you are about it.”

“You are very plain, ma’am,” Alethea said.

“I am very old, child, which is the same thing with the manners worn off it. I have watched two families throw thirty years and a great deal of money onto a fire, and not one of them can any longer tell me what the quarrel was first about. If a wedding is what puts it out, I will dance at it on the legs I have left, and I will not pretend to either of you that it is anything grander than a bucket of water thrown upon a piece of ruinous, costly blaze.”

“You would have me grateful for the bucket, ma’am,” Alethea said.

“I would have you sensible of it, child, which is rarer and worth a good deal more. Gratitude I can do without. I have buried three husbands’ worth of it and can tell you to the shilling what it was worth.”

“Three, ma’am?”

“Two of my own and one I inherited along with a house I did not want, and not one of the three was ever thanked half as prettily as he thought he deserved. Wed the boy, put a child in the nursery, and quarrel with him for the next forty years if it amuses you. It will suit you better than this house has done, and I say so as a woman who has watched your father across a dinner table and pitied every plate set before you.”

It should have been outrageous. It was, instead, so entirely without malice, so plainly the honest wish of a very old woman who had watched two houses waste three decades on a quarrel neither could still explain, that Alethea found she had no answer ready that would not have been a discourtesy to the one person in the room who had said a true thing.

She looked at the duke. He was already looking at her, and for one moment, before either thought the better of it, a look passed between them that was very near to recognition, two people sold to close a bargain, meeting each other’s eyes across the open page of it.

“I will sign,” she said. “For the tenants, and for whatever cousins and nieces would otherwise inherit this war along with the plate. I will not sign for you, Your Grace, and I will not sign for my father, and I will thank neither to imagine for a moment that I have.”

“I would not dream of imagining it,” the duke said. “I have quite enough on hand imagining it of myself.”

“Then we are agreed upon the one thing, and it is a start of a kind, though a poor one.” She turned for the door and stopped with her hand upon it, because there was something she wanted said before she left the room and was not certain she would have the courage for later. “I will be civil to you in public, sir, because six hundred families require it of me. I have promised nothing whatever about being fond of you, and I do not intend to, and you would be a simpleton to want it.”

“I have never in my life wanted a thing so heavily conditioned,” he said. “You may rest quite easy on that account. I am not the beast your family have been describing to you these thirty years, though I grant you it is early days to be proving it, and you have every reason to keep your doubts a while yet.”

She paused with the door half open, because there was one more thing she wanted, and wanted it now, in the only room the two families had ever been honest in. “One question, Your Grace, and I will have a true answer or none. When they told you the bride’s name, what did you say?”

He was quiet a moment, and she thought he would decline it. “I asked whether there had been no one else available,” he said. “It was ungallant, and I withdraw it, and I will not pretend to you that I did not say it or that I did not mean it at the time.”

“Splendid!” She found she could look at him without the old distaste, which alarmed her more than the matrimony had. “It is the first thing the two of us have held in common, and I would rather we began by owning it than by being dishonest about it over a wedding breakfast.”

“Then we begin honestly, and we dislike one another honestly,” he said, “which is already more than either house has managed in thirty years. I find a man can build on that, given a little time.”

“Do not build too high upon a single shared discourtesy, sir. It is a poor foundation, and I have agreed to sign a settlement, not to admire the house you raise on it.”

She left before she could discover whether she wished to smile, because wishing to smile at an Arden, on this of all nights, was the species of disorder her whole upbringing had been built to prevent, and she had every intention of preventing it a good while longer.

Chapter Two

Benedict handed his intended down from the carriage for the fourth time in three days, before the fourth set of watching windows, and arranged his face into the expression of a man delighted to be doing it.

The performance had a name in his household. His grandmother called it courting, and the entire Arden establishment had thrown itself into the fiction with an enthusiasm he found faintly obscene, given that every soul beneath his roof knew the matrimony had been drafted by a solicitor and read aloud without inflection. He had walked her through the Rothmere gardens while the gardeners silently observed them and sat beside her at two dinners while the county inspected them closely, and driven her the length of the ridge road in an open carriage so the ridge road bear witness to their courting.

“Pray, there is no occasion to hold the carriage door quite so fiercely, Your Grace,” she said in a low voice while still smiling for the windows. “They will conclude you are afraid I mean to bolt.”

“I am chiefly afraid the step is loose. I have a duty of care to the merchandise until the sale is concluded.”

“That is very nearly amusing. Do be careful. If you make me laugh in a Selwyn courtyard, my father will have the flagstones taken up and examined for Arden influence.”

“Then we are safe. I have never once succeeded in making a Selwyn laugh, and I do not propose to begin the habit on your father’s own stones.”

“You are closer to it than you know, sir, which is the most alarming thing anybody has said to me all week.”

He had learned, during their time together, that Lady Alethea Selwyn conducted a public courtship as he did, with a bright and total insincerity that would not have disgraced the stage, and that she disliked the whole business as much as he. Today’s watching windows belonged to Bellmere, and the man waiting on its steps was the reason he had insisted they come.

Ambrose Selwyn had administered the disputed estate for eleven years on a commission, and he greeted the pair of them with the warmth of a man greeting the tide. He gave them the tour, fluent and unhurried and helpful in every particular that cost him nothing, and when Benedict asked about the low field, where the water had stood since the winter and killed the grass in a long dark tongue toward the beck, Ambrose turned courteous and vague and impossible to pin to a figure.

“The works below the meadow are not carrying, Mr Selwyn,” Benedict said. “I can see it from here. What has been spent on them, and when?”

“There have been works, Your Grace, and there will be further works, and I should not like to hand you a figure I could not stand behind.”

“I did not ask for a figure you could stand behind. I asked for the one that was spent.”

“The soil is difficult here. It has always been difficult.” Ambrose smiled, unhurried still. “My father used to say Bellmere held water the way a Selwyn holds a grudge, which I hope you will forgive, sir, given the present company.”

“I would forgive it a great deal more readily if the field were dry. You will find me the papers before we leave, or you will explain to me why you cannot, and I confess I am already more interested in the second conversation than the first.”

Ambrose’s smile did not move a hair. “You will find, Your Grace, that an estate is a slower creature than a duke. What looks like idleness from a London road is very often only patience wearing plain clothes.”

“And what looks like patience from eleven years’ comfortable commission is very often the habit of never being asked. I am asking, Mr Selwyn. You will find me a novelty on that particular account, and I would recommend you adjust to it early.”

“I shall look forward to the education, sir.”

“See that you survive it,” Benedict said, pleasantly enough, and Ambrose laughed, and neither meant one syllable of the laughter.

They were still in the yard when the roof came down.

It was not the whole roof, only the back half of Jem Pardew’s cottage, a slow sodden collapse of thatch and one rotten purlin that had waited on the next hard rain and chosen that particular afternoon to have it. Pardew burst from the front of the house at full speed, a child tucked under each arm and the hound barking frantically at his heels, bellowing aloud for his wife. She was already out on the grass, and counted the children twice before she would believe she had both.

Benedict had his coat off before he had consciously decided to move.

“Your Grace, you needn’t trouble yourself,” Ambrose began. “The estate has men for this.”

“Then send for them. Pardew. Is that your name? Look at me, man. Is anyone under it?”

“No, sir. Your Grace. No.” Pardew was grey and shaking and holding his children as though the ground itself could no longer be trusted underfoot. “It’s only the back of it, he says. Only we’ve nowhere. It is the whole of the back of it, sir, and the winter coming, and I’ve the two little ones.”

“Then that is a thing that can be mended, which the alternative under that purlin would not have been. Attend to me. Who is the nearest carpenter, and where does he drink of an afternoon?”

“Coyle, sir. The Ferry, most likely at this hour.”

“Ambrose. A cart, a man on a fast horse to the Ferry for Coyle, and whoever keeps the estate stores. There is seasoned oak in the barn at the home farm, I walked past it not an hour since, and it is going to become a roof this afternoon.” He turned back to Pardew and put the plainness into his voice that the man had braced himself against smooth promises to hear. “Your roof will be sound by dark and dry by the week’s end. I will not tell you the low field will be right by autumn, because it will not, and I would sooner you cursed me for the truth now than for a kindness that failed you in October. Do you take my meaning?”

“I do, sir.” Pardew held his eye a moment, a man who had prepared himself for a duke’s easy generosity and been handed a duke’s difficult honesty instead, and the fright went out of him and he settled. “I shall take that over the other, sir, and thank you.”

And while Benedict argued oak with a reluctant Ambrose, Lady Alethea Selwyn drew off her gloves.

He caught it at the edge of his attention and then could not look away. She went into the wrecked half of the cottage with a maid and a lantern and came out with a list, in a clear upright hand on the back of a tradesman’s bill, of what was ruined and what was merely wet and what wanted only drying. Word went out, at her order, by a stable boy to an empty Selwyn cottage two miles off, one he had not known existed and she plainly had, and by the failing of the light the Pardews had a dry floor to sleep on that night and a wet one already becoming a roof.

He found her at the cart as the last light went, checking her list against what the boy had carried out. “You knew that cottage stood empty,” he said. “Two miles off, and ready, and you knew it to the hearthstone.”

“I know every empty house on this estate, Your Grace, and every full one, and which of the tenants my uncle has let quietly fall behind while he tells London the soil is difficult. It is not difficult so much as neglected, which is a cheaper word and a worse one, and he prefers the first.”

“Your uncle would not thank you for that sentence.”

“My uncle does not thank me for a great many of my sentences. It is among the few pleasures the arrangement has left me, and I mean to go on enjoying it. I was raised to run Bellmere, sir, and informed at seventeen that Bellmere would go to a cousin regardless. One does not unlearn an estate merely because one has been forbidden to care for it.”

***

She drew her gloves back on when the carriage took them up again and turned her face to the window, and it was Benedict who could not quite leave it be.

“You found that family a dry bed inside the hour and then declined to take the smallest credit for it,” he said. “I came here expecting Selwyn theatre. A great deal of noble sentiment and no dry beds at the end of it.”

“And I came expecting Arden indifference. A duke who would drive past a fallen roof sooner than dirty the sleeve of his coat.” She kept her face to the glass. “It appears we have each been labouring under vastly different impressions. I would not dignify our situation as a treaty. Sharing a single roof is no guarantee of peace.”

“No. But it is more than either of our grandfathers contrived in thirty years, so I propose we permit ourselves a moderate self-congratulation and then quarrel about something at once, to restore the natural order of things.”

“Willingly. Whose fault is the feud?”

“Yours,” he said. “Unambiguously and on the documents. Your grandfather called my great-uncle out over a boundary he had not the smallest business defending.”

“After your great-uncle stood up in a crowded ballroom and named my grandfather a fraud before ninety people and the better part of the diplomatic corps. One is generally expected to acknowledge such remarks.”

“Was he a fraud, then?”

“Was your great-uncle invulnerable to lead, or merely favoured by Providence? Because he conducted himself across all that decade as a man convinced that he was, and I will tell you the boundary stones had a curious habit of drifting Arden-ward whenever there was a good fog on the beck.”

“That is slander, madam, and I would call you out for it directly if I were not obliged to enter into matrimony with you on Tuesday fortnight, which does rather blunt the edge of a challenge.”

“It quite spoils the drama.” And there it was, the thing not one of them had leave to do. She laughed, and he laughed, in a moving carriage on the enemy’s land, and both heard it happen and neither could get it back afterwards.

He let a mile go by before he said the next thing, because the next thing was the reason he had wanted the carriage and not the drawing room.

“We should settle our terms,” he said. “Not the settlement. The other terms, the ones the solicitors are too delicate to draw and we shall the two of us suffer for wanting later. Tell me what you require of me, and I will tell you honestly whether I can give it, and neither will pretend afterwards it was not said aloud.”

She took a moment, ordering it. “Exclusivity,” she said. “Whatever else this matrimony proves to be, it will not be the arrangement my mother has borne, where a wife learns to smile in the one room while the other room is understood and never named. If I am to do this, I will not do it beside a woman kept at Richmond.”

“Agreed, without qualification. Name the next.”

“Respect. I do not mean flowers, Your Grace. I mean that I keep the ordering of my own house, and that I go on managing certain Selwyn concerns that are mine to manage, and that you do not, on the day it becomes convenient to you, discover that a wife’s affairs were her husband’s all along.”

“Agreed. The house is yours to order. Your concerns remain your own. I ask one thing only in exchange, which is to be told before I read a matter touching my estate in a stranger’s letter, and I will hold myself to the identical courtesy.”

“You have agreed to a great deal very quickly, sir. A cynical woman would suspect you of intending to break the lot of it the moment my back is turned.”

“A cynical woman would be describing my cousin Philip, not me, and you have not yet met enough of my family to tell the two of us apart.”

“You speak of your cousin the way one speaks of a draught beneath a door,” she said. “Constant, and not quite worth the trouble of naming aloud.”

“Philip is the most agreeable man in my family, and the one in whom I place the least reliance, and I have never once been able to give a reason for the second that would survive being said out loud in company. Put it down to an old habit of mine and think no more about it.”

“That is a singular disclosure to make to the woman you intend to bring under your roof.”

“It is. I would sooner say it myself, plainly, than have you form a warm attachment to him unwarned, though I daresay I have only succeeded in making him a great deal more interesting to you. There was a fourth thing. You have been holding it back since the low field.”

She came to it more slowly, and he understood she was circling the one term she had not decided how to phrase.

“I would ask that you keep no other establishment,” she said. “Now, or after. I have heard a great deal about Arden men across thirty years, and I would rather hear this from your own mouth than go on hearing it from the county.”

“I keep none, madam, and I will keep none.” He said it plainly, and it was plainly true. The last of the three arrangements of his life had been closed, honourably and by mutual consent and with a settlement drawn to protect the woman’s business, some three weeks before this matrimony was ever spoken of to him. He answered the question she had asked. The reckoning he kept of himself was scrupulous and lawyerly and entirely private, and what he handed her was the true present tense of it. It did not once cross his mind, in the warmth of a carriage where she had just laughed at his joke, that she might be hearing a sentence about all of a man’s history where he had spoken only of its present condition.

A note beneath her phrasing sat a little wrong. A flatness where he had expected relief. An assumption sitting behind the words like a stone under still water, the shape of a woman who had already decided what a duke’s I keep none was worth and was merely confirming the figure. It would have taken a single question to bring the matter up into the light. He had the question formed and ready. What is it you believe you have just been told, and who told it you, and how long ago did you decide it was true? He turned it over, and looked at her profile against the passing green, at the small unguarded ease that a month of hostility had not once shown him, and he set the question down unasked, because to ask it was to reopen the one subject that had gone well in a month of subjects going badly. A man does not, a fortnight from his own wedding, take a blade to the single seam holding the thing together. He told himself he was being kind. In truth he was being a coward, in the exact dialect of a man raised to treat every disclosure as a wound and every silence as a mercy, and it would cost the two of them more than either could yet have imagined. And so he said nothing, and the carriage rolled on, and the issue that would take the matrimony apart before it had begun was, just then, no larger than a question a careful man chose not to ask.

“And the last matter,” he said instead, because there was a last matter and it wanted saying before Tuesday fortnight. “The heir. I will not pretend the article is not written, and I will not have it lying between us in the dark as a duty neither had the courage to name. I ask only for honesty in it, and discretion, and that we come to it as two people cooperating in a thing rather than two enemies enduring it. Beyond that I ask nothing, and I will require nothing of you that you do not first offer.”

Her colour rose, and she kept her eyes on the glass, and she was some while answering. “I am aware of the necessity, Your Grace. I would be obliged if you did not oblige me to discuss the mechanics of it in a carriage, on a public road, before I have even the small dignity of a ring upon my hand.”

“Then we will not discuss them. I wished only for the door to be named, so that not one of us is left to open it in the dark and pretend to be surprised by what is behind it.”

“You are very careful of my dignity, Your Grace, for a man buying it up by the acre,” she said, though there was less edge in it than the words themselves carried.

“I am careful of it because it is very nearly the only thing in this arrangement that will still belong to you on Wednesday morning. The name will be mine, the house will be mine, and the county will call you by my title a full year before it troubles to learn your Christian one. Your dignity is the single article the solicitors could not draw up between them, and I will not have it spent before you have so much as worn it once.”

She looked at him then, properly, and for rather longer than the courtship required of her. “That is either the kindest thing anyone has said to me in a month or the most calculated. I confess I cannot yet tell you which.”

“Nor can I, in all honesty. Ask me again in a twelvemonth, when one of the two of us is bound to know.”

They had left the Bellmere road and turned in under the limes before the Selwyn dower house, where the day’s courtship was to be seen concluding itself. The coachman had slowed the horses through the trees, and the light came down through the leaves across her in a way that undid, for a moment, a month of his careful indifference.

“May I?” he said.

She turned from the window. “May you what?”

“I think you know very well what. I would rather ask it badly than take it smoothly. May I?”

She ought to have uttered a refusal indeed, and he had steeled himself for the blow. Instead, she held his gaze without flinching, a stray tendril of deep auburn hair framing her brow. In the emerald depths of her eyes lay an unspoken defiance, a question addressed as much to her own heart as to him, before she murmured, “The casements on this side look out upon the orchard. And there is no one in the orchard.”

He took that for the yes it was.

He kissed her slowly, because he had wanted to since he laid his eyes upon her and did not mean to squander it in haste, and because slowness was the one honest thing he had to offer inside a matrimony built wholly of arrangements. She held still against him at first, braced, waiting to find some ground on which to disapprove of it. Then her breath broke on a single caught unsteadiness against his mouth, the bracing went out of her all at once, and she turned into him rather than away from him.

“You are meant to be enduring this, madam,” he said against her mouth.

“I am perfectly aware of what I am meant to be doing.” Her hands had found the front of his coat and were pulling him closer rather than holding him off. “I find I have developed very little interest in doing so.”

The carriage stood under the limes in the green half-dark, and he had her back against the panelling of the door, one hand at the nape of her neck and the other learning the shape of her through the muslin. She made a low sound into his mouth that travelled the whole length of his spine, and when his lips left hers for the warm skin below her ear she tipped her head back against the wood to give it to him.

“Tell me to stop, and I stop on the word, whatever we have begun by then,” he said against her throat. “Do you understand what I am promising you?”

“I understand you far better than you seem to credit.” Her voice had gone low and rough and astonished at its own sound. “I am telling you the exact opposite of stop, and I would be obliged if you ceased asking me questions and attended to it.”

He laughed once against her throat, thoroughly undone by her, and unfastened the front of her bodice with more patience than he had ever spent on anything in his life, giving her the entire time it would take to change her mind. She did not change it. When his mouth closed over her breast she arched off the panelling with a gasp that had his name buried in the middle of it, her fingers pushing up into his hair to hold him there rather than draw him away.

“Say the word if this is too much for you,” he said.

“It is a very great distance from too much, and you are a fool if you cannot read as plainly as that.” Her breath caught as his teeth grazed her. “Do not dare to stop reading it.”

“I am going to touch you now,” he said, low, his hand already gathering the muslin up along her stocking, “and you are going to tell me how it is, every part of it, and spare me nothing. You have never once spared me before.”

“Then do the thing and spare me the recitation of your intentions.” Whatever else she had been about to say did not arrive. He touched her, and the sentence went out of her mid-breath, and he felt it go.

He touched her where no one had ever touched her, over the fine damp linen first, one slow pass that had her hips chasing his hand before her pride could think to forbid it, and then, when she pressed toward him rather than shrinking away, beneath it, into the swollen heat of her. A sound left her that had no words in it at all.

His name left her, and then very little else that was sensible. “That is not in the least what I was given to understand this would be,” she said.

“Tell me what you want, and you shall have it,” he said.

“More of that. Do not stop doing that, on any account you can devise.”

He gave her that, and did not make her ask twice. What drew the broken sound out of her he learned quickly, and did again, and then again, two fingers deep in the wet heat of her and the heel of his hand set where she was swollen and aching for the pressure. She rode his hand with no leave asked of the part of her that had spent thirty years learning restraint. He brought her to the trembling edge of it and then eased her back down from the edge, deliberately, and she made a sound of pure outrage against his jaw.

“Why would you do such a wicked thing? You are not to stop, I absolutely forbid it.”

“It will be the better for you if I take you there slowly,” he said. “Place your trust in me this once. Never have I deceived you, and I shall not begin the vice now, when I am so entirely at your mercy.”

“Then take me there and be quick and do not be gentle about it.” Her forehead dropped to his shoulder, her breath coming in short broken pulls that ended, each of them, in some fragment of his name.

He took her there, unhurried about it. She went rigid and then liquid against him inside a single breath, clenching tight around his fingers, slick to the wrist of him, her cry muffled in the wool of his coat and shaped, at the very last of it, into his name and then into nothing that belonged to any language at all.

He had kept his own burning desire on a tight rein throughout, straining against the fall of his breeches. Yet he welcomed the ache, for her pleasure was the sole object of his endeavour, and his own could well wait until a wedding night was theirs to claim. The moment the pleasure outran her hold on who she was inside it arrived under his hand, unmistakable, and there he stopped. He gentled his touch, drew her in against his chest, and held her while she came back to herself, every nerve he owned in open revolt against the decision.

“You have stopped, and you are not going to finish it,” she said, when her breath came back enough to spend on words, half in accusation and half in plain astonishment.

“Not tonight, and not in a carriage two hundred yards from your father’s door, with your maid outside pretending she cannot count the minutes,” he said. “When I take you to bed it will not be an act done in haste against a door panel, and it will not be a thing you have any cause to regret by morning.” The county would have taken a great deal more. Propriety had drawn its line a mile behind where he stood. He stopped at the exact instant her pleasure outstripped her, because she had walked into that library braced against being taken from, and he would be damned before he taught her to brace against him as well.

She drew back from his shoulder after a while, her emerald eyes still smouldering, and her breath still uneven, and she was, as he clearly could see it move across her face, drawing an entirely wrong conclusion from all of it.

“They told me Arden men take,” she said unsteadily. “That is the very word my whole family use for it. Take. You had me half out of my dress and undone against a carriage door, and you did not take one single thing for yourself in the doing of it.”

“I did not take anything for myself, no, and I am aware you noticed.”

“You are aching for it now. I am not so ignorant of men that I cannot tell that much about your condition.” Her hand came, wondering, to rest low against him, and he caught it and moved it gently aside before she unmade all his resolve. “You want it, plainly, and you stopped regardless. So either my entire family are fabricators, or the great Arden reputation is an enormous quantity of noise raised over remarkably little.”

“You are welcome to whichever of those conclusions gives you the most comfort tonight.”

“I find the second one comforts me enormously.” She sat back and began, with hands that were not yet steady, to put herself to rights, and a loosening that was almost relief had come into her mouth. “I had braced myself to be handed a beast on my wedding day. I begin to suspect I have been sold one who does not exist, and I cannot begin to tell you what a relief it is to have been so completely misinformed.”

He let the sentence stand between them.

That was the second silence he chose in the space of one afternoon, and it was the harsher of the two, because he let her believe his restraint tonight was a promise about every night after. The truth of it was only that a man who has stopped is not, on that account, a man who does not know how to begin. She had asked him, in the carriage, to keep no other establishment, and he had answered about the present. Against the panelling she had decided that he was harmless, and he had let her keep the mistake. Two small mercies, each of them falsehoods worn inside out, both waiting on their day.

***

The settlement was signed that night, in the same library, beneath the same unlit chimneypiece, with the same two solicitors and his grandmother watching from the same upright chair. Benedict stood a little apart, at the window where he had stood before, and watched Lady Alethea Selwyn take up the quill. He watched her read the ninth article through, once, in full, her lips moving very slightly over the clause about a living heir within three years. Then she returned to the head of it and read the entire article a second time, slower, as though she were setting it down to memory against a day she would need every word of it, before she wrote her name beneath his own in a clear upright hand that did not shake at all.

Chapter Three

“If you smile any harder at my aunt Selwyn, Your Grace, she will conclude you have been got at, and send for a physician to bleed the goodwill out of you.”

“I was attempting to appear content,” Benedict murmured, from the head of the table where two families sat in their opposing colours and pretended to be one. “Your aunt has been watching me across the soup as though I mean to make off with the silver, and I thought a little warmth might reassure her.”

“It will accomplish the precise opposite. The Selwyns distrust warmth in an Arden as a farmer distrusts a fine week in February. It is pleasant, to be sure, and fair weather enough, but it signifies only that winter has not yet done with you.”

The chapel had been adorned in Arden blue on one side and Selwyn silver on the other. Great-Aunt Sowerby, connected to both houses by a cousinage no one could any longer trace, and therefore judged neutral enough to countenance the affair, had wept steadily through the whole affair, in the manner of a woman who wept at everything and remembered none of it by the dinner hour. The estate at Fenwick belonged to neither party in the dispute; indeed, that was the sole reason they were assembled upon its grounds.

Alethea had woken that morning braced for a day she would have to endure with her jaw set. She had not been braced for the speeches.

She caught passing fragments of conversation among her relations, who were busily exchanging tales of her youth, about a girl of nine who had once reorganised the entire Selwyn library by a system of her own devising. The child had refused for a fortnight to explain it to the steward, on the grounds that a man who could not work it out did not deserve the books. The Arden side laughed, which no one had expected. Then the Dowager Duchess rose, to a silence that had a good deal of apprehension in it, and remarked that she had waited eight and seventy years to see a Selwyn seated at an Arden table without a lawyer between them, and that she found the experience improved by champagne and by the bride, in roughly equal measure.

There was an apricot preserve at her end of the table, sharp and gold and a great deal better than anything her father’s kitchen had ever sent up, and she took it twice, and was not, on either occasion, thinking of anything whatever. She would afterwards be able to date the whole disaster from it. It was the hour she stopped standing guard.

“She has just paid me a compliment,” Alethea said, low, genuinely startled. “Your grandmother. In public. Before Selwyns.”

“She has. Do not grow accustomed to it. She is establishing a credit she intends to draw upon heavily and without notice for the rest of your natural life.”

“I begin to think I have formed a connection with a family of tacticians who have merely disguised themselves as people.”

“You have. It is a great deal better than the reverse, which is what I appear to have got.” He turned his glass and did not drink from it. “You look well today. I have been trying to find a way to say it that does not sound like a valuation, and I have failed, so you will have to take the plain version. You look well, and I am glad it is you across the table and not the alternative I was so ungracious about in the library, and I withdraw the ungraciousness formally, before witnesses, while I have the champagne to blame.”

***

Cecily found her by the long windows an hour later, while the tables were being drawn back and Great-Aunt Sowerby was explaining to a captive bishop the exact degree of her connexion to both houses, which required a diagram and possibly a second bishop.

“You are enjoying yourself,” Cecily said. “I have watched you do it for twenty minutes, and I still do not entirely believe it. You laughed at something the man said. With your whole countenance. I have not seen you do that at a Selwyn function since we were girls.”

“I am aware of it, and I would be obliged if you did not describe it aloud, because saying it makes it real, and I have not decided yet whether I am permitted to keep it.”

“Keep what?”

“The suspicion that it might not be a catastrophe.” Alethea turned her glass and did not look at her friend. “I came here prepared to survive a day, Cecily, the way one survives a tooth drawn, and instead I have spent it being handed small pleasant surprises by people I was raised to despise, and I do not know what to do with any of them. I keep waiting for the trap to close.”

“And if there is no trap?”

“Then I am in worse trouble than if there were, because I shall have to feel something, and I had planned so carefully not to.”

Across the room, a Selwyn great-uncle proposed a toast that began as a courtesy to the Arden line and turned, by its third sentence, into a spirited defence of the disputed boundary. Alethea’s father rose with the particular smoothness of a man heading off an incident, thanked his cousin for his warmth, and sat him down.

“To the two houses,” her father said, in the voice he used for tenants and creditors, “who have quarrelled long enough to have forgotten the cause, and who may now learn to quarrel about the seating instead.”

“Pay heed to him,” said the Dowager Duchess, lifting her glass, “for it is the first sensible remark a Selwyn has made in my hearing since the year seventeen and ninety, and I was there for a great many of them.”

The laughter that followed was the wrong laughter for a feud, too easy, too general, and Alethea watched her father and the Dowager exchange a look across the flowers that had a whole exhausted history in it, two old campaigners setting down a conflict neither could any longer remember starting, and she thought, dangerously, that it might be true. That it might actually be done. That the thing they had spent her for might be a thing worth having bought.

***

Benedict came to her in the small yellow anteroom where she had gone to be briefly out of the noise, and he did not touch her, and he stood a courteous distance off with his hands behind his back.

“They have quite exhausted every capacity for enmity,” he said. “Your great-uncle has cornered mine over the port, and they have discovered a shared and violent objection to the turnpike commissioners, and are the best of friends. I give it until the carriages are called.”

“It cannot last. You know it cannot.”

“I know nothing of the kind, and neither do you, and I find I would rather be wrong in the hopeful direction than right in the other for once in my life.” He looked at her a moment. “I did not expect today to be bearable. I want to tell you that plainly, because we are wedded. I expected to endure it. I did not expect to look up during your cousin’s story about the library and think that I would not, on the whole, have chosen differently if the choosing had been mine.”

“You must not say things like that to me,” she said, and her voice was not steady. “I have not the armour for it today. Tomorrow, perhaps. Say it tomorrow and I will have a defence ready.”

“Then I will say it tomorrow as well,” he said, “and the day after, until it stops alarming you, however long that takes. I am a patient man about the things that matter, madam, whatever else you have heard.”

She had no answer ready that was safe. The trouble, all through that long bright afternoon, was that there kept being no safe answer. The man had spent a month failing to be the enemy she had been promised, and here was a wedding breakfast doing the same disloyal work upon her. By the time the light began to go she had committed the reckless act of allowing herself to hope.

***

She carried the hope up the stairs of a borrowed house and into a bedchamber that smelled of beeswax and of hothouse roses a maid had set there and meant kindly. It lasted until she heard his tread in the dressing room and understood that the day of long talks and tale bearings of their pasts and champagne had been the easy part. The difficult part had a door, and the door was opening.

He came in without his coat, and stopped a careful distance from her, and did not reach for the candles.

“You need not be afraid of anything that happens in this chamber,” he said. “I know what must be done, and I will not hurry you through any part of it. If you wish to talk first, we will talk. If you wish it to be dark, it will be dark. There is no hurry in all the night, and no one is waiting on us, whatever the article says.”

“I am not afraid of you.” She was standing very straight by the cold hearth, in the linen they had dressed her in, her rich auburn tresses unbound for the very first time in the presence of a gentleman, while her emerald eyes shone with a sudden, perilous intimacy. “I am afraid of the part I have not been told. I know what you showed me in the carriage. I do not know the rest of it. Nobody would tell me. My mother said I would learn it from my husband, and my aunts said a lady does not enquire, and I have begun to suspect the ignorance was arranged on purpose and handed to me as a virtue.”

“It was arranged, yes,” he said quietly. “It very often is. It is done so that a girl cannot object to a thing she has not the words to name. I am sorry for it. I will tell you anything you ask me, tonight or ever, and you may find my willingness to answer is the only true advantage I bring to this.”

“Then I will ask you the thing I have wanted to ask since the carriage.” She lifted her chin, and there was the willed steadiness in it that had carried her through the library and the settlement and the chapel. “You know what must be done. You have said so twice. How is it that you know?”

She watched him decide, in the half-second before he spoke, to tell her the truth.

“Because I am two and thirty,” he said, “and I have not lived as a monk. There were arrangements, before you, conducted honourably and ended honourably, and I learned in them how to be careful with a woman and how not to hurt her, and that is the whole of why I can promise you tonight will not be got through in haste or in ignorance. I would rather you had that plainly than imagine I acquired it by study.”

The hope went out of the day so completely that she was surprised the candles did not gutter with it.

“Arrangements, honourably conducted,” she said. “You took what you wanted from women you did not think worth your name, and you were praised across the county for your discretion while they were required to disappear, and you have brought the skill of it to me as though it were a wedding gift.”

“You know nothing whatever about those arrangements, madam, and you are describing them with remarkable confidence for a woman who was in the schoolroom when the first of them began.”

“I know that any one of them could have been ruined past saving by what you and she were doing, and that you could not be ruined by it at all. I know that the risk was never once shared equally between you. If that is inaccurate in any particular, Your Grace, I invite you to stand there and correct it.”

He was quiet, and she saw the shot go home, and she saw too that he had no correction to offer because there was none, and that some part of him had known it for years and filed it where it could not trouble him.

“No one has ever called me a rake,” he said at last, and it was the wrong thing, and he seemed to know it even as it left him.

“No. Of course they have not. You are a duke. Society keeps prettier names for the sins of dukes, and saves the ugly ones for the women who commit them at half the scale.” She had begun to shake, and she despised the shaking, and she went on regardless. “You will find the plainer word waiting for you in my family’s mouth, and you may call it Selwyn spite if it comforts you, but you supplied the evidence yourselves across thirty years, and I did not invent a single line of it.”

“Your family’s judgement appears to have preceded the trial by some three decades. You have found me guilty this evening of a charge you assembled long before you met me.”

“How many have there been?” she said.

“That is not a question you want the answer to tonight.”

“Do not tell me what I want. I have had a bellyful today of men certain they know my wants better than I do, and you are about to be the last of them I permit it from. How many?”

He was a moment in answering, and he held her eyes when he did. “Three women, across fourteen years, each one ended cleanly before the next was begun, each of them understanding what she entered and leaving it no poorer than she came. I will not perform shame for you over faith honourably kept with three people, madam, not even tonight, not even to buy back the good opinion I can watch you taking from me as we stand here. The shame you want would be a falsehood, and I have made you one promise in this matrimony worth the name, which is that I will not be deceitful to you, and I find I mean to keep it even when a falsehood would serve me better. That is going to cost me more than the truth ever could, and tonight is merely the first instalment.”

“Your own conduct assembled it. I have merely read the file.” She turned from him, because she could not go on looking upon the countenance that had made her hope, and she put her hand on the cold stone of the mantel to steady it. “I had begun to think you were different. That is the thing I cannot forgive, and it is not even yours to be blamed for. I did it to myself, in a carriage, like a simpleton who had never been warned. Cecily warned me. She told me to stop sorting men into two clean piles, and I nodded, and I went straight out and built you a pile of your own and called it safe.”

For a long moment neither said anything, and the borrowed roses filled the silence with a sweetness that had nothing to do with anybody in the room.

Then she thought of Article Nine, lying on a table in her father’s study three counties away, in a clear hand she could have recited with her eyes shut. Behind it stood the six hundred tenants, the four years of arbitration, the two estates that could not carry the cost. Hope was a luxury, and this was not, and never had been, a night that belonged to her.

“It changes nothing,” she said. “The article does not care whether I have been disappointed. Come closer.”

He held where he was, a full pace short of her. “Not tonight, Alethea. There is no clause in the world that requires it be tonight. Nothing is forfeit if we wait until the anger has gone out of the room. I would very much rather wait.”

“I would very much rather it were done.” She turned back to him, and she had put the willed steadiness back on, and it frightened him more than tears would have, though she had no idea of that yet. “I have spent a month being brave about the parts of this I could bear. Let me be brave about the part I cannot, and have it behind me, rather than lie awake beside it for a week dreading the morning it finally comes.”

He crossed the room then, slowly, and he was gentle, and the gentleness was the cruellest part of all, because it was the same care she had felt in the carriage and it now meant nothing, and she made herself a small cold sentence to hold on to while it went on. This is a term of the settlement. I am fulfilling a term of the settlement.

He asked her twice, and that was the thing she would carry out of the room and set against him for the better part of a year, that he had put to her a question about wanting and had been handed an answer about permission, and had taken the one for the other because he wished them to be the same thing.

“Do you want this?” he said, once, with his mouth near her dishevelled tresses and his hands not yet certain of her.

“Want has had very little to do with any part of this matrimony,” she said, to the canopy, to the dark, to no one. “It required an heir. It did not require my enthusiasm, and nobody who drafted it thought to ask for that. You have my leave, Your Grace. You have had it since I put my name to the thing…”

And he did as she had bade him.

He drew the linen from her shoulders, and she let him, and lay back against the pillows the way she imagined a woman was meant to, with her hands open at her sides and her eyes on the fourteen rings of the canopy. Without ceremony or hurry he undressed himself, and when he came down beside her the length of him was warm and bare against her hip, and she compelled herself not to wince, for a start of surprise was a weakness she would afterwards have been forced to account for.

“I am going to touch you first,” he said, low, against her temple. “So that it is easier for you. Tell me now if you would rather I did not.”

“You need not narrate it, Your Grace. I am aware of the order of things in principle, whatever I may lack in practice.”

He gave her no answer. His hand moved down over her stomach and between her thighs, and she parted them because that too was a term, and his fingers found her and were careful, and slow, and knowing in a manner that was its own separate insult. He stroked her open, over the folds and then into the slick heat of her, and her body, which had not been consulted about any of the evening’s decisions, began to answer him as it had answered against the panelling. Her hips shifted once, without her leave, toward the pressure of his fingers, and she stilled them and stared harder at the canopy.

“Your body is not your enemy tonight, whatever else in this room is,” he said, very quietly. There was no triumph in it, only a care that made her want to strike him. “You are permitted to let it help you.”

“That is not help so much as obedience, which appears to be the one quality this family prizes in a woman.” She turned her face from his on the pillow. “You shall have the article, and you shall have my leave, and you will get nothing else of me tonight, not my attention and not my pleasure and not one word you have not paid a solicitor for. Continue. I would have the rest of it behind me.”

He was a long moment over that, his fingers gone still within her, and afterwards she would call it the hinge of the whole matrimony, the place at which a different man might have drawn his hand back and said no, not like this, not on those terms. This man did not. He had her leave, and he had nothing else, and he took the leave and told himself it was the whole of what a man required, because he wished it to be, and looming over her, he settled within her. “Look at me, once, if you are able,” he said.

She did not look at him. Her eyes stayed on the fifteenth ring she could not be certain of, and he pushed into her slowly, and it was a stretch that burned and then a bright tearing hurt she had not been warned of either, and she took the breath through her teeth and held it. He stopped at once, seated shallow, his arms shaking a little with the labour of holding still.

“That is the worst of it, and it does not come again,” he said. “I will stay just here until you tell me otherwise.”

“I have told you already. Continue.”

He worked into her by degrees, careful past bearing, until he was fully seated, the whole hard length of him inside her and the weight of him above. Then he began to move, slow and shallow, one hand braced by her head and the other beneath the small of her back to spare her the worst of the angle. He was skilled, and that was the thing she would abhor the longest. The art to make it bearable was entirely his, and he made it bearable, and bearable was all that she would permit herself to have.

She counted the rings again and went elsewhere, cataloguing the dead grate and the shuttered window and the number of hours until morning. Beneath her, the careful pleasure his body kept trying to hand hers went on being refused at the door, because she had decided, and she was a woman who could hold a decision against her own flesh when she was required to. And he knew that she was doing it. She felt him know it, in the check of his breath above her and the half-beat in which his hand went still at the small of her back, and she felt him decide, inside that half-beat, to go on regardless. That was the thing she would set against him longest afterwards. Not that he had failed to see it. That he had seen it, and had not once stopped to ask himself why leave was the only thing she had given him. He said her name once, low, on a breath with a torn edge to it she would not hear. His steady stroke gave way as he moved within her, his hands gripping the bedclothes near her head, a deep groan wrung from his throat as he spent his passion into her warmth. The last of the day’s hope ebbed from her body the way heat leaves a stone after the sun goes down gradually, then all at once, until none remained.

Then it was done, and he had been as good as his word about the swiftness of it, and about the care, and about every promise but the one that had mattered.

Afterwards he lay beside her in the dark, and his breathing evened, and after a while his hand came across the space between them and found her shoulder, reaching for the person and not the duty, wanting to gather her in and say some true thing that the night had earned and the day had promised.

She turned away from his hand, onto her side, and drew her knees up, and looked at the wall until the candle burned down, and did not sleep, and did not weep, and did not once let him know she was awake.