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

Chapter 7

The fire had burned down by a hand’s breadth before either of them spoke, and Julian understood that she was not finished, and that it was not for him to hurry her.

“Your brother is very gifted, Mr. Carrick.” She said it plainly, without flattery, the way one states a verifiable fact about the weather. “He draws better than Elias ever did. He has a sense of humor.” A pause. “He is also, I think, very lonely.”

Julian felt the words land in him the way a stone lands in still water, and did not trust himself to speak.

“I do not know what arrangements you have made for him,” she said. “But I would ask you, with as much respect as I can muster, not to undo them when you take him home.”

“Undo them?” he said. The word came out sharper than he meant it.

“Undo what I have seen you build.” She met his eyes then, for the first time since she had set down her book. “You have taught him to read lips, to pass, to smile. You have made him a creature who can move through the world as though he were hearing, and you have done it out of love. I do not question that it was love.” She let the sentence settle. “But I have been the brother who was made to keep his hands still, Mr. Carrick. I have been the one hidden in the place in Yorkshire, fed and housed and kept clean, and never once spoken to in my own language by anyone who loved me enough to learn it. And I can tell you that there is a particular loneliness that comes from being loved well and loved wrong — from being given everything by a person who will not give you the sound of your own true voice.”

Julian could not, for a long moment, speak.

“I have made,” he said at last, and his voice broke on it, “the wrong arrangements for him.”

She was silent, watching him.

“I have taught him to keep his hands still. I have told myself I was protecting him. I have spent the last five years — eleven years — watching him sit on his hands at dinner parties because I taught him to. I told him the world preferred a deaf boy who could pass. I told him his chances were better if he was quiet.” He looked at his own hands, open and empty in his lap. “I did not want to watch him be laughed at anymore. So I made him laughable, gently, without meaning to. I made him small so the world could not hurt him, and the world hurts small boys, Mr. Carrick, by not letting them be seen. By letting an ordinary boy earn a different country.”

She did not absolve him. She did not look at him with pity. She looked at him with the steady, undecorated assessment of a woman deciding what kind of man she had been talking to — whether the weeping at the window, the unbranded carriage, the eleven days without a signet ring, had been a performance or an arrival.

And then she said: “That is the most honest thing you have said to me, Mr. Carrick. I am glad you have said it.” A pause. “But I do not think it is the most honest thing you have to say.”

He went very still. The fire cracked.

“What do you mean?”

She picked up her book and did not open it. He watched her turn it over in her hands, once, and understood that she was bracing herself to tell him a thing she had been carrying for six years.

“Lord Ashcombe keeps an old register in the front hall,” she said. “Every guest who has ever stayed in this house is listed in it, going back to the last century. My memory for crests is good. It is good because six years ago I wrote a letter to the Duke of Ashmore asking him to support a small school I wished to establish for deaf children in Northumberland — a school to teach them to sign, and to read, and to be taught in their own language rather than managed — and I received a reply from his secretary refusing me, sealed with the Ashmore crest.”

She set the book down.

“I looked at that seal for a long time. I have looked at it since, every time I have passed an Ashmore carriage in the street. I memorized the hawk. I would not have known it from any other crest, once. Now I would know it anywhere.”

She looked at him, and her eyes were hard, and they were not hard.

“Your carriage came up the drive unbranded,” she said. “But your brother’s trunk was not. There is a small A, with a hawk, on the brass at the corner. I saw it on the first day you arrived.” She paused. “I have known who you were since Tuesday.”

The fire shifted in the grate. A log turned, and fell, and sent a small eruption of sparks up into the darkness.

“You have known,” Julian said, and his voice was very careful, “for five days.”

“Yes.”

“And you said nothing.”

“I had not yet decided whether I would say anything at all.” Her voice was level. “I told myself I would observe. I told myself I would see what kind of man hides himself in his own friend’s house and calls himself Mr. Carrick — whether he was hiding the hawk out of shame, or out of calculation. I did not believe you were here for an honest reason. I believed you had come to look at me, perhaps, because Lady Pettigrew had put my name on some list.”

“I had not heard your name,” he said, “until Ashcombe said it last Tuesday.”

“I know that now.” She held his gaze. “I believe you.”

“What changed?”

She was silent for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was quieter.

“I watched you watch your brother from the morning-room window the day I went into the rose garden. You sat there for an hour. You did not come down.” A pause. “A man who is amusing himself does not sit at a window for an hour and weep when no one is watching.”

Julian’s breath went out of him. He had not known he had been weeping. He had not known she could see the window from the rose garden — that the light and the angle had given her his whole revealing hour, his whole unguarded face, the whole evidence of everything he had hidden for five years. He had not known anything, it seemed, about anything.

She did not press. She let the silence do its work. And then she said: “I wrote that letter to your secretary in 1817. I had buried my brother three months earlier.” Her voice was very even now, very careful. “The school was an attempt to make his death mean something. I thought if I could teach other deaf children the language they had been denied — if I could build the school Elias never had — then the four years after the journey would have been worth it. Then the journey would have been worth it.”

“The refusal came back in a fortnight. It was polite. It was final. It said the duke’s resources were already committed.” She looked down at her folded hands. “I was twenty-two. I had just buried my brother. I read that letter standing in the hall of the Pettigrews’ house, and I decided, in that moment, that I would spend the rest of my life despising the Duke of Ashmore, and I held him in that despising for six years.”

“I do not blame you for it now,” she said. “I understand that the letter never reached you. I understand that you were three-and-twenty, that your secretary handled a hundred such petitions a year, that a hundred such women with a hundred such dead brothers wrote a hundred such letters and were refused by rote.”

“I understand that is not the man I was angry at.”

She looked at him.

“But I did not know that then. And for six years I carried an idea of the Duke of Ashmore that I did not enjoy carrying. And then I came down to Kent on the Pettigrews’ charity, and I saw a man across a ballroom watching his deaf brother be laughed at — and I did not know what to do with the difference between that man and the one I had pictured. I have been sitting with that difference for a week. I do not yet know how to reconcile them. I am not finished with being angry, Mr. Carrick.”