“So I ran. I ran, and I ran, and I ran. I couldn’t come home because the King was sending troops, and I am a loyal man. So I just kept running. Until one day I came to another barn. This one had two women hanging from it. It was awful. I never discovered why they had been killed or who was responsible for it. It was then that I decided it was better for a person not to feel anything at all. It is easier.”
“It can be,” Elizabeth whispered. “It can be much, much easier.”
The Duke nodded. “You look very beautiful when you look into the distance like that. Like you’re in a dream.”
“Duke,” Elizabeth said.
“Harold.”
“Harold,” she went on. “Please, tell me the truth, why do you want to marry me? There is a connection between us – I cannot deny that – but there must be some other reason. A man in your position cannot afford to marry based upon emotion alone.”
The Duke rubbed his jaw and let out a long sigh. “There is a reason,” he said. “But it is no longer valid. If the reason were not there, I would still wish to marry you as soon as you would have me. But fine, I will give you the reason I threw the party and invited so many unmarried women. The King wishes for me to marry. It is making him look bad, apparently, to have a renegade around him in peacetime. He needs me to marry so that the rumors about me can cease.”
“I am merely a pawn!” Elizabeth cried. “I am a piece in your game of houses!”
Elizabeth felt as though she’d been punched in the chest. She had kissed this man – she had kissed this man, for Heaven’s sake – and now he was telling her he had lied to her face. She had dishonored herself with him. If anybody were to find out that she had kissed a man without being married to him, she would be ruined forever. “I was just one of many, was I, at the party? One of many that you thought you could marry!”
“That is not how it is,” Harold said, his voice never changing tone or inflection. “I needed a wife. I saw you. You were by far the most interesting woman at that party. I spent time talking to the others, and I was disappointed. Yes, it started in a rather sordid way, I will give you that. But we have had a nice time of it over these past two days, haven’t we? I truly believe we are getting to know each other.”
“I do not know you at all,” Elizabeth said. “You lied to me and you—kissed me!”
“I should not have kissed you,” Harold said. “I own that. It was wrong of me. But do not tell me that you did not enjoy the kiss. I know you did, and you know you did. We both enjoyed it. Is that wrong?”
“We are not married,” Elizabeth said. “Whether or not it is wrong makes no difference when the consensus is that it is wrong. I will be ruined if anybody ever discovers this!”
“Nobody ever will,” Harold said calmly. “And it will not matter if we marry.”
“Is this your ploy, to kiss me and then blackmail me into marriage?”
“Now you are being silly,” Harold said. “I am not blackmailing you. I would never do something like that.”
“How can you just sit there and talk with such a calm voice? Are you not excited? Are you not sorrowful?”
“I am patient,” Harold said slowly. “I am patient, and I am sorry. But I will not weep if that is what you wish. I wept my last tears a long time ago.”
Elizabeth breathed heavily and composed herself, summoning her inner-calm. “Leave me now, if you if would,” she said. “Please, I wish to spend this night alone.”
“Very well,” he said, rising. “I will see you on the morrow.”
Elizabeth waited for the door to close behind him and then threw herself onto the bed, feelings twisting through her like gnarled branches.
Elizabeth woke in the middle of the night with a feeling of almost overwhelming dread. Like every woman, she had heard horror stories about men using them and then ruining them. To some men, she knew, using a woman was just a sport, something to be done and then laughed about afterwards. You didn’t need to take a woman’s feelings into consideration when you were a certain kind of mind. You merely did what you wanted and damned the consequences. Elizabeth had to hope that Harold was not a man like that. If he was, she was already ruined. She had already crossed a line. Perhaps there is a land where a woman can kiss whomever she wants, but it is not this one.
She tried to reclaim sleep, but it wouldn’t come. She walked to the desk and lit a candle, and hunched over a French novel about a woman who is stolen from a small town and carried to Paris, where she learns how to become a proper lady. Only at the end was the small town French woman rumbled, when she failed to read a piece of Greek script. She was thrown aside by the man who had stolen her and was forced to return to her town, disgraced.