Chapter Four #3
They had reached the morning room, where their abandoned watercolors waited on their easels.
Rosanne's latest attempt at a landscape had dried in their absence, and the colors had settled into something that looked almost intentional; a loose style that might, if one squinted, seem artistic rather than unskilled.
"I should not have spoken," Lillian said, settling into her chair and examining her own half-finished painting. "Your brother was correct. It was not my place."
"Nonsense. He was being ridiculous, as usual. You had the answer, and you gave it. What were you supposed to do? Stay silent and let them argue for another hour while Daniel scowled at his drainage reports?"
"Staying silent would have been more proper."
"Proper is boring." Rosanne picked up her brush, examined it dubiously, and set it down again.
"Besides, he acknowledged you. That is practically effusive, for Daniel.
I once saw him nod at a footman who had saved him from stepping in a puddle, and it was the warmest human interaction I had witnessed from him all month. "
Lillian thought of the duke's reluctant words, your reasoning was correct, and the visible effort it had taken for him to say them. There had been something almost painful about it, as though praise were a foreign language he had forgotten how to speak.
What made him this way? She wondered. What carved all the softness out of him and left only this; this rigid shell of a man who cannot admit admiration without choking on it?
She thought of Rosanne's whispered confession: They loved each other, you know. Desperately. Passionately. And it destroyed them both.
Perhaps that was the answer. Perhaps he had watched love consume his parents and decided that any emotion was dangerous. That feeling itself was the enemy, to be controlled and contained and never, ever expressed.
It was a sad way to live. A lonely way.
"You are thinking about him," Rosanne observed, with the shrewdness of a girl who had spent her life studying the people around her for signs of danger.
Lillian started. "I beg your pardon?"
"You have that look. The one you get when you are turning something over in your mind, examining it from all angles." Rosanne smiled and she had a small, knowing expression on her face. "You were thinking about Daniel."
"I was thinking about the weather."
"You were not."
"The weather is very fine today."
"Lillian."
Lillian sighed, setting down the brush she had picked up. There was little point in dissembling; Rosanne was extremely observant.
"I was thinking," she said carefully, "about what might make a person so guarded. So reluctant to show any warmth, even when warmth would cost nothing."
Rosanne's smile faded into something more complicated. "You are thinking about our parents."
"You mentioned them once. You said they loved each other desperately, and it destroyed them."
"Did I?" Rosanne looked away, her fingers twisting in her lap. "I should not have. It is not a pleasant story."
"I do not wish to pry. But I find myself curious. About your brother. About what shaped him."
"You are curious about Daniel." Rosanne's voice was soft, her gaze still fixed on some middle distance. "That is more than most manage. Most people see the title and the coldness and the scowl, and they decide they know everything there is to know. They do not wonder what lies beneath."
"There is always something beneath."
"Yes." Rosanne turned back to face her, and there was something raw in her expression; a vulnerability that Lillian had glimpsed before but never seen so clearly.
"Our parents loved each other in the way that stories tell you love should be; all-consuming, passionate, the sort of love that burns everything it touches.
And that is exactly what it did. It burned everything. "
Lillian waited, silent.
"They would fight," Rosanne continued, her voice dropping.
"Terribly. Screaming matches that shook the walls, accusations and recriminations and cruelty designed to wound as deeply as possible.
And then they would reconcile, just as passionately; tears and embraces and vows that this time would be different.
But it never was. The cycle would begin again within days. Sometimes within hours."
"That must have been very difficult. For you and your brother."
"It was terrifying." The word came out flat, unadorned.
"We never knew which version of our parents we would encounter; the ones who loved each other or the ones who seemed to hate each other.
We learned to be quiet, to be invisible, to stay out of the way of whatever storm was brewing. Daniel learned... other things."
"What things?"
Rosanne hesitated, and for a moment Lillian thought she would not answer. Then she spoke again, her voice barely above a whisper.
"He learned that emotion was dangerous. That love was a weapon.
That the safest way to survive was to feel nothing at all.
" She met Lillian's eyes. "He was twelve when our mother threw a vase at our father's head.
Fifteen when they had an argument so vicious that half the servants gave notice rather than remain in the house.
Eighteen when they both died within a month of each other; our mother first, of a fever that she refused to treat because she could not bear to be bedridden while our father was away, and then our father, of what the physicians called heart failure but what we all knew was simply grief. "
"They died of loving each other."
"In a manner of speaking." Rosanne's laugh was hollow. "And Daniel….Daniel decided he would never let that happen to him. He built walls so high and so thick that nothing could penetrate them. No emotion, no passion, no feeling at all. He would be safe, even if safety meant being utterly alone."
Lillian absorbed this information in silence. It explained so much; the rigid control, the clipped sentences, the way he looked at her sometimes as though she were a threat he did not know how to counter.
She was a threat, she realized. Not to his safety or his position, but to his carefully constructed walls. Every conversation they had, every moment of connection, was a crack in his armor.
No wonder he avoided her.
"I should not have told you all that," Rosanne said, her voice returning to something like its normal register. "Daniel would be furious if he knew. He does not speak of our parents. Ever."
"I will not mention it to him."
"I know you will not. That is why I told you." Rosanne reached out and took Lillian's hand, squeezing gently. "You see him, Lillian. You see the person beneath all that ice and stone. I do not know if you can reach him, I am not certain anyone can, but you see him. And that matters."
Lillian squeezed back, her throat tight with an emotion she could not quite name.
"I am not trying to reach him," she said. "I am simply.... I am here."
"Sometimes that is enough." Rosanne smiled; a small, hopeful expression. "Sometimes simply being here is exactly what someone needs."
***
That evening, Daniel sat alone in his study and did not think about Miss Lillian Whitcombe.
He reviewed the estate accounts, making notations in his precise, angular hand. He drafted a letter to his solicitor regarding the property in Sussex. He read, or attempted to read, the drainage report that had occupied so much of his afternoon.
He did not think about the way she had looked at him when he acknowledged her reasoning.
He did not think about the calm certainty in her voice when she had asked her question, or the way the two farmers had listened to her, or the small curve of her mouth that might or might not have been a smile.
He certainly did not think about what Rosanne might be telling her, right now, in the morning room where they had retreated after leaving his study. Rosanne talked too much, she always had, and there were things about their family that Daniel preferred to keep private.
She will have told her about our parents.
The thought surfaced unbidden, and he pushed it away with practised efficiency. It did not matter what Miss Whitcombe knew or did not know about his family history. She was Rosanne's friend, nothing more. Her opinion of him was irrelevant.
And yet.
The question she had asked, about the planting of the tree, kept circling back through his mind. It had been so simple. So obvious, once voiced. And he had not thought of it.
He, who had managed this estate for nearly a decade.
He, who prided himself on his thorough, methodical approach to problem-solving.
He had spent half an hour listening to Garrett and Hobbs argue, and the most sophisticated solution he had conceived was to split the land between them; a compromise that would have satisfied no one and resolved nothing.
Miss Whitcombe had asked one question and ended the dispute in seconds.
She is clever, he thought reluctantly. Genuinely clever. Not merely possessed of a quick wit, but capable of the sort of clear, practical thinking that most people, most men, never achieve.
It was an uncomfortable realization. Daniel was accustomed to being the most capable person in any room. He did not know what to do with a woman who might, in certain respects, be his equal.
Not his equal, he corrected himself. She is a gentleman's daughter with no formal education, no estate experience, no training in management or negotiation. That she happened to ask the right question does not make her his equal.
But even as he formed the thought, he knew it was not quite honest. Education and training could be acquired; the kind of mind that saw what others missed, that cut through confusion to the heart of a problem, was something rarer.
He had known men with every advantage of birth and education, who could not think their way out of a paper sack. And here was Miss Lillian Whitcombe, with her practical gown and her paint-stained fingers, demonstrating a clarity of thought that half the gentlemen of his acquaintance would envy.
It was maddening.
It was fascinating.
It was...
Daniel set down his quill pen with unnecessary force, scattering drops of ink across the ledger.
He would not do this. He would not sit in his study analyzing Miss Whitcombe's mental capabilities as though she were a horse he was considering purchasing.
She was Rosanne's friend. She visited his home at Rosanne's invitation.
Beyond the basic courtesies required of a host, she was none of his concern.
He would be polite but distant. He would maintain appropriate boundaries. He would not seek her out or engineer excuses to be in her presence.
And he would absolutely, categorically, stop thinking about the way she had smiled when she said I acknowledge your acknowledgment; that small, private curve of her lips that had looked, for just a moment, like a challenge.
He picked up his quill pen and returned to the drainage report with renewed determination.
But the words blurred before his eyes.