The Duke’s Christmas Bargain
“Pretend to be my fiancée until Twelfth Night,” the Duke of Orwater said, “and I will see your father’s physician paid and your sister’s schooling secured.” He forgot to add one thing: that neither of them would fall in love. He was wrong about that, too.
PART 1
“Pretend to be my fiancée until Twelfth Night, Miss Elfenstone,” said Peveral Marchman, Duke of Orwater, without preamble, “and I will see your father’s physician paid and your sister’s schooling secured. There is only one condition, and I will have your word on it before I say another thing. You must never come to love me, nor I you. Whatever passes between us before my household, before the county, before the whole watching ton at my Christmas ball — it is performance. Nothing more.”
Avisia Elfenstone stood very still in the cold, book-lined library of Orwater Hall. A ledger of the estate’s audit accounts lay open on the table before her, the ink not yet dry on the final column. She had been totaling when the Duke had shut the door behind himself and spoken as though the matter were already settled.
She had known him three winters now, in the way a woman who balances a great house’s smaller accounts knows the man who owns it: by the set of his shoulders passing a window, by the low voice giving orders to a groom, never by conversation. For he had never before troubled to have one with her.
“Your grace,” she said carefully, “I do not understand what use I could possibly be to a duke in want of a fiancée.”
“Because you are exactly what I do not want,” he said, and there was no unkindness in it, only a bluntness she would come in time to recognize as the whole architecture of the man. “Lady Imogen Fair Haven has returned to the county a widow, and my aunt tells me she means to renew what she once broke off. I will not be hunted through my own ballroom at Christmas like a stag run to ground. I require a woman on my arm whom no one will suspect of angling for the position — a woman of sense who will not mistake a fortnight’s pretense for anything real, and who has reason enough of her own to keep the secret.”
“And you have decided I am that woman because I keep your household ledgers and have never once flirted with you in the stairwell.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth that was not quite a smile. “Among other reasons. Yes.”
She ought to have refused him outright. A duke did not summon the vicar’s daughter to his library at nine at night to propose a counterfeit betrothal, and a sensible woman did not entertain it past the first sentence. But her father had coughed blood into his handkerchief three mornings running. The physician in Sethbury would not come again without payment in hand. And Tamson’s letter from the Dame school had arrived that very morning with a note appended in the schoolmistress’s cramped hand, regretting that fees for the coming term remained outstanding.
Avisia had read that letter twice, and then folded it very small, and put it in her sewing box. Because there had been nothing else to do with it.
“How much?” she said, hating herself a little for asking it so plainly. “And for how long?”
“A hundred pounds settled on your father before Christmas Eve, and your sister’s school fees paid through the completion of her education. In exchange, you will be seen on my arm from now until Twelfth Night — at church, at the assemblies, at my aunt’s card evenings, and at the ball itself on Christmas Eve, where I intend the engagement to be announced beyond any possibility of doubt. After Twelfth Night, the arrangement will end quietly. We shall have quarreled, or you shall have had second thoughts, or I shall have proved myself unworthy. The particulars hardly matter. You will return to your father’s house with your reputation entirely intact and a settlement besides, and I will be a free man again.”
He said it all in the flat, competent tone of a man reading out the terms of a lease. And Avisia understood that this was precisely how he wished her to hear it: as business, and nothing but business.
She studied him across the width of the library table. The dark hair swept back from a brow that carried, she thought, more weariness than a man not yet forty ought to own. The eyes that watched her now with the same full attention he must once have turned on his brother’s ledgers, assessing risk. The set of a mouth that had, she suspected, not smiled without reservation in a very long while.
Orwater was called the Iron Duke behind gloved hands in three counties. And she had never until this moment troubled to wonder whether the name grieved him.
“And if I say no?”
“Then I will find another way to be rid of Lady Imogen. And you will go on keeping my accounts. And neither of us will speak of this again.”
He paused.
“But your father still coughs blood in the morning, Miss Elfenstone. And I think you know it.”
It was a cruel thing to say. And she saw, watching his jaw tighten the instant the words left him, that he knew it too. That he had not meant to say it so plainly — had perhaps not meant to say it at all — and regretted it even as it hung between them in the cold library air.
It was the first unguarded thing she had seen him do.
And it undid more of her resistance than all his talk of settlements.
“One condition of my own,” she said. “If we are to be betrothed before the whole county, your grace, I will not be lied to in the particulars. I would know why Lady Imogen troubles you so, and why your aunt is worrying, and what manner of Christmas ball requires a counterfeit bride to survive it.”
He considered her for a long moment. And she had the sense, not for the last time, of being weighed on a scale whose true units she did not know.
“Sit down, then,” he said at last, and drew out the chair across from her, as though she were a steward come to review the harvest accounts rather than a woman he had just asked to be his pretend betrothed. “It will take longer to explain than I had planned to give it.”
She sat.
He did not.
“My brother Edmund was Duke before me,” he began, pacing now to the cold hearth and back. “And this house held a Christmas ball every year of his life, from the year our father died until the year Edmund himself died. Two Christmases past, in a carriage overturned on the Sethbury road, with his wife beside him. There has been no ball at Orwater since. My niece Lucy is six years old and does not remember a Christmas with music in this house. My mother, the Dowager Duchess, believes — rightly, I expect — that Orwater cannot go on being a house of mourning forever. And she has set her heart on reviving the ball this year. For Lucy’s sake, if for no other. I have agreed to it.”
He turned to face her, his expression unreadable in the candlelight.
“I did not agree to be hunted through my own ballroom while I do it.”
PART 2
“And Lady Imogen?”
The Duke’s mouth thinned. “Lady Imogen Fair Haven was Miss Imogen Vane when I was a younger son with no expectation of a title. And she broke our engagement three weeks before the wedding to marry the Earl of Rosemuir instead. Because an earl with land in hand was a surer thing than a second son with none.”
He said it without heat. Which somehow made it worse than if he had raged.
“Rosemuir is dead a year now. And she has discovered, I am told, that a widowed countess is not so very grand a prize after all. And that the Duke of Orwater — the very man she once discarded — has become, through no virtue of his own, a considerably better one. My aunt believes Imogen means to renew her suit at the ball publicly. Where refusing her will cost me dearly in gossip either way. I will not give her the chance to try. A public betrothal ends the matter cleanly.”
Avisia sat with that a moment, turning it over. It explained the bluntness, the flat terms, the insistence on the one condition before he would say anything else. A man burned once by a woman’s calculation would build his defenses accordingly. And hers, she supposed, was meant to be a wall he could see through entirely — precisely because there was nothing behind it to mistake for feeling.
“You believe that if I understand from the outset that none of it is real, I cannot wound you as she did.”
“I believe that clarity spares us both a great deal of trouble.”
“And Lucy? Does she know you mean to produce a fiancée for her Christmas ball as though I were a decoration hired for the mantel?”
For the first time, something crossed his face that was not calculation — a flicker, quickly smoothed, of a man caught out.
“Lucy knows only that her uncle means to give her a Christmas with music in it, and that a kind lady will be staying at the hall through the season. She is six, Miss Elfenstone. She will not trouble herself with the particulars of a betrothal contract.”
“No,” Avisia agreed. “But she will trouble herself, I think, with whether the kind lady is kind in earnest — or only performing kindness for a hundred pounds.”
She watched him absorb that. Watched the flicker of discomfort deepen very slightly before he mastered it.
“I will not be unkind to a grieving child to satisfy the terms of a business arrangement, your grace. Whatever else I agree to — that much I will not perform.”
“I would not ask it of you.”
“Then we understand one another on that point at least.”
She drew a slow breath. Outside the library window, the first true snow of the season had begun — fine and silent against the black glass. And somewhere above them in the sleeping house, a small girl who did not remember Christmas music lay dreaming, perhaps, of nothing at all.
Avisia thought of her father’s handkerchief. Of Tamson’s careful, hopeful hand, asking whether the fees might yet be found.
And she thought, too — though she would not have admitted it aloud for any sum — of the strange, unlooked-for pull she felt toward a man who had just confessed his deepest wound to her across a ledger table because she had asked him plainly to.
“Very well,” she said. “I accept your terms, your grace. I will be your fiancée until Twelfth Night. And I will never come to love you. And you will never come to love me. And at the end of it, we shall part as strangers with a settlement between us.”
She rose and extended her hand across the table — the ink-stained fingers of a woman who kept another man’s books, meeting the gloved hand of the most feared duke in three counties.
“Though I confess I have never before shaken hands on a broken heart in advance of having one.”
He took her hand. His grip was warm through the kid leather, warmer than she had expected of a man so carefully cold. And he held it a fraction longer than the business of the agreement strictly required before he released it and stepped back, as though the table between them were not distance enough.
PART 3
“You will move into the hall tomorrow,” the Duke said, his voice gone brisker, the momentary warmth folded away somewhere she could not follow it. “My aunt will see you properly outfitted. It will not do for my betrothed to be taken for a poor relation, whatever the truth of the matter. Mrs. Bell will show you to the Rose Room.”
He paused at the door, his hand on the latch, not quite looking back at her.
“Thank you, Miss Elfenstone. For your father’s sake, I am glad of it. For my own — I am sorry to have needed to ask.”
He was gone before she could answer. And she stood alone in the library a long while after, the ledger still open before her, the snow thickening beyond the glass, turning that final sentence over and over as though it might, examined closely enough, reveal itself to be something other than what it plainly was.
The first crack, however small, in the wall he had built with his own one rule not an hour before.
She did not sleep well that night in her father’s narrow house in Wickmare, packing by candlelight the few gowns fit to be seen and the one that was not. And she told herself twice — and then a third time — that a hundred pounds and a term of schooling were reason enough for anyone to agree to anything. And that she would remember, when the pretending grew difficult, precisely what the Duke of Orwater had asked of her. And precisely what he had not.
Her father, when she told him only that she had accepted a position at the hall through Christmastide to help prepare the ball and keep the ducal accounts in order, studied her over his spectacles with the particular searching look of a man who had buried a wife and had learned, in the years since, to read a daughter’s face for what she did not say.
“You have always been careful, Avisia,” he said. “Be careful now.”
“I am always careful, Papa.”
“I did not say cautious,” he said, and coughed, and reached for her hand, and did not let go of it for some time.
Orwater Hall by daylight was a different creature entirely from the cold, candlelit library Avisia had left the night before. A great gray house of a hundred windows set among bare elms, its forecourt already busy with wagons of fir being unloaded for the coming ball, its front doors thrown open by a footman who bowed to her as though she had always belonged there.
Avisia stood a moment on the step with her single trunk beside her, feeling every inch the vicar’s daughter she was, and reminded herself that she had agreed to be looked at, and must therefore learn quickly how to bear it.
The Dowager Duchess Anora received her in a small sitting room with faded blue silk. A woman past sixty with her nephew’s dark eyes gone silvershot and a directness that made Avisia understand at once where the Duke had learned his bluntness — though age had softened hers into something nearer to warmth.
“So,” Anora said, setting down her tea and studying Avisia from crown to hem with an attention that felt less like judgment than like being read. “You are the young woman my nephew has decided will save us all from Imogen Fair Haven.”
“I understand I am to be his fiancée for the season, your grace.”
“You understand a great deal more than that, I think. Or Peveral would not have chosen you.” Anora’s mouth curved. “He is not a fool, whatever else the county says of him behind their fans. He would not hand so delicate a matter to a woman without sense enough to manage it. Tell me plainly, Miss Elfenstone — did he explain the whole of it, or only the part that suited him?”
“He explained. Lady Imogen. And Edmund. And Lucy.” Avisia hesitated. “He asked one condition of me before he would say anything else at all.”
“That neither of you fall in love.”
Anora said it without surprise, stirring her tea as though the words cost her nothing. “Yes. He would. My nephew has spent two years building a very careful house out of grief and duty, Miss Elfenstone, with every stone set exactly where it will bear the most weight and the least feeling. And he means for this arrangement to be one more stone — useful, loadbearing, and entirely without warmth. I will not pretend to you that I think he will succeed in keeping it so. But I will not tell him that either, because he would only build the wall higher.”
She set down her cup.
“Now. You will want to meet Lucy before you meet anyone else in this house who might tell you lies about her uncle’s disposition.”
Lucy Marchman was found in the nursery, on her stomach on the hearthrug, constructing an elaborate and structurally doubtful stable out of carved wooden animals. She looked up at Avisia with her father’s fair coloring and her uncle’s dark, assessing eyes, and said without any preamble whatsoever:
“Are you going to marry Uncle Peveral?”
“I am going to pretend to, for a little while.” Avisia said it because she had promised herself in the carriage that she would not lie to this child, whatever the terms with the Duke required of the county at large. “Would that trouble you very much?”
Lucy considered this with the grave seriousness only a six-year-old can properly summon.
“Mama and Papa used to dance in the hall before Christmas,” she said. “There isn’t any dancing now. Is there going to be dancing again, if you pretend to marry him?”
“There is going to be dancing,” Avisia said, and something in her chest ached at the plain, unguarded want in the child’s voice — want that had clearly gone unspoken in this house for two long years, because no one had thought to ask a grieving six-year-old what she missed. “A great deal of it. Would you like to help me learn, so that I do not embarrass your uncle in front of the whole county?”
Lucy’s face transformed entirely. The wariness gone in an instant, replaced by the particular delight of a child handed a purpose.
“I know all the steps,” she announced. “Papa taught me. Before —”
She stopped. The sentence folding on itself.
Avisia knelt on the hearthrug beside her without thinking twice about the state of her one good gown.
“Then you shall teach me,” she said.
And watched the child’s face steady itself again. Grateful and a little astonished, as though kindness offered without conditions were a foreign language she was only now being taught to read.
PART 4
She did not see the Duke again until the dance lesson three evenings later. Held in the long gallery, because the ballroom itself was still half-dressed in dust sheets, its chandeliers not yet lowered for cleaning. And because, Anora informed her dryly, Peveral had never in his life consented to be taught anything in a room large enough for an audience.
He arrived precisely on the hour, dressed with the careless perfection of a man who had never had to think about his tailoring, and bowed to her with a formality that made the dancing master — a small, nervous man named Mr. Croft, imported from Sethbury for the occasion — visibly relax.
“Your grace has danced before, I trust,” Avisia said, because the silence wanted filling, and because teasing him seemed unaccountably easier than being formal with him now that she had knelt on his niece’s hearthrug and heard the child’s small, unhealed grief.
“I have danced at a great many balls I did not wish to attend, Miss Elfenstone, which I am told does not count as the same accomplishment.”
“We shall discover the truth of that shortly.”
Mr. Croft set them the figure, and the music began — only a single violin, thin and sweet in the high-ceilinged gallery. And Avisia discovered within the first turn that the Duke of Orwater danced like a man who had learned the steps by necessity and never once by pleasure. Correct. Controlled. Entirely without the ease that ought to have come naturally to a body so evidently strong and well-made.
His hand at her waist was light, almost cautious, as though he feared to hold her more firmly than the figure required. And when the turn brought them close, his eyes met hers for the length of a held breath before he looked deliberately past her shoulder instead.
“You are counting,” she said low, as the figure turned them again.
“I am ensuring I do not tread on your gown. Which I am reliably informed is your only good one, and which I would rather not ruin before it has even had the honor of being seen at the ball.”
“How do you know it is my only good one?”
“Because my aunt told me. And because I noticed the mend at the hem myself, three winters ago, the first week you came to keep the accounts. And I have thought of it every time I have passed you in a corridor since.”
He said it evenly, without any apparent awareness of how much the admission gave away.
And Avisia missed a step entirely.
His hand tightened at her waist to steady her, and for one moment — one full, suspended moment — the violin sustaining a long note above them, they stood closer than the figure required. His breath faintly warm at her temple. His eyes no longer looking past her shoulder at all.
“Your grace,” she said very quietly, “I believe that is a good deal more attention than a man pays to a woman’s mended hem — unless he means something by it.”
He released her at once, stepping back into the figure with a correctness so sudden and so total that Mr. Croft, watching from the corner, applauded the recovery as though it had been intentional all along.
“It means nothing more than that I am observant, which any man managing an estate must be. Shall we continue, Miss Elfenstone, or has my footwork already condemned me beyond hope of recovery?”
“Your footwork is adequate,” she said, matching his sudden formality, though her pulse had not yet steadied. “Your excuses want considerably more practice.”
He did smile then. Briefly. Involuntarily. Gone almost before it arrived. But she had seen it. And she carried the sight of it with her through the remainder of the lesson like a coal banked carefully against the cold.
It was Lady Imogen Fair Haven who arrived uninvited and unannounced, precisely as the lesson ended. Sweeping into the long gallery in deep violet silk with the particular grace of a woman who had never once in her life doubted her welcome anywhere. She was beautiful in the accomplished, weathered way of a woman who had spent a decade perfecting the art of being looked at. And her eyes went from the Duke to Avisia and back again with an assessment so swift and so complete that Avisia felt catalogued and dismissed within the space of a single glance.
“Orwater.” Imogen extended a gloved hand he had no choice but to take. “I had not heard you had taken up dancing lessons. How delightfully domestic. And this must be your Miss Elfenstone. I confess I had pictured someone rather grander, given the speed with which the whole county has been made to hear of your engagement.”
“Miss Elfenstone has no need of grandeur, Lady Rosemuir.”
The Duke said it flat and certain as a fact requiring no confirmation, and Avisia noted with a small, warm flare of gratitude that he did not so much as glance in her direction to check whether the compliment landed.
“No,” Imogen said, her eyes traveling once more, unhurried, over the mended hem of Avisia’s gown, the plainness of her hair, the ink stain still faintly visible on one finger despite a week’s careful scrubbing. “I dare say she has not.”
She smiled. It was a lovely smile. And there was nothing at all warm inside it.
“How did you and the Duke meet, Miss Elfenstone? I find I am quite consumed with curiosity.”
Avisia felt the trap close half a second before she saw its shape. A simple question asked before witnesses that she and the Duke had never troubled to agree upon an answer to. Because in the rush of terms and settlements, neither of them had thought to invent a courtship to match the fiction of their engagement.
She opened her mouth with no notion at all of what might come out of it.
And felt in the same instant the Duke’s hand settle at the small of her back — warm and certain — drawing her half a step nearer to his side.
“She kept my accounts for three winters before I troubled to notice what was in front of me,” he said before Avisia could speak at all. His voice carrying the particular flat conviction of a man stating something he had only just realized was entirely true. “I am not, as you may recall, Lady Rosemuir, a man given to noticing things quickly. I am told it is one of my chief faults.”
“Among others,” Imogen murmured.
But something in her composure had thinned very slightly. And her gaze, when it came back to Avisia, held for the first time something that was not quite contempt — something nearer to calculation. As though she had expected to find a fiction and had instead found a question she could not yet answer.
PART 5
She did not stay long after that. Taking her leave with every courtesy the occasion required and none of the warmth. And it was only once the sound of her carriage had faded down the long drive that the Duke’s hand, still resting lightly at Avisia’s back, seemed to recall itself and withdraw. He stepped away from her with the same abrupt correctness he had shown mid-dance, as though putting a safe distance between them were a duty he had momentarily, dangerously forgotten.
“That did not feel like performance, your grace.”
“It was performance,” he said, though he did not quite look at her when he said it. “Imogen Fair Haven has spent ten years learning to read a room for the one true thing in it. If she had seen us hesitate, she would have known everything in an instant. I did what the moment required.”
“Of course,” Avisia said.
And told herself she believed him. And found, walking back to the Rose Room alone through the darkening corridors of a house not yet dressed for Christmas, that she did not believe him in the least. And that the not-believing frightened her considerably more than Lady Imogen’s cold, assessing eyes ever could.
The following Sunday, it was Anora who insisted, over Avisia’s quiet protest, that a newly betrothed couple could not possibly fail to appear together at the parish church in Wickmare, where the whole of the county would be watching for the sort of confirmation only a shared pew could properly provide.
“You will ride with him in the ducal carriage,” Anora said, adjusting the collar of Avisia’s best pelisse with the brisk authority of a woman who had dressed a great many young women for a great many trials. “And you will sit beside him in the family pew, which has stood empty of anyone but Peveral and Lucy for two years, and will draw every eye in the church the moment you occupy it. You will smile as though there is nowhere in England you would rather be. And you will let him hand you down from the carriage in full view of the churchyard — because that single gesture will do more to silence gossip before it starts than a hundred pounds of settlement ever could.”
The carriage ride itself passed in a silence that felt to Avisia considerably more fraught than the short distance between Orwater Hall and the little gray church warranted. The Duke sat across from her in his dark Sunday coat, watching the frosted hedgerows slide past the window with an attention she suspected had less to do with the scenery than with avoiding conversation he did not yet know how to have with her outside the safe boundaries of accounts and terms.
“Your grace,” she said at last, because the quiet had grown heavier than she could comfortably bear, “I have kept your ledgers for three winters and never once seen you at a loss for words. Is it my presence that unsettles you, or merely the prospect of the whole parish watching us pretend?”
“Both, in equal measure, I expect,” he admitted. And something in the honesty of it eased the tightness in her chest more than any polished reassurance could have. “I have not sat in that pew beside anyone but Lucy since Edmund’s funeral, Miss Elfenstone. I confess I do not entirely know how to do it without thinking of who ought, by every right of family and expectation, to have been sitting there instead.”
“Then think instead of who is sitting there now,” Avisia said, gentler than she had intended. And let the rest wait for a quieter hour.
He looked at her then with an expression she was coming slowly to recognize — not quite gratitude, not quite surprise, but some new thing assembled out of both. The look of a man discovering that a woman hired to solve one problem had begun, without any apparent effort, to ease a dozen others he had not thought to name in their bargain at all.
The church was exactly as Anora had predicted — full to bursting by the time their carriage drew up outside it. Half the parish, having contrived some excuse or other to arrive early enough to watch the Duke of Orwater hand a plain young woman down from his own carriage in full view of the churchyard gate.
He did it with a correctness that gave away nothing, and a gentleness that, to Avisia’s eye at least, gave away a great deal more. His hand closing firm and warm around hers as she stepped down onto the frosted path. He did not release it at once, holding it a beat longer than the descent required while the assembled parish watched and murmured, and in several cases openly craned their necks for a better view.
It was afterward, in the churchyard, that the true trial of the morning arrived in the person of Mrs. Pru Cathcart, wife of the parish’s largest landholder and, by common consent, the most thoroughgoing gossip between Wickmare and Sethbury. She descended upon them the moment the Duke’s carriage door had closed behind the last of the congregation’s curtsies.
“Your grace,” she said, dipping a curtsy so shallow it barely qualified as one. “And Miss Elfenstone. My dear, how very sudden this all is. Why, I have known you since you were in short skirts, keeping your father’s accounts in that neat little hand of yours. And I confess I had no notion at all that his grace had so much as noticed you existed, let alone —” She paused, savoring the sentence’s unfinished cruelty. “— let alone this.”
“Then you have not been watching closely enough, Mrs. Cathcart.”
The Duke’s voice carried the same flat certainty she had heard him use against Lady Imogen only days before.
“I have watched Miss Elfenstone balance my estate’s accounts to the last farthing for three winters running without a single error. I did not find and correct an error in the quarter’s accounts myself before she found it first. And I have come slowly to understand that a woman capable of such precision and such quiet patience is worth considerably more than the county’s notice — however belatedly I arrived at the understanding myself. I do not consider my own tardiness a failing in her, Mrs. Cathcart. Only in myself.”
Mrs. Cathcart’s mouth opened and closed once, entirely without sound. And she recovered herself only enough to murmur something about wishing them joy before retreating toward her own carriage with the particular haste of a woman whose ammunition had proved unexpectedly damp.
PART 6
“You did not need to defend me so thoroughly,” Avisia said once they were alone again on the frosted path, though she could not entirely keep the warmth from her voice.
“I found I wanted to,” he said simply. “Which I confess surprises me nearly as much as it appears to surprise you.”
Tamson found them then, breathless from having run the length of the churchyard in her Sunday boots, her face alight with the particular delight of a sixteen-year-old confronted with genuine romance for the first time in her young life.
“Avisia! Is it true? Papa says you are to be a duchess, and I told him he must be exaggerating because you have never once mentioned a duke in any of your letters — not in three years — and I read every one of them twice.”
“It is rather a recent understanding, Tamson.” Avisia was aware of the Duke beside her with an attention that made her considerably more careful with her wording than she might otherwise have been. “But yes. It is true enough.”
Tamson turned her bright, unguarded gaze on the Duke himself, entirely without the deference an experienced courtier might have shown him.
“You will be kind to her, your grace. She has been kind to everyone else her whole life and had precious little of it returned. What with Mama gone and Papa’s health what it is — and I should like to know that someone means to be kind to her for a change, before I let myself be glad about any of this.”
“Tamson —” Avisia began, mortified.
But the Duke only crouched slightly so that he met the girl’s eyes on a nearer level, and answered her with a gravity that suggested he took the question exactly as seriously as it deserved.
“I mean to try, Miss Tamson. With everything I have. I cannot promise you I will always succeed — I am told I have a talent for cold correctness that wants considerable improvement. But I promise you I mean to try every day. And I would rather you held me to that promise than let me forget it.”
Tamson studied him a moment longer, weighing the answer with the same unguarded seriousness her sister had shown him in the library three weeks before. Then, apparently satisfied, she produced a smile of such open delight that it settled, Avisia thought, something in the Duke’s own careful composure that had been braced for judgment and found warmth instead.
They rode back to the hall with considerably less silence between them than they had carried on the journey out. Avisia recounting, at his gentle prompting, small stories of her sister’s childhood and her father’s long, patient ministry in the parish. And the Duke listening with an attentiveness she had not expected of a man reputed across three counties to care for nothing beyond his accounts and his solitude.
“You asked me once,” he said as the hall’s gray towers came into view above the bare elms, “why I chose you for this arrangement when I might have found any number of women with better claim to grandeur and less to lose by the pretending. I told you it was because you would not mistake the pretense for anything real. I begin to think that was not the whole truth even then, though I did not have the honesty to say so at the time.”
“What was the whole truth, your grace?”
He did not answer at once, watching the hall grow nearer through the carriage window. When he spoke again, his voice had gone quieter, more careful, as though he were feeling his way toward a confession he had not planned to make so soon.
“I have watched you for three winters, Miss Elfenstone, doing careful, unhonored work that no one troubled to thank you for, without once complaining of it. And I have thought more than once that a man might do a great deal worse than to build his life beside a woman who does not need to be watched to do the right thing well. I did not admit that to myself as a reason when I asked you in the library. I find I cannot honestly deny it as one now.”
Avisia held that confession carefully, the way she might have held a fragile thing passed to her without warning. And did not answer it at all beyond a small, private smile that she let him see, and that he returned briefly, before the carriage drew up before the hall’s great doors, and the careful correctness settled over him once more — the way it always did, the instant they came within sight of watching eyes.
By the second week of Advent, Orwater Hall had begun — cautiously, and then all at once — to remember how to be a house at Christmas.
Avisia had not planned it so. She had only asked Mrs. Bell on her third morning whether the great hall might not want dressing for the season the way the account books described it having been dressed in years past. And Mrs. Bell had looked at her with an expression Avisia could not at first read, and had said only: “His grace has not asked for the boughs to be cut since the year the old master died, miss. But I have kept the greenery lists all the same.”
So Avisia and Lucy and half the household staff besides tramped out into the home wood on a bright, hard-frosted morning to fill three wagons with fir and holly and long ropes of ivy — Lucy shrieking with a delight that carried across the whole clearing when a startled hare bolted from beneath a holly bush. And even Mr. Fenwick, the Duke’s steward, a dry and careful man of fifty who Avisia had privately thought incapable of levity, was persuaded to climb a low branch after a particularly fine spray of berries, and returned to earth with his coat torn and his dignity considerably improved by having lost it.
The Duke found them at it in the late afternoon, riding back from some errand of business in Sethbury. And Avisia watched him rein in at the edge of the clearing and simply sit his horse a long moment, watching. His niece laugh with her whole body for what was — Avisia understood without being told — very possibly the first time in two years. His staff at ease in a way she suspected his grief had not permitted them to be for a great while. Watching, too, though he would not have named it so, the woman he had hired to perform a betrothal directing the whole glad chaos of it with red cheeks and pine needles caught in her hair.
“You have conscripted my entire household into cutting greenery,” he said when he had at last come close enough to be heard. And there was something in his voice she had not heard there before — not quite accusation, not quite wonder — some unsteady thing between the two.
“I have conscripted your household into remembering Christmas, your grace. The greenery is merely the excuse.”
She held out a sprig of holly heavy with berries, without quite thinking about whether the gesture crossed some line of theirs she had not yet learned the shape of.
“Will you carry some back? Or will the Iron Duke of Orwater be remembered as the only man in the county who refused to help decorate his own hall?”
He took the holly. His fingers brushed hers in the taking of it, bare skin against bare skin in the cold air, both of them having shed their gloves for the work of the wood. And neither moved to correct the contact for a moment longer than the exchange of a sprig of holly strictly required.
PART 7
“Lucy has not laughed like that,” he said quietly, watching his niece now rather than Avisia, “since before the accident.”
“She told me,” Avisia said, matching his quiet, “that her parents used to dance in the hall before Christmas. And that there has been no dancing since. I did not think it my place to ask more than that.”
Something crossed his face — grief, still raw after two years, despite every careful stone he had set against it. For a moment she thought he might turn from her, retreat into the correctness that was his habitual armor. Instead, he said:
“Edmund was driving too fast on the Sethbury road — because Cordelia was laughing at something, and he always drove faster when she laughed. As though he could not bear for the moment to end before he had wrung every last second from it.”
He stopped himself visibly, the way a man stops himself at the edge of a cliff he has walked toward without quite noticing.
“I have thought more times than I can count that if I had been in the carriage instead — if I had simply been a duller brother, a slower driver —” He stopped. “Forgive me. That is not a confidence I intended to burden you with, Miss Elfenstone. It is not part of our arrangement.”
“No,” Avisia agreed gently. “It is not part of our arrangement. I asked anyway. And you answered. Because I think some part of you has been waiting two years for someone to ask.”
She did not reach for his hand, though she wanted to. She had learned already, in two short weeks, the precise distance he could bear before he retreated behind formality again. And she judged, watching his jaw, that they stood very near its edge.
“You are not responsible for your brother’s happiness in the last moment of his life, your grace. I hope you know that — whatever the rule between us permits me to say it.”
He did not answer her directly. But he rode back to the hall at a walk beside the wagons, rather than cantering ahead as his errand’s urgency might have justified. And when Lucy, tired and pink-cheeked and glowing, fell asleep against Avisia’s shoulder in the jolting wagon bed, Avisia looked up to find him watching the two of them with an expression he made no particular effort to smooth away before their eyes met.
The message came at dawn, carried on foot by a boy from Wickmare, too breathless with running to do more than gasp out that the Reverend Elfenstone had taken a turn in the night, and that the physician had been sent for but had not yet come.
Avisia was down the stairs and into her cloak before she had properly finished reading the letter, the ring on her finger cold against skin gone suddenly numb with fear. She did not see the Duke until she reached the stable yard, already shouting for a horse to be saddled — and found instead that he was there before her, his own mount already being led out, his greatcoat thrown on over a shirt still open at the collar as though he had dressed in the space of a single minute.
“I have sent word to Dr. Hilleran in Sethbury already,” he said before she could ask how he had known, “and told him to spare no expense and no delay, and to charge the whole of it to my account rather than wait for your father to protest the cost. My own carriage is being brought round for you now — it will be faster and warmer than riding, and I have ordered hot bricks put in it. Besides —” He paused, meeting her eyes. “I am coming with you. Unless you would rather I did not.”
“You need not. This is no part of our arrangement, your grace.”
“I am aware of precisely what is and is not part of our arrangement, Miss Elfenstone.” Something in the low urgency of his voice silenced her more thoroughly than any argument could have. “This is not that. Get in the carriage.”
The road to Wickmare had never seemed so long. Avisia sat rigid against the squabs with her hands knotted in her lap, and the Duke sat across from her, saying nothing at all for the better part of a mile. Until at last, without any evident calculation, he reached across the narrow space and closed his hand over both of hers. Still and warm and entirely steady.
“Hilleran is the best physician in three counties,” he said. “I have used him for Lucy and for my mother’s rheumatism, and I trust him with lives that matter to me. Your father will have the very best care that money and my name together can command — and I promise you it is considerable.”
He paused.
“I am sorry. I know ‘sorry’ does very little against fear. But I am sorry all the same. And I did not want you to sit in this carriage without someone saying it to you.”
She did not trust her voice. So she only turned her hand beneath his and gripped it hard. And he let her. And did not once suggest that the gesture exceeded the terms of their bargain.
Her father, when they reached the small vicarage, was pale and short of breath, but conscious. Propped against a mound of pillows with Tamson white-faced beside him. Dr. Hilleran arrived within the hour, on a horse ridden nearly to lather — summoned by a rider the Duke had sent ahead at a gallop the moment Avisia had climbed into the carriage.
The examination was long and grave, and ended with a diagnosis of a weak heart, long strained by a lifetime of insufficient means, and a winter chill settled badly on already tired lungs. “Serious,” Hilleran said carefully, “but not, with rest and warmth and proper nourishment through the season, beyond hope. He will want a fire kept through the night for some weeks yet, and food richer than a country parson’s stipend generally runs to. And no undue exertion of any kind.”
“He shall have all of it,” the Duke said before Avisia could speak. “Send whatever is needed from the hall’s own stores — coal, meat, wine, if it will help him. And bill the whole of your attendance to me directly. I do not want the Reverend troubling himself over accounts while his heart mends.”
Avisia, standing in the cramped hallway of her father’s house, watching the Duke of Orwater arrange with brisk and unhesitating generosity for a country parson’s comfort as though it were the most natural thing in the world, felt something in her chest crack open that she had been holding very carefully shut for two weeks.
“You did not have to do all this,” she said when he had gone and Tamson had been sent to sit with their father, and they stood alone a moment in the small, cold parlor.
“The settlement already provides for his physician.”
“The settlement provides for a debt paid,” he said. “This is not that.”
He looked at her then with an intensity that made her want, unaccountably, to step back from it.
“I find I do not much care to distinguish between the two any longer, Miss Elfenstone. Whatever the terms we agreed to in my library a fortnight past — your father is unwell, and I have the means to ease it, and I find I want to ease it a great deal more than the arrangement between us strictly requires. I do not know what to call that. I am not certain I wish to know.”
“Peveral.”
She said his given name — unused between them until that moment — slipping out unbidden in the rawness of the morning. And watched something in his face open at the sound of it, undefended, before he caught himself.
“That is not part of the performance either,” he said quietly.
“No,” she agreed. “It is not.”
PART 8
It was three days later, once her father had been pronounced stable and improving and she had returned to the hall to resume the season’s preparations, that Lady Imogen found the Duke alone in his study and closed the door behind her before he could object to the privacy.
“You went to Wickmare yourself,” Imogen said without any preamble. “In your own carriage, with hot bricks, and sat the whole day at a dying parson’s bedside. That is not the conduct of a man performing an engagement. Peveral, I have known you a long time. I know precisely what you look like when you are pretending — and what you look like when you are not. And you were not pretending in that parlor.”
“I do not answer to you for how I choose to be kind to a woman in my employ, Imogen.”
“No,” she agreed. “You do not. But you might answer to yourself — before you ruin us both further.”
Something in her voice shifted, the cool composure cracking to show, briefly, an older grief beneath it.
“I was a fool at nineteen, Peveral. I chose land over love because I was frightened of what love without security would cost me. And I have spent every year since Rosemuir’s death regretting it in the particular, precise way one only regrets a thing once it is entirely beyond recovering. I came back to Orwater hoping there might yet be some ember left of what we had, however carelessly I once smothered it. I did not expect to find you had gone and fallen in love with your bookkeeper instead.”
“I have not —” he began. And stopped. Because the denial would not come. Because he found, standing in his own study with the words half-formed, that he could not in honesty finish the sentence.
“You have,” Imogen said softly. And for the first time there was no calculation in her voice at all. Only something that might, in another woman, have been pity. “I would advise you, as someone who once made the opposite mistake and has regretted it every day since, not to let your own rule cost you what my caution cost me. But that is not my place to say, I suppose. And I have said quite enough for one visit.”
She gathered her gloves.
“I shall not trouble you again, Peveral. Whatever I came to Orwater hoping to reclaim, I find it was buried a good deal deeper than I had the right to dig for. I wish you joy of her — if you have the courage to take it.”
She left him alone in the study with the fire burned low. And it was there, an hour later, that Avisia found him — come to bring the week’s accounts as she had done for three years running, and found instead a man staring into a dying fire with an expression she had never before seen on him.
Not the careful correctness. Not the flat competence. Something raw and unresolved. A man caught between the wall he had built and the woman who had begun to see straight through it.
“Your grace,” she said uncertainly, the ledger still in her hands.
“I told you once,” he said, not turning from the fire, “that I would not fall in love with you. I believed it entirely when I said it. I had built my whole life since Edmund died on believing that a man could choose not to feel a thing simply by refusing it permission.”
He turned then. And the look he gave her held nothing of the war left in it at all.
“I find I was wrong, Miss Elfenstone. I find I have been wrong for some time now. And I do not know what to do with the wrongness — because I promised you a rule, and I meant it as a kindness, a way to keep you safe from a man who could not be trusted to love anyone well, myself least of all. And I do not know how to break my own rule without breaking the safety I meant it to give you.”
Avisia set the ledger down very carefully on the nearest table, because her hands had begun to shake and she did not trust the numbers to survive them.
“Perhaps,” she said, “you might ask me whether I still want the safety of a broken rule — before you decide on my behalf that I do.”
He looked at her a long moment, something fierce and frightened both moving behind his eyes. And then he crossed the room in three strides and stopped a bare foot from her, close enough that she could see the war being fought in his face. Between everything he had promised himself two years ago and everything he wanted, standing here in this quiet room, more than he had wanted anything since the carriage had overturned on the Sethbury Road and taken his old life with it.
And then the study door opened without warning.
Mrs. Bell stood in the frame, pale and urgent, with a letter in her hand.
“Your grace — Lady Imogen’s brother is below stairs, asking most particularly to see you both together. He says he has come about the engagement. He says he has proof it is a sham.”
Sir Aldus Fair Haven was a heavier, coarser echo of his sister, without her polish or her sudden, surprising honesty. He stood in the Duke’s study with his hat still on his head and a folded letter held between two fingers as though it were a winning hand at cards he had waited a long while to play.
“I have here a letter from a housemaid formerly of this establishment, dismissed last spring for thieving, who is willing to swear before a magistrate that she overheard Miss Elfenstone here discussing the terms of a paid arrangement with your steward, Mr. Fenwick, on the very night your engagement was first announced to the household. A hundred pounds and a sister’s school fees, I believe, were the figures mentioned. I imagine the ton would find that a very great deal more interesting than a Christmas ball.”
The Duke’s voice came quiet and cold. “Get out of my house, Fair Haven. You will have your answer before the ball. And it will not be the one you are hoping for. I do not pay ransoms for the privilege of my own honesty.”
Sir Aldus left with his threat still hanging in the room, unresolved. And for the whole of the next two days, the Duke said nothing more of it — closeted with Fenwick and with his solicitor, and once, briefly, with his aunt, whose raised voice carried as far as the corridor before the study door was shut against it.
It was on the third evening, in the great hall itself, half-dressed now in fir and ivy for the ball two nights hence, that he called the household together — Mrs. Bell, Fenwick, the maids, the footmen, all of them standing uncertain among the half-hung garlands — and told them plainly what Sir Aldus had threatened, and why it would come to nothing.
“I asked Miss Elfenstone to pretend to be my fiancée,” he said, before them all, his voice carrying the flat, unhesitating certainty she had heard him use against Lady Imogen and Mrs. Cathcart both. “The bargain was mine to propose and mine alone. She did not seek my notice, nor my title, nor my money — I brought all three to her door and asked her to take them in exchange for a kindness to her family that I was glad, and remain glad, to give. If there is dishonesty in this house, it is mine, freely admitted, and I will answer for it to anyone who asks. Miss Elfenstone will answer to no one. Whatever the housemaid overheard, she heard the truth of a bargain I made, not a lie Miss Elfenstone told. I will say so to Sir Aldus, to the magistrate if it comes to that, and to the whole of the ton at the ball itself, should anyone there have the poor manners to ask.”
He looked, then, only at Avisia.
“I would rather the truth cost me something than let a lie cost you anything at all.”
It was not, in the end, a private declaration. It was made before the whole household, in a half-decorated hall, with pine needles still caught in the Duke’s own dark hair from an afternoon spent hanging garland himself. And it was, Avisia thought, watching him say it without a single hedge or softening, more binding than any proposal made in private could have been.
That should have settled it. And for a day, it nearly did.
But three nights later, beneath the mistletoe hung in the long gallery, the Duke leaned down as though he meant to kiss her — and stopped, a bare inch from her mouth, his hand still at her jaw.
“I have told the whole household the truth of our bargain,” he said, low. “I have not yet told you the truth of what I want to ask you next. And I find I am afraid to ask it wrongly. Give me four days, Avisia. Let me be certain I am asking for the right reasons, and not merely because Sir Aldus has frightened me into haste.”
She waited through all four days. She sat with Lucy over her stitching, and rode to Wickmare to see her father sitting up and eating broth with something like his old appetite, and told herself each morning that four days was not so very long to wait for a man to be certain of his own heart.
But by dawn on Christmas Eve — the day of the ball itself — his answer had still not come.
She packed her trunk before the household had properly woken, and left a short note for Anora on the writing desk in the Rose Room, and walked out into the snow before anyone could think to stop her.
He caught her a mile short of Wickmare, riding bareheaded through the snow, his greatcoat unbuttoned as though he had not troubled to fasten it before mounting. In the middle of the quiet, frozen road, with snow catching in his lashes and his heart laid bare before her, he said the words she had stopped hoping to hear.
“I love you. Not as a performance. Not as a term of any settlement. Not as a wall I have decided is safe enough to lower for an afternoon. I love you as I have not let myself love anything since Edmund died — entirely, and with a great deal of fear attached to it, that I no longer wish to let govern me. I told the whole household the truth of our bargain because I could not bear for Sir Aldus’s lie to touch you. I am telling you now the truth of my own heart, four days later than I ought to have, because I was afraid of it, and I am done being afraid. I am asking you, Avisia Elfenstone — not to pretend to be my fiancée any longer. But to truly be it. And then, when you are ready — to be my wife.”
He kissed her then, in the middle of the snow-quiet road. Gently, and then not gently at all. And Avisia Elfenstone, who had come to Orwater Hall three weeks before to pretend at a betrothal for a hundred pounds and her father’s health, understood in the warmth of that single, unguarded kiss that she had gained instead something no settlement in England could have purchased for her.
That night, the Christmas ball was the finest Orwater Hall had seen in a generation. And at midnight, before the whole assembled county — Sir Aldus among them, his letter long since rendered worthless, his face fixed in a rictus of a smile he could not afford to abandon — the Duke of Orwater went down on one knee and asked her again, this time with no pretense at all.
And she said yes.
They were married the following spring in the small stone church at Wickmare, where Avisia’s father — restored now to a careful but steady health — insisted on performing the ceremony himself. And the whole county turned out to see it, filling the little church far beyond its usual Sunday congregation.
And every Christmas Eve after that, for the whole of their long life together, the Duke of Orwater would find his wife somewhere in the crowded, laughing hall — by the hearth, or the punch bowl, or kneeling on the floor to settle some dispute among the youngest guests — and cross to her without fail, and take her hand, and hold it a moment longer than strict propriety required.
He never did learn to dance without counting the steps.
But he never again needed to look past her shoulder while he did it.
THE END
