Chapter 7
Gwen reached the garden gate a few minutes before the appointed time and found the iron colder than she had expected beneath her gloved hand. A lamplighter had passed not long before and left a meek flame that shivered in its glass cage.
The square was quiet. No carriage rattled, no late reveler sang to the winter air. She drew her cloak closer and listened to the small noises that belonged to the night—the hiss of the gas, the soft rustle of branches.
A key turned once in the lock. The gate yielded. The Duke stood within, not in full evening dress, but in a dark coat and plain hat that made a gentleman look like a shadow who had learned to walk.
He inclined his head. “Lady Gwendoline.”
“Your Grace.”
“Walk with me,” he demanded.
She hesitated on the threshold. Garden paths could hide and reveal in the same minute.
The gate clicked softly behind her. They ventured into the square together, moving at a pace that would not interest a watchman. The gravel gave a quiet, regular answer to their steps.
“This is unwise,” she cautioned. “The houses look upon us.”
“The houses look upon many things,” he replied. “They rarely know what they see.”
“My face is not unknown,” she reminded him. “Nor is yours.”
“True. Which is why we will not give them a clear view.” He led her toward the southern border, where a line of yews stood sentry and the lamps thinned. “The gardeners have been lazy here. The hedges are thick. The gravel is poor. The owners complain of damp, so no one lingers.”
She followed, though her lungs had tightened as if she had been running.
It was easier to be brazen in a study where the door shut and the fire hummed like a sleeping beast. Here, the night kept score. Windows could open without a sound. A maid could lean on her elbows with nothing to do but remark on shadows.
“You chose the garden gate,” she observed. “Why?”
“It has two keys,” he answered. “One is mine, the other belongs to a man I have paid since his youth to forget faces.”
“That is a poor habit to purchase in a servant.”
“It has served me. As will this path.”
Gwen felt a pang of unfounded jealousy in her chest at the thought of him bringing other women here.
They turned beneath the yews. The city seemed to fall a little further away. The lamps behind the hedge became small blurs, more suggestion than light. The river made its distant presence known with a faint, damp breath.
The Duke glanced down at her. “You are uneasy.”
“I am sensible,” she corrected. “If you wished to be truly discreet, you would have kept us in your study.”
“My servants watch,” he said. “I trust them, but I do not tempt them. A footman can keep a secret until a laundress offers him a laugh and a pie. A gentleman may stroll in a square with a lady and be accused of nothing but air.”
He said it so calmly that she wished to be angry. Anger would have burned away the flutter in her stomach.
Instead, she kept her voice level. “You think of everything.”
“I try.”
“I’m sure you do not, and I do not trust you,” she scoffed, before her politeness could throttle the truth. The words felt cool and honest.
“Good,” he uttered. “I am not offended by prudence.”
“I do not trust any man,” she added. “Not to remember what he promises when he is comfortable. Not to keep his hands where they belong when he is angry. Not to keep his temper when the world refuses to obey him.”
They had reached a small alcove where a stone bench bowed out from the hedge. A plane tree lifted a dark hand above it, bare and black against a faded sky.
The Duke stopped and turned so that the path lay behind his shoulder. He did not touch her. He did not move closer than was necessary for a private conversation.
“If we are to continue,” he said, with that dry clarity that felt like the edge of a well-honed blade, “you will have to trust me at least enough to follow my instruction.”
She kept her chin up. “Your instructions have been agreeable only when they match my purpose.”
“Then we are not so far apart,” he replied. “Your purpose requires privacy. Mine requires it as well. Allow me to provide it.”
“You ask too much of a stranger,” she protested.
“You are no longer a stranger,” he pointed out. “You are a conspirator who arrives at the stroke of the hour and leaves when the clock tells her to leave. You keep your word. I keep mine. If you wish us both to keep our words tonight, you will accept a small measure of inconvenience.”
“Inconvenience,” she repeated, with a small, incredulous sound that almost passed for laughter. “What a gentlemanly word for panic.”
“Perhaps,” he relented. “Yet panic can be quieted by art. I have a little to hand.”
She wished to ask what art.
She wished to ask if he had brought shackles concealed in velvet.
She wished to run.
But she remained.
She remained because she had a purse to fill and a mother to save, and because last night, when he had moved toward her, careful as a surgeon, she had felt not fear, but the strange relief of being read by someone who could actually read.
“I am not panicking,” she declared, but it felt like a lie.
“You are, but not as much as I’d thought,” he replied. “You have decided, then.” His voice had softened by a hair.
He didn’t ask a question, but made a statement. It should not have steadied her, but it did.
She drew in one slow breath and let it go. “Very well, give your one instruction.”
A tinge of satisfaction flashed across his face and was gone just as quickly. He looked not pleased, but determined, like a man to whom a difficult mechanism has just yielded.
“First,” he began, “we will confirm that no eye is upon us.” He tilted his head toward the path. “Listen.”
She listened. The square answered with its pale, ordinary music.
Further away, a carriage rattled in search of home.
Somewhere, a gentleman laughed, already drunk on his own stories.
Here, the hedge breathed, the gravel lay hushed, and the air smelled faintly of damp earth and winter roses that had outlived their season.
“Second,” he continued, “we will change your view of the world for half an hour.”
She frowned. “My view?”
“Yes,” he said. “It is too wide for comfort. You are bravest when you see too much. I wish you to see only what will keep you safe.”
“How do you propose to accomplish that?”
“By obscuring the unimportant.”
She could not help it; she smiled. “You speak like a mathematician.”
“I speak like a man who prefers useful proofs to theatrical risks.”
“You have not always preferred the former,” she said.
“No,” he answered. “I am learning.”
The odd confession passed between them and lodged somewhere warm beneath her ribs. She looked away at once, for warmth was treacherous. She had come to trade, not to thaw.
“I will try,” she agreed. “But I will also run if I must.”
“Run,” he said, almost kindly, “and I will let you.”
She nodded and folded her hands to still the tremors in them. She could do this. She had crossed rougher roads with less to gain.
“Proceed, Your Grace,” she forced out, steeling herself.
The Duke slipped his right hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a length of dark silk. It lay like a tame river over his palm.
She recognized the sheen. It was his cravat. Not the starched day length, but the softer evening one that men tied when they wanted their throats to remain unencumbered.
Her mouth went dry. “What use do you mean to make of that?”
“A simple one,” he replied. “Turn around.”
“No.” The word came fast, almost childish. She steadied it. “Tell me why.”
“So that the night will belong to us alone,” he explained.
“So that when we walk, you will not see a window that may or may not be open. So that when I speak, you will not be measuring the distance to the gate. You will measure my voice instead, and the ground beneath your feet, and the limits of your wish to stay.”
“You ask a great deal.”
“I offer more,” he said. “I offer to carry the fear that belongs to the street. I cannot carry the fear that belongs to your history.”
She had not told him a single name. He had nonetheless put his finger on the place where her heart bruised when the air turned wrong. She hated that he could do it. She liked that he did it without the spice of triumph.
“If I do not agree,” she asked, “what then?”
“You walk away,” he murmured. “Our deal ends. You may keep the money I have sent; I will accept the loss.”
She studied his face. The lamps at the far edge of the square left him in a wash of soft shadow. She saw the line of his mouth. She saw the green that looked almost black at night.
She did not see a man who lied for pleasure. She saw a man who had learned to sit very still in order not to break what he held.
“And if I agree?”
“Then you will have thirty minutes without looking over your shoulder,” he answered. “You will find that the world grows larger when it is narrowed for a while.”
“You are very sure of your metaphors,” she said.
“I am very sure of my methods,” he returned.
She thought of the velvet pouch that he had slid into her hidden pocket at the garden party after they shared a dance.
She thought of her mother sitting by the window in the cold sun, pretending to sew, pretending not to listen for the click that meant her stepfather had set his temper aside for the day.
She could not waste what had been bought.
“Very well,” she sighed. “I will try your art.”
He inclined his head as if she had solved a proof. “Turn around.”
She did.
The hedge cooled her cheek. She lifted her chin to free the column of her throat. Her hands folded in front of her, then unfolded, then folded again.
Do not fidget. He will notice it. He will think he has won a point.
The silk touched her brow. He did not seize or startle. He set the fabric in place as a valet might smooth a collar, competent and without heat.
She might have found it intimate. She found it almost professional. That steadied her more than a compliment would have.
“Too tight?” he asked.
The nearness of his voice unsettled her more than the dark ever could.
Foolish girl, she scolded herself inwardly. Yet the warm coil low in her belly refused to obey.
“No,” she answered.
The Duke drew the ends once and made a neat knot that sat lightly at her temple.
The world went slightly dark. Not black. Brown, perhaps, like tea poured into a cup and held to the light. She could feel the air, cool and damp. She could hear the faint rustle of leaves. She could not see the houses.
The relief arrived like a tide she had not expected.
“Step,” the Duke murmured.
Gwen stepped. He had not taken her hand. She felt his presence to her left, an inch beyond the folds of her cloak. She found the gravel by sound rather than sight.
Her body adjusted quickly, as bodies did when they were allowed to be clever.
“Again,” he instructed.
She walked. The ground told her what she needed. Here, the crunch shallowed. Here, the stones were larger. Here, a root had lifted the path, so she must raise her foot an inch.
She had known these things all her life and yet had never listened to them with her eyes closed.
“Do you still think the windows are watching you?” the Duke asked.
“Yes,” Gwen replied, before she could stop herself. Then, she listened. Nothing but the slow, even breath of the hedge and the distant, watery cough of the river. “Perhaps not.”
“You do not trust me… Say it.”
“I do not trust you.”
“Good,” he uttered. “Now, allow me to earn some of what you withhold.”
“How?”
“By returning you to the power of your own senses.”
“That is not yours to return,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “It is yours to claim.”
They came to the little bend near the plane tree. Gwen felt it as a cooler patch in the air, as if the tree’s hand still shadowed the ground. The Duke said nothing and kept pace.
She did not need his voice to know he was there. She knew it as one knows the shape of one’s own hands in the dark.
He halted. She halted as well. The cravat remained gentle on her eyes. She had thought it would chafe, but it did not. It freed.
The thought surprised her so much that she laughed quietly, as if she had caught herself in some small and novel sin.
“What do you see?” he asked.
“Color without edges,” she replied softly. “Myself, oddly. I hear the gravel. I can count my heartbeat. I know where you stand.”
“Where do I stand?”
“A little too close for comfort.” She felt his smile, though she could not see it.
“You may ask me to move,” he offered.
“Do so.”
He shifted a pace away.
The air cooled at once. She missed the warmth and scolded herself for it.
“Now,” he said, “walk with me for five more minutes. Then, we will sit. You may remove the silk when you choose. You may keep it if you prefer. The choice will always be yours while you are with me.”
Always is a dangerous word. It tempts foolish women to believe that a gentleman means what he says beyond the hour in which he says it.
Yet the word did not feel like bait in his mouth. It felt like a line he had carved into stone for himself as much as for her.
“Very well,” she agreed. “Five minutes.”
They resumed walking. The square breathed around them, patient and blind, like a creature that trusted its keeper. Gwen learned the corners by air and the turns by sound. She found that her shoulders had sunk an inch without her permission. She let them stay there.
Eventually, the Duke spoke. “Here is the bench.”
Gwen reached out and found the cold stone with the tips of her gloved fingers. She sat and felt the bench take her weight with the charity of old things.
The Duke did not sit beside her. He sat a little far, at the angle a careful man would choose when he wished not to crowd.
“If you wish to see me,” he urged, “remove the cloth.”
“I know where you are,” she replied. “I do not need my eyes.”
Silence stretched, but it was not tense. It was delicate. She lifted her hands to the knot, but her fingers hovered.
Not yet, she decided silently, surprising herself yet again. Let me keep the world small a little longer.