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

Chapter 9

The work did not begin with the school. It began with a search, and with a man named Mr. Wills, who was worth his weight precisely in the thing Julian most needed and had never once thought to buy.

The steward’s letters took a fortnight to bear fruit, and they were not gentle. But in the depths of that winter, a deaf schoolmaster from Faversham — a square, patient man with enormous hands and the patient, unshockable calm of a man who had seen every cruelty a deaf child could be handed and had decided to spend his life building a sea-wall against them — arrived at Ashcombe House in a sleet storm, eleven days after they had sent for him, and he looked at Oliver’s hands the way a surgeon looks at a wound that has been left to heal crooked.

“You sign like a boy,” he told Oliver, in signs, “who has been hiding under a table for five years.”

Oliver looked at him. Then he laughed — the sudden, uncareful laugh Julian remembered from the rose garden, the laugh of a boy who had forgotten he was being observed, and Mr. Wills laughed too, and Julian watched from the doorway with his heart in his throat, unable to follow the words but understanding the music of them completely.

That winter, Julian took lessons.

Mr. Wills was not gentle with him, and Julian was glad of it. He was a ducal pupil, and the man treated him exactly as he treated every other pupil, which meant that he made Julian hold his fingers in aching positions until they cramped and would not let him advance a word until he could sign please and thank you and again, slowly without looking like a man asking for directions in a foreign port. Julian was a terrible student. He was worse than terrible; he was a man in his late twenties who had spent eleven years believing he did not need to learn this, and who was now discovering that he had, in fact, been managing his brother with the fluency of a man speaking a language in which he knew only the verbs come, eat, sleep, be quiet.

Oliver, at first, refused to be in the room. He sat in the library and did not come; Julian watched him decline, through a doorway, with a face of complicated reservation. Then, a week later, Oliver appeared in the doorway and watched. Then, one evening, he crossed the room and sat down across from his brother, and he corrected him — gently, precisely, the way one corrects a child learning a beloved thing — and they were both so startled by the happening of it, by the fact that Oliver had corrected him at all, that neither of them signed anything for a full minute.

“You are worse than Elias,” Mr. Wills said, finally, in the dead calm of a man stating a natural law, like gravity, or the migration of curlews.

“I know,” Julian signed. It took him three attempts to get it right, and Oliver laughed at him — kindly, helplessly, with his whole body — and Julian found that he did not mind being laughed at, for the first time in his life, because it was not the laughter of a ballroom. It was the laughter of a brother.

The spring came on, and the school opened.

It was housed in a converted dower house on the Ashmore estate — a long, low building that had once housed a succession of widows and dowagers, and had stood quietly empty for twenty years, and was now transformed, at a great cost and a greater impatience, into a schoolroom with twelve desks and a proper slate wall and windows that threw the east light in clean, unbroken bars down the length of the room.

The twelve pupils came first. Then the tutors: a man and a woman, both deaf, both chosen by Mr. Wills, both of them in possession of the particular unsentimental ferocity of people who have decided they will not lose a single child to the world the way they were lost. And Julian had insisted on purchasing the blackboard himself — a great slab of polished slate in a walnut frame — despite Rosalind’s quiet, ironical suggestion that perhaps she ought to buy it with her own money, to be certain she had earned it, to be certain no one would confuse her school with a duke’s charity.

He bought it anyway. He had it delivered to the schoolroom, and he carried it through the door himself with her, the two of them gripping the heavy walnut frame — he who had never lifted a crate in his life, she whose shoulders had done all the carrying in the world — and when they set it down in the middle of the empty room, she stood and looked at it for a long time without speaking. The morning light came through the tall east window and fell across the blank slate in a long gold bar.

She raised her hands, and she signed, slowly, so that he could read it:

Thank you.

He signed back, badly: It is yours. You earned it.

She laughed — the silent, shoulders-up laugh of the library and the rose garden — and he laughed with her, forgetting, for a minute, that he was a duke and a man who had once thought the world would end if anyone saw him laugh wrong.

The school was named for Elias Vane.