Chapter Fifteen #2
“I suppose I have.” Delicately, Grace laid down the letter upon the stack of the rest they’d gone through and picked up a pen to add the amount of the debt outlined therein to the tally sheet they’d been working to complete these last hours.
“Unpleasant,” she said at last. “I doubt you’d fare well. ”
Henry’s lips twitched with the tiniest fillip of mirth. “Ought I take offense?”
“Only if you wish to do so. But in my opinion—which we must agree is without flaw—you bathe too frequently to survive it.”
Another minute widening of his eyes. “And you don’t?” His nose twitched as if he were scenting the air in an effort to detect the sour smell of body odor above the sweet jasmine scent of her perfume.
She allowed herself a haughty sniff. “I do, now,” she said. “But then, I was just fourteen, and no, I did not have the indulgence of regular baths. Nor are they offered in jail.”
“Ever?”
The strident horror in his voice wrung a laugh out of her. “I was only in the clink for a week,” she said. “In that time, we were offered a bucket of water to wash with only once—on Sunday—and the water was grey by the time it was my turn to use it. I decided I’d rather be dirty.”
Henry shuddered with all the revulsion of a duchess who had just seen a mouse scurry across the floor. “I can’t say I blame you.”
“That wasn’t the worst of it,” she said.
“The cell, which I shared with a great many other women—and rats—reeked of piss and shit. We had no blankets, nor even any cots. We were crammed within for all but one hour a day, during which we were made to walk circles in the yard for exercise. During that time, we weren’t permitted to speak to or look at one another. ”
“I hesitate to inquire after the food.”
“In fact, the food was the only bright spot.” At least for her. “We had regular meals, if only of thin soup or gruel.”
A cant of his head, confusion pinching his dark brows together. “In what way is that a bright spot?”
“I rarely had regular meals outside of jail.”
A long pause as he dropped his gaze, abashed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve spoken of it before, I know, but I had assumed—hoped—that it was a rare occurrence. That was insensitive of me.”
Not insensitive so much as uninformed. He’d been insulated, for much of his life, from the realities often faced by the lower classes. “I suppose it must be difficult,” she said carefully, “to have to consider things that you never would have done before.”
A brief wince flashed across his face. “It is,” he admitted slowly. “But it is also elucidating. Could I ask…another rather insensitive question?”
The fact that he had asked permission first made it already less insensitive than he probably imagined. And there was the fact that he’d been by to see her every day this last week, despite the fact that she’d told him that she would inform him when Uncle Rafe produced a location for Mr. Cooper.
She thought he must simply enjoy her company.
And even though this last hour—longer than he ought to have stayed for a regular morning call—had passed mostly in silence as they read through his uncle’s letters in an attempt to gain a full understanding of the man’s debts, still it had been a comfortable sort of silence.
“Ask away,” she said as she collected another letter.
“How do you handle it so well? Being a bastard, I mean to say. It’s as if…as if it doesn’t matter to you at all.”
“It doesn’t,” she said. “I can’t control the circumstances of my birth. Probably there are some”—many—“who would think it right and proper for me to be ashamed of it, but I will not allow them to decide my worth for me.”
Henry shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I wish I could do the same,” he said, his voice low and pensive.
Poor man. He hadn’t the luxury of so many protective older sisters and such a large family from which to take strength.
From the day she had been welcomed into their fold, no one had ever treated her as lesser, nor allowed her to take to heart the gossip of the Ton.
These last eight years, she had been surrounded by unwavering love and support—a veritable human shield which insecurities had never been allowed to penetrate.
She had always known precisely who she was, and if there had ever been a time when she might have faltered, there had also been a dozen or more outstretched hands thrust out to her, ready to lift her to her feet once again.
She asked, “What about you has changed since you learned the truth?”
“Everything has changed,” he said, a quizzical slant to his brows. “My title, my right to inherit—”
“No,” Grace said. “Those have changed for you. What has changed about you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Are you a fundamentally different person than you were?” she asked. “Not your circumstances, but yourself? Has your character altered?”
“Oh.” His head touched the back of his chair as he considered the question, staring at the ceiling in reflection. “Perhaps I am a bit less…exacting than once I was. Less rigid. More flexible.”
“Would you qualify that as good or bad?” Grace asked, propping one fist beneath her chin as she leaned against the side of the couch.
A wry smile touched the corner of his lips.
“I’m not certain,” he said. “I’ve done some things of late which are of questionable morality on the surface, and instigated still more that the law would find beyond the pale.
It’s been at least twenty years since I last walked anything but a scrupulously narrow path, so I do find my conscience somewhat plagued by these things. ”
He did rather seem the sort to adhere to a certain moral rigidity. “What was the last thing you did which plagued your conscience?” she asked, curious. “Prior to all of this.”
A small shrug of his shoulders. “I broke a boy’s nose in a fight,” he admitted.
“You?” A little laugh eked from her throat. “I truly cannot imagine it. Why?”
“He said disparaging things about my mother.”
“Oh.” Now it was her turn to be abashed. “Henry, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s been decades,” he said, “since I last got into scrapes such as those. I don’t regret them, really.
But Mother worried for me, and eventually I grew up enough to realize that it would do me no favors.
I couldn’t convince anyone of anything with my fists.
I could only show them with my actions. So I have always tried. ”
“Tried?”
“Tried to be better. The best. The sort of man—the sort of earl—who would repair the family reputation.” He said it like he was reciting a mantra, like an ingrained, reflexive chant that had lived within his head for years, whispering at the back of his mind.
Doing all the right things. Saying all the right things. Constraining himself to walking only the finest of lines, the narrowest of paths. Pursuing the unreachable goal of perfection. “Henry,” Grace asked softly. “Do you…like yourself?”
He startled to the question, staring at her as if she’d spoken to him in a language he didn’t understand. “Like myself? Why would I need to like myself?”
“Because it’s important to like oneself. I do,” she said. “If you were to hear the Ton talk of me, you’d think me beyond redemption. But I never mind them, because I do like myself.” A reflective smile caught at the corners of her lips. “I was nearly engaged last year,” she said softly.
“Engaged?” Some strange emotion kindled within the frosty blue of his eyes. Something a shade away from anger. Jealousy? “To whom?”
“Lord Latimer.” It seemed so silly, now, that she had allowed herself to come so close to such a disaster. “I liked him, in the beginning,” she said. “He was pleasant, affable. I don’t think I ever loved him, but I enjoyed his company. In the beginning, at least.”
Henry’s hands flexed, curling over the arms of his chair. “What happened with him?”
“I wasn’t enough for him,” she said. “No—no, that’s not quite it.
I was too much for him. Too loud, too demonstrative, too opinionated.
There was too much of me all around. Suddenly he was trying to prune bits of me away, a piece at a time, like a flower that had bloomed too wild.
Suddenly I was a jewel that required polishing to achieve his version of what I ought to be.
Everything I like best about myself became a flaw to remove.
He wanted me to mute myself, to blunt myself, to dull myself.
Even to adopt a slimming regimen, so that there might be less of me all around. ”
“That unmitigated arse,” Henry hissed through the tight clench of his teeth, and Grace found herself once more reminded that he had never considered the fullness of her figure a flaw in need of alteration. “Someone ought to put him in his place.”
Grace allowed herself a snicker. “Oh, I did,” she assured him.
“I refused him in the end, and not particularly kindly. Because I like myself just as I am, and it is only his loss if he couldn’t.
” A little sigh slipped across her lips.
“There are many people who likely dislike me for the wrong reasons. But I like myself for the right ones.” Because she was kind and clever, witty and loyal.
Because she knew how to lift spirits, and how to encourage without nagging.
Because she was good-humored and—mostly—sweet-tempered.
Because she was compassionate and thoughtful.
“It’s important to like oneself,” she said.
“Because one must also live with oneself.”
A long, contemplative silence drew out between them as he discarded another letter and scratched down a new number upon their tally sheet. “I don’t think I used to like myself,” he said quietly as he set down his pen again. “But I think—I think now I do. At least a little better than I did.”
∞∞∞
“You can’t watch the door all evening,” Felicity chided lightly as she sidled up on Grace’s left side. “Perhaps he’s not coming.”