The Duke Hid His Royal Crest to Watch How She Handled His Deaf Brother— He Fell for Her Immediately

Chapter 3

Come, bring the boy. I have ducks. I have a stretch of river. I have no daughters to throw at you. The claret is mine and it is poison. Stay a month.

There was a postscript, scratched an inch below the signature: And leave the hawk at home. No one here will ask it anything it does not care to answer.

Julian read it twice, folded it, and went to find his brother.

He delivered the news by note, in the careful sloping hand the two of them had used for one another for eleven years — since the year the fever had taken their father and their hearing together, and Julian had sat down at his brother’s bedside with a slate and a piece of chalk and had begun, without any skill and with a great instinct, to build a bridge across a silence no one had taught him how to cross. The note said only this:

We are going into the country. No one will know me there. No one will know us. There is a boy next door who draws. Trust me.

(The boy next door was a fiction, an invention of Julian’s hand that he was not yet ready to discuss. He was not sure, that morning, whether he had written it out of hope or out of an old, familiar loneliness he had never once admitted to having.)

Oliver read it twice. He looked up with the steady, evaluating gaze that had been the only weapon left to him after the illness — the gaze that stripped a man bare and asked, without sound, what are you, and what do you want of me. It was the same gaze he had turned on doctors at six, on tutors at nine, on the grandmother who taught him to smile at fourteen. Julian had learned, long ago, to read the difference in it between suspicion and study. This time, for the first time he could remember, there was a third quality in it he could not name.

Julian set his hand on his brother’s shoulder, the way he had done since Oliver was a boy, the only comfort he permitted either of them: the weight of a hand that did not require speech. After a long moment, Oliver reached up and set his own hand over Julian’s — a gesture Julian had never once received from him in his life, and could not, for a long moment, speak around.

Ashcombe House was a low stone manor pressed against a green hill in Kent, with orchards gone somewhat wild, the branches hanging heavy with apples no one had bothered to pick, and a long lawn sloping down to a river the color of weak tea, moving slow and brown between its banks. It was not a grand house. It was not even a particularly well-kept house. But it was honest, and it was old, and it had the particular quality of a place that had weathered its own storms and had stopped apologizing for them.

Lord Ashcombe met them in the drive in a coat too large for him, its cuffs worn dark at the edges. He shook Julian’s hand without ceremony. And then he turned to Oliver, and he did not crouch, and he did not raise his voice, and he did not offer his hand in the sharp, public way most men did when they were terrified of a deaf boy and wanted to get it over with. He held out his hand — palm up, patient, waiting — and he said, slowly enough that Oliver could read the shapes of the words on his mouth:

“I am Ashcombe. I knew your father. I am sorry I did not know you sooner.”

Oliver took the hand. And Julian, watching the surprise soften his brother’s face in a way he had not seen soften in five years, felt the shame rise in him like a dark tide — the particular shame of a man who had spent five years protecting his brother from the world by keeping him out of it, and had told himself, in the doing of it, that he was being kind.