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

Chapter 5

Julian could not, from the window, make out what she signed. He could not read sign halfway across a lawn and a garden, through a pane of glass — he had never learned more than the bare grammar of it, and what he could see now was only the shape of her fingers moving in the air between her and his brother. But he could see the shape of it. The precise, unhurried motion of a woman who had not used her hands this way in a very long time, but had not forgotten how.

He saw Oliver’s face change.

It was not a large change. It was the small, enormous change of a locked door giving way, a crack of light at its hinges, the difference between a smile that was trained and a smile that was arrived at. Oliver sat up slowly in the sunlight, as though he were afraid that any sudden movement would scatter what was happening, as though the whole garden — the roses, the sky, the river beyond the hedge — were made of something that would shatter if he startled it. And then Oliver raised his own hands, and signed back.

Julian Carrick, sixth Duke of Ashmore, sat down on the window seat without having decided to, his knees going out from under him like a boy’s, and could not take his eyes off the lawn.

He had not seen his brother sign in public for five years.

He had taught Oliver, at fourteen, with the care of a man trying to save his brother’s life, that signs were for the house and the schoolroom, for the privacy of family; that the world preferred a deaf boy who could read lips and pass, more or less, for an ordinary boy with a quiet manner; that Oliver’s chances in the world — his marriage chances, his inheritance chances, his chances of being treated as a man and not a spectacle — were better if he kept his hands still. He had told himself this was kindness. He had told himself this was protection. He had told himself, every single night for five years, watching Oliver fold his hands in his lap at dinner parties and hold them there, that the boy was safer for the stillness, that he was doing right by him.

And here, in a rose garden in Kent, on a Wednesday afternoon in September, a stranger in a turned-cuff gown had crossed a lawn and given Oliver back his hands. Hands he had taught Oliver, by slow instruction and long habit, to hide. Hands that were, Julian understood with a sudden, vertiginous clarity that he could not stop, his brother’s truest speech.

He could not read what they said. He would never know what words passed between them across that grass. But he could see his brother laugh — once, a silent laugh that came up through the shoulders and shook him, the way people laugh in libraries, without sound and without restraint — and he could see the woman laugh after him, louder, her mouth open on a laugh that had been forgotten and had just now remembered itself. And he could see them settle, the woman sitting down on the grass beside the bench rather than on it, in the unguarded way of a person who did not mind the damp, and Oliver turning his sketchbook around to show her the rose — the crimson late rose — and her pointing at something, and him shaking his head, and her signing something else, and the two of them, by a process Julian could only watch and cannot describe, inventing a word together that neither of them had known an hour before.

And then he saw Oliver put his hand to his mouth. And saw his shoulders fold. And understood, even through the glass and the distance, that his brother was weeping.

Rachel — no, Rosalind — sat very still. She did not reach for him. She did not fuss. She waited, the way one waits for weather, and when Oliver looked up again, red-eyed, she said something in signs that Julian could not read, and Oliver made a small, watery laugh, and she signed it back, and held out her hand, and he took it.

Julian almost went down. He did not. He understood, with a clarity that arrived sharply and would not leave him for many days afterward, that his presence would change what was happening on that lawn — that the moment a duke stepped into the sunlight of a stranger and a deaf boy making language together, the door he had watched swing open would swing shut again, out of politeness, out of deference, out of the same terrible kindness with which he had closed it in the first place. What was happening in the rose garden was not for him.

He sat back down. He watched them for an hour. He watched the sun move across the lawn, and the light change on the turned cuffs of her gown, and the two of them — his brother and a stranger — build, out of nothing, in the space of sixty minutes, more of a language between them than he and Oliver had shared in a decade.

When Oliver came in for tea, he was still holding the sketchbook, and his eyes were red. He crossed the library without a word and sat down on the sofa beside Julian — closer than he usually sat, his shoulder pressing against his brother’s the way he had done at the age of six, before the fever — and he signed there, in the open library, without first checking whether anyone could see. Without looking around to see who was watching. Without the flinch Julian had spent five years teaching out of him, or into him, he could no longer say which.

She knows, he signed. She knows it. She knows it, Julian.

Julian put his arm around his brother and could not, for a long moment, trust himself to sign back.