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

Chapter 8

The fire had burned low, and neither of them moved to feed it. The two of them sat in the guttering light, and the room had gathered up all its shadows into the corners, and Julian understood that everything he had thought he was doing — every rationalization, every kindness, every careful engineering of his brother’s safety — was being held up to the light of this single candle and found wanting. And he let it be found wanting. There is a relief, he discovered, in ceasing to defend the thing you have secretly known was indefensible, in putting down the weight of it in front of a person who has watched you set it down honestly.

She spoke, then, and she named the smaller angers, one by one, with the patience of a woman counting out coins she had counted a hundred times before.

“I am angry,” she said, “at the woman I was at twenty-two, who had to write a begging letter to a duke and was refused. I am angry at every dinner table at which my brother was discussed as a misfortune. I am angry at every parlour in which he was produced, like a piece of furniture, for people to pity and then put away.”

“Are you angry at me?” he asked. He wanted to know. He was not, for once, bracing himself to be told.

“Yes,” she said. “I am angry at you even now, for hiding your name. You did not need to hide it.” She held his gaze and did not soften it. “You could have come to me as the Duke of Ashmore and asked me plainly whether I should like to be looked at. I would have said no, of course, and you would have gone away, and we would not be sitting here. But you would have given me the dignity of the choice.” Her voice lowered. “You took it from me because you believed you would learn more without it. You wanted to be certain you were not being pursued for your fortune. I can promise you, Mr. Carrick — I have been pursued by nothing for six years. I would have given you the truth, and you did not think to ask for it plainly, and that is what I am trying to forgive you for.”

“I would have learned nothing,” he said. “I would have been afraid to ask. I would have been afraid you would say no.”

“I know. That is the part I am trying to forgive you for.” She said it not as a wounding but as an honest account, a bookkeeper setting down the true figure rather than a flattering one. “We are both,” she said, “in the ledger tonight. Let me tell you what I want, and you may decide what it is worth to discharge it.”

She stood. The firelight moved up over her gown, over the turned cuffs, and he realized, with a sudden and unbidden clarity, that she was the most unafraid person he had ever stood in a room with — that she was the person in this story, out of all of them, who had stopped being afraid years ago, the way a person stops fearing a storm they have already been through.

“I want the school,” she said. “I want it built. I want it funded — and I want the funding to come openly, so that no child within the walls is ever put away in the corner of a house as an inconvenience. I want it named for my brother. I want yours to be its first pupil, if he wishes. And I want it to be the kind of school where deaf children are not taught to keep their hands still.”

She came to stand in front of him, and she was not far, and she was not afraid.

“I want you to acknowledge your brother in public. I want him at your table at Ashmore, with his hands free, signing whatever he likes on whichever matter he chooses, in front of whichever guest cannot bear it. I want the guests who cannot bear it to leave.” She looked at him. “That is the start of what I want.”

Her voice had become very quiet, and it did not waver.

“And then, if you still wish to ask me anything — you may ask me, and I will give you an honest answer. But I will not be asked anything before that.” She said it with a kind of tenderness, and with an absolutely immovable resolve. “I will not be a reward for behaving correctly. I will be the woman who decides, at the end of the work, whether the man who did it is someone she wishes to know. I have been an object other people decide things about for my whole life. I am not going to hand you the one choice I have left to make.”

He nodded. He could not, in that moment, do anything else. The room had become, in the space of an hour, more honest than almost any room he had stood in in his life, and he understood that he had been given, unexpectedly and without deserving it, the thing his father had looked for all his life and never found: a person who would tell him the truth.

“Then I have work to do,” he said.

“You do,” she said. “We both do. Mine is in Northumberland, and yours is in a rose garden in Kent, and somewhere, if we are lucky, they will be the same garden.”

She left him there, and the library door clicked shut behind her, and Julian Carrick, sixth Duke of Ashmore, sat for a long time in the dark with his hands open in his lap, looking at them as though they were a stranger’s. The ring was still in his pocket, where it had been for eighteen days now. He took it out, and turned it over in the firelight, and looked at the hawk, and understood that he had been given a chance to make his brother’s life look like a thing he had not been able to make his own life look, and that he intended, now, to take it.

He did not put the ring back on. He had decided, in the dark, in the honest light of her leaving, that the hawk had done enough managing.