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

Chapter 4

There were six other guests at Ashcombe House, and every one of them seemed, at first, to have arrived by accident, chosen by no design other than convenience. The Lamberts, an old couple who had been married forty years, were deaf in the ordinary, advancing way of age, and therefore incapable of commenting on anything they had not firmly seen — which meant, practically, that they commented on nothing at all. A young pair from Sussex, the Ashleys, noticed nothing beyond one another; they held hands under the table, spoke exclusively in a private shorthand, and appeared to regard the rest of the party as a kind of weather. And a widower named Cordell, who collected birds and would talk of curlews for an hour without noticing that no one was answering, seemed to have been sent by the gods themselves to keep the dinner table full.

On the first evening, in the library, Lord Ashcombe poured a second glass of his poison claret, squinted at the fire, and mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that the Pettigrews had sent down a young lady to stay.

“A quiet creature,” he said. “Some cousin, or the remnant of a cousin. They did not want her in London.” He swirled the dark wine and studied it with the gravity it did not deserve. “I gave the girl a room because I owed her father a favor from 1789 that has waited far too long to be repaid, and a man’s debts to the dead are the only ones God actually holds him to.”

Julian set his glass down carefully. He was not, he realized, breathing evenly.

“Of which family?”

“The Vane family. The Northumberland Vane.” Ashcombe shrugged, a long, loose motion that said what does it matter. “Father dead. Mother dead. The brother dead too, some years back. She lives with the Pettigrews on sufferance, and she is grateful for it, which is the saddest thing I can say about a human being.”

“Why do you ask?” Ashcombe asked, then — because Julian had not actually asked aloud why he was asking, and the old man was sharp in the way of people who had stopped performing sharpness.

Julian said he was not sure. He had heard her name, perhaps, somewhere. In London. It was nothing.

He was sure. He had not heard her name anywhere. He had merely seen her hands moving against her waist in the shadow of a pillar, and the image had declined to leave him.

She came down to breakfast the following morning.

The east light struck through the tall windows in clean, unbroken bars, the way light does in country houses when the day is new and no one has yet decided what it will be. And Lady Rosalind Vane walked into it in the same dove-grey gown she had worn at the Pettigrews’ ball in London — turned at the cuffs, he noticed, in the careful, practical manner of a woman who owned exactly one good dress and had made a firm decision, long ago, to wear it until it gave out.

She greeted Lord Ashcombe by name. She greeted the Lamberts, with the patience of long practice and the loud, clear, unhurried voice of a woman who had learned to be heard by those who would not admit they could not. She reached the Ashleys and let them disappear into one another without comment. And she greeted Julian with the small, formal incline of the head one offers a total stranger, correct in every particular and warm in none.

And her eyes, when they met his, did not flicker. There was no recognition in them at all — only the careful, practiced expressionlessness of a woman who had taught herself, over a lifetime of being an inconvenience, to enter rooms without being seen.

She sat across from him. She poured her own tea, without waiting to be served, in a way that spoke of years of not being served. She exchanged polite, brief conversation with Mrs. Lambert about the weather, repeating herself twice without the smallest flicker of irritation when the old woman could not hear her and would not admit it. She asked Julian exactly two questions in the whole of the meal — whether the road from London had been long, and whether he took his tea sweet — and she received his answers with the absent courtesy of a woman with no particular interest in the man across the table. Two questions. He counted them. He was, he discovered, counting them.

He watched her leave the room afterward, when the party broke up. She walked the way she had stood beside the pillar at the ball: contained, soundless, occupying the smallest possible amount of the space she was given — a woman who had learned that the safest way to exist in a room was to cast no shadow an enemy could aim at.

She does not know me, he thought. And then, less certain, a third time: Or she has decided not to.

That afternoon, Oliver went out to the rose garden with his sketchbook.

The roses at Ashcombe were nearly done for the year, their heavy heads gone brown, but two or three late crimson blooms still held their color against the warm south wall, and Oliver had been drawing flowers since he was twelve, when a tutor in Vienna who had given up on teaching him Latin in favor of a pencil had discovered, within a week, that the boy who could not be taught the dead languages could be taught everything else in the living world. Drawing was Oliver’s one, unguarded grace — the single place where he did not perform, did not smile the trained smile, did not sit on his hands.

Julian, who had no gift for idleness, stationed himself at the morning-room window and watched his brother settle on the stone bench, open the book, and sharpen his pencil by degrees, in the slow ritual he had repeated a thousand times, the absolute concentration that was Oliver’s particular gift to himself.

Perhaps ten minutes passed. And then a woman came around the corner of the hedge — the corner nearest the wall, the one place a person would come from if they were seeking the last of the sun.

Rosalind Vane.

She had not known Oliver was there. Julian saw it in the exact instant she saw him: the way she stopped, mid-step, the half-step backward, the brief tightening of the shoulders — the entire physical grammar of a person who had come seeking solitude and had found a stranger in it instead. She turned to leave. And then she did not. She turned back. She looked at Oliver, bent over his sketchbook, unaware of her for a long, long moment, with an expression Julian could not read from the window. And then — in a motion that seemed to cost her her entire body — she crossed the lawn.

She did not approach him from behind. She did not startle him. She walked deliberately, at a wide and patient angle, around to a point directly in his field of vision, and she stopped at a respectful distance, and she waited — without speaking, without moving, only present — until Oliver, sensing the change in the light, looked up.

His face went still. The stillness Julian knew better than any face in the world. The stillness that meant a stranger had arrived, and Oliver was preparing, once again, to smile and nod and pretend, to be charming and silent and small, to hold his hands perfectly still in his lap.

And Rosalind Vane, without a word, raised her hands into the air between them.