The Duke Rode Two Days Through Rain to Reach His Dying Aunt—Only to Find Her Well and Her Companion Defying His Every Command, Until One Look Across a Chessboard Made Her Fall for the Man She Could Never Have

PART 7 

It was Fay who drew from him, one close, thundery evening in early July, the thing he had told no one in eleven years.

They had been in the library after his aunt retired. The habit of lingering had grown, and the storm had come up over the downs and thrown itself against the tall windows. And by some turn of the talk, they had come to his brother Edmund.

He never spoke the name. The county spoke it for him in the hushed tones reserved for tragedy grown respectable with age. The late Lord Edmund, the Duke’s younger brother — dead these eleven years. A riding accident. So sad. And how gravely His Grace had borne it, alone.

“Were you close?” Fay asked simply, without the arch note she used to arm herself. She had learned — he was coming to understand — when to put the armor down. And it was more disarming than any wit.

For a long moment, the Duke did not answer. The rain ran down the glass. He looked into the fire. And something in the storm, or the hour, or the low, unguarded kindness in her voice, loosened a knot he had kept tied so long he had forgotten it was not natural, and thought it merely the shape of himself.

“We were everything to each other,” he said at last. “Our mother died when I was nine and he was six. Our father was a great man in the way my grandfather was a great man — which is to say cold and correct and much admired and no comfort to a child on earth. So we had only each other. Edmund was the warm one. He laughed easily — the way you…” He stopped. He had been about to say the way you laugh, and he did not say it. But she heard the shape of the missing words. He saw her hear it.

“He laughed easily. He was reckless and generous and forever in some scrape. And I was the elder, the grave one — the one who got him out of the scrapes and lectured him and loved him past all sense. He used to say I had been born a duke twice over — once by our father’s title, and once by my own nature — and that he had been born only a person, and that between us we made one whole man. And he was not wrong. And I did not know how right he was until he was gone, and I found I was only the half that could not laugh.”

“What happened?” she asked very gently.

“A wager.” His voice had gone flat — the flatness that costs the most. “A stupid, reckless, Edmund sort of wager that he could take the north gate at a gallop in the dark on a green horse, coming home from a dinner where he had drunk more than he should. I had gone up to bed. I heard the commotion. I was the one who found him in the lane in the dark with the horse standing over him. He lived three days. He never woke. And I sat with him the whole three days and held his hand and told him all the things a grave man cannot say to a warm one until it is too late to matter. And on the third day, he died.”

He drew a breath that cost him something visible.

“And I stood up from that bed already the Duke of Danahern in name — our father had been dead four years by then — but not, until that morning, in truth. Because until that morning I had still had Edmund to be a person for, while I was only the title. And I decided — I did not know I decided it, but I see now that I did — that I would never again love anything so much that its loss could do to me what his had done. I made myself into the half that cannot laugh. On purpose. Because the half that could had died in a lane. And I have run this family and this county with that half for eleven years. And I told myself it was duty, and grief, and the burden of the name. And it was all of those things. And underneath all of them, it was only fear. I was afraid. I have been afraid for eleven years — of wanting anything at all.”

He looked at her across the firelight in the storm-lit room.

“There. I have made a duke confess to cowardice. I hope you are satisfied.”

Fay did not offer him comfort of the ordinary kind. She did not tell him it was not his fault, or that Edmund would not have wished him to grieve, or any of the soft, useless things people said. She sat very still in the firelight and let his words fill the room and be true.

And when she spoke at last, it was quietly, and it went straight to the bone.

“He was wrong, you know — your brother. That you were the half that could not laugh. I have heard you laugh, Oldwin, twice now. And both times you looked at the sound as though it were a stranger. But it was not a stranger. It was you. It was there the whole time. You only buried it in a lane with him because you could not bear to leave it above ground alone. That is not the same as not having it. A man who could not laugh would not have to work so hard to keep from it.”

She rose and stood a moment by his chair, and did something she had never done — which was to rest her ink-stained hand very briefly on his shoulder. A plain, warm human weight, there and gone.

“You did not stop being the whole man when he died. You only stopped letting yourself. It is a great deal harder to mend than a broken thing, I grant you — because a buried thing has to be dug up, and no one can do that for you. And it hurts more coming out than it did going in. But it is not gone, Your Grace. I have seen it. I would not waste my breath on a monument. I have no patience with statuary.”

She said good night and left him alone with the storm and the fire and eleven years suddenly, terribly unlocked.

And the Duke of Danahern sat up until the small hours with his brother’s name in his mouth for the first time in a decade. He wept once, briefly — which he had not done at the graveside nor at any hour since. And in the morning, he felt, for no reason he could have defended to anyone, lighter than he had felt since he was a boy of six with a brother who laughed easily and told him they made one whole man between them.

He did not thank her. There were no words for it. But that evening, he set out the chessboard in the library of his own accord for the first time. And when she came in and saw it and raised one eyebrow, he said only: “You owe me a game, Miss Ward. I am given to understand you play a reckless, attacking game with no respect for the rules. And I find I have developed a taste for reckless things.”

He added, as she took the seat across from him with that maddening spark rekindling in her eyes: “Do not let me win. I have had a surfeit of people letting me win. It is the loneliest thing in the world. And I did not know it until you.”