She Stayed Silent as Her Husband Called Her Mute Before the Entire Table — Then the Feared Iron Duke Set Down His Fork, Defended Her Before Everyone, and Began Uncovering the Secret Behind Her Three-Year Marriage

PART 3

“Find the settlement documents,” Haldane said. “Discreetly. I want to know precisely what Sir Aldis signed, and under what pressure he signed it.”

Marsh’s gray eyebrows rose fractionally, the closest the man ever came to visible surprise. “Your grace is contemplating a suit for nullity.”

“I am contemplating nothing yet beyond information, Marsh. But I find I do not care to leave a woman’s whole future in the hands of a man who purchased her father’s debts as one purchases a horse — before laying eyes on the rider.”

The third thing Haldane learned, he learned for himself three days later in the most unlikely of settings: the subscription library on Bond Street. He had gone in search of a volume on Roman agricultural law that his steward had recommended for its treatment of drainage rights. Instead, he found Githanoris seated alone at a table by the tall windows, a book opened before her that she did not appear to be reading, her gaze fixed on the gray London rain sliding down the glass.

She startled when he approached. A small, quick movement, quickly mastered — the reflex of a woman who had trained her body to expect unpleasant surprises. And then, recognizing him, something in her shoulders eased.

Haldane felt an unreasonable warmth at being apparently the sort of surprise that did not require guarding against.

“Your grace.” She began to rise. He raised a hand, and she settled again, though color had come up faintly in her cheeks.

“Please. I did not mean to disturb your reading.”

“You have not disturbed it, for I confess I have read the same page above a dozen times and could not tell you a word of it.”

A small, rueful smile touched her mouth — the first he had seen from her. It transformed her face entirely, revealed a warmth and a wit that her husband’s presence, Haldane understood, must smother as thoroughly as a hand over a candle.

“I come here on Tuesdays,” she said. “It is the one afternoon my husband dines at his club and does not require my presence. And I find I have grown rather fond of libraries. They do not ask anything of a person beyond quiet.”

“An excellent quality in a library,” Haldane said. “And I should think a scarce one in most households.”

He hesitated. Then, with more boldness than he generally permitted himself, drew out the chair across from her.

“May I sit? I promise not to require conversation if you would rather your quiet were not further disturbed.”

“I find, your grace, that your particular disturbances have thus far been rather welcome ones.”

She said it lightly, but there was truth beneath the lightness. And Haldane, settling into the chair, felt something in his chest that he had not felt in a very long time and did not immediately recognize, because it had been so long since anything had come near enough to touch it.

The small, dangerous pleasure of being wanted in a room.

They talked for above an hour. Of Scarlatti, as promised. Of the drainage rights that had brought him there in the first place, at which she laughed outright — a real laugh, surprised out of her — when he confessed the volume’s title. She spoke of her girlhood in Herefordshire, of a mother dead these eight years, of a father she loved and pitied in equal measure. A gentle, ineffectual man who had never recovered his nerve after the canal scheme failed, and who now lived quietly and mostly alone in a house too large for his diminished means.

She did not speak of her marriage. And Haldane did not ask, understanding instinctively that whatever ground existed between them was too new and too fragile to bear that particular weight yet.

But he watched her. And listened beneath her words for what she did not say.

And heard it anyway.

In the careful way she checked the small watch pinned at her bodice every twenty minutes. In the relief that crossed her face, and then guilt close behind it, when she realized how much time had passed.

“I must go,” she said at last, gathering her gloves with hands that were not quite steady. “My husband dines early on library days.”

If I am not at home before him —

She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.

At the library door, beneath the awning, in the thin gray rain, Haldane said the thing he had been turning over in his mind since Marsh’s report arrived three days before.

“Mrs. Rexol. If ever you found yourself in difficulty of any kind, I hope you would know that you might send word to Hailwood House. It would be received with the fullest discretion — and answered.”

She looked at him for a long moment, rain misting silver in the space between them. Something in her face was so nakedly startled, so unused to the offer of shelter, that Haldane felt his own throat tighten unexpectedly.

“Why?” she asked simply. “Forgive me, your grace, but I do not understand why a man of your consequence should trouble himself over the difficulties of another man’s wife.”

He could have given her a dozen practiced answers. Chivalry. General principle. The ordinary duty a gentleman owed to any lady in distress. All of it would have been true — and none of it would have been the whole truth.

And something about the directness of her question demanded better of him than a comfortable half-answer.

“Because I watched you endure an unkindness with more grace than most men could summon under a knighthood,” he said. “And because I have some small experience of humiliation worn in public while the room laughs. And I did not care for the way it sat with me, to watch you carry that particular weight alone. That is the whole of my reasoning, Mrs. Rexol. I offer no more elegant one, because I have none.”

She did not answer at once. The rain fell between them, soft and steady. A hackney rattled past on the wet cobbles. Somewhere behind them, a shop bell rang thin and bright.

When she spoke, her voice had dropped so low he had to lean nearer to catch it.

“I have not been offered kindness without a price attached to it in longer than I can well remember. Your grace, I do not quite know what to do with it freely given.”

“You need do nothing with it,” Haldane said. “Save know that it is there, should you ever require it.”

She left him then, hurrying down Bond Street beneath a borrowed umbrella toward whatever waited for her at home. And Haldane stood beneath the library awning long after she had disappeared into the rain and the crowd, thinking of drainage rights and canal debts and gray eyes that had looked, for one unguarded moment, as though they had forgotten how to hope for anything.

And were only now, cautiously, relearning the shape of the word.