Every Lady Curtsied as the Duke Entered — But He Walked Straight to the Woman Reading Alone by the Window, Unaware She Was About to Become the Only Choice That Truly Mattered
PART 7
And so began the strangest and best autumn of Kitpatrick of Gaspre’s life.
He called again. He called with a shamelessness that scandalized the county and delighted him. He came without ceremony and stayed too long, and talked to her of things he had never talked to anyone of — the estate that had come to him at nineteen when his father died, the terror of it, the sudden crushing weight of a thousand lives depending on a boy who did not know a barley harvest from a wagon. His mother, who had died three years after and left him truly alone. The wall he had built around himself, brick by brick, out of the discovery that everyone who came near him wanted something, and that the wanting never stopped.
He had never said these things aloud. He had not known they were in him to say until he found a listener who did not herself want anything from him at all.
She, for her part, gave him what she had. She did not shower him with gifts — she returned the shawl he sent her because it was too fine. She accepted the mending of the ditch only because the ditch, and not she, was the beneficiary.
“You must stop sending things,” she told him on the fourth or fifth call, handing back a small parcel unopened. “You do not understand what it does. My cousins have not had a new ribbon in two years, and you send me French gloves. It curdles the house. Kindness that shames the people around it is not kindness — it is only a finer sort of vanity. If you wish to give me something, give me your conversation. And give it to my cousins, too, for they are silly but they are not unkind, and a little of your notice would do more for their spirits than a wagon of gloves.”
She fixed him with her clear gray gaze. “You have spent so long being wanted that you have forgotten how to be a guest. Learn it. I would rather have a guest than a duke.”
No one had spoken to him so in fifteen years. He found he could not get enough of it.
There was one call in particular that he would remember all his life. It was a wet October afternoon, and he had come without warning to find the house in one of its quiet crises — her uncle laid up with the gout and roaring about it, a chimney smoking, a cousin in tears over some small disaster of the heart. And Orwenna in the middle of it all, calm as a stone in a stream, dispensing remedies and comfort and common sense in equal measure without once losing her patience or her thread.
He had stood in the doorway and watched her manage the whole unruly household with a competence that his own steward on twice her uncle’s income could not have matched. He had thought: This is a woman who has run a great house all her life without ever being given one.
When at last the crisis subsided and she came to him apologizing for the disorder, he said without preamble: “You would make a formidable duchess.”
The color came and went in her plain face.
“That is a very improper thing to say to a woman you have known three weeks.”
“It is an observation, not a proposal,” he said — though even as he said it, he was aware it was becoming less true by the day. “I am a great noticer of competence, Miss Kyniston. I have to be. I employ a great many people, and most of them are competent at appearing competent, which is a different and lesser art. You are the genuine thing. It is restful.”
“I did not know competence could be restful,” she said dryly, “until I watched you settle your uncle and comfort your cousin and mend the chimney in the space of an hour without once raising your voice.”
“I did not mend the chimney. I told the boy which flue to open. There is a difference.”
“Then you had better learn to draw it, or I shall get above myself and be insufferable.”
But she was pleased. He could see she was pleased. And he was learning that the way to please her was never with silk or gloves, but with this — with being seen to see her, with noticing the quiet daily competences that all her life had gone unremarked because they were performed by a poor woman in a shabby house where no one thought to look.
They fell into a manner of talking that neither of them had ever had with anyone. She told him once, setting down her sewing, that he must not hate the women who angled at him.
“They are taught from the cradle that a good marriage is the only fortune a woman may make for herself. And then they are shown the greatest fortune in the county and told to go and win you. Of course they angled. What else were they given to do? You are angry at them for playing the only game the world allowed them. Meanwhile, you are free to walk away from the table whenever you please, because you were born holding all the cards.”
He did not throw her out. He sat for a long time in silence, turning the thing over. At the end of it, he said: “You are right again. It is becoming a habit with you — being right — and a most uncomfortable one for me.”
She laughed. The rain ran down the windows. And the Duke of Gaspre understood that he had passed, somewhere in that shabby parlor, from a man who admired a clever woman into a man who loved her. There would be no coming back from it. He did not want to come back from it at all.