Chapter 2
“Aletter, My Lady. Delivered not ten minutes ago.”
Louisa looked up from the basket beside her, where Eleanor lay sleeping with the thoroughness of an infant who had decided the entire household existed to keep quiet around her. The butler, Hodges, held out a silver tray with a single folded letter on it, sealed in dark wax.
“For me?” Louisa took it, turning it over. The seal was unfamiliar, a hawk in mid-flight, wings sharp against the wax. “Hodges, do we know anyone with a hawk for a seal?”
“I could not say, My Lady.”
“No,” Louisa murmured, half to herself. “Neither can I, and that is precisely what makes it interesting.”
Lady Henswick appeared in the hallway with the speed of a mother who had heard the word letter from two rooms away. “Who has written?”
“I have not the faintest idea.” Louisa broke the seal and unfolded the thick paper. Her eyes moved down the page, and her eyebrows climbed with them. “Well…”
“Well, what?” Lord Henswick had emerged from his study, drawn by the same instinct as his wife, and now stood in the doorway with the look of someone bracing for further inconvenience. “Louisa, well, what?”
“It’s from the Duke of Ashvale.”
The hallway went very still.
“The Duke of Ashvale,” Lord Henswick repeated, as though the title might rearrange itself into something more sensible on a second hearing. “Writing to you.”
“That does appear to be what has happened, yes.”
“Why on earth would the Duke of Ashvale write to you?” Lady Henswick’s curiosity had sharpened into an expression closer to bewilderment. “You have never so much as danced with the man. I am not certain you have ever been in the same room as him.”
“I have not.” Louisa’s eyes moved further down the page, and her voice, when it came again, had lost some of its teasing edge. “He says he has heard that I am fluent in sign language.”
“Sign language.” Lord Henswick said the words as though they belonged to some private eccentricity of his daughter’s that he had long since stopped attempting to explain to guests. “What does that have to do with the Duke?”
“He has a ward.” Louisa read on, her thumb pressed to the corner of the page.
“A boy. He says the child has not spoken since his father died some years past. Every tutor and physician has failed to reach him.” She looked up briefly, something flickering behind her eyes that was not quite surprise and not quite recognition, but sat somewhere close to both.
“He wonders whether I might be persuaded to meet with him, to discuss an arrangement.”
“An arrangement.” Lord Henswick’s voice rose a full octave. “What manner of arrangement does a duke propose to an unmarried woman he has never met?”
“I have not the least idea, Father, as I have not yet finished reading the letter.”
“Then finish it,” Lady Henswick said, “before your father expires from suspense in the hallway.”
Louisa read on. The Duke’s hand was precise, unhurried, the sentences constructed with the same economy she imagined he brought to everything else in his life.
A man who wasted nothing, least of all words.
He mentioned that the boy’s name was Christopher, that he was called Kit, that he was eight years old and that he had not spoken a single word since witnessing his father’s death three years ago.
He explained, briefly and without excessive sentiment, that governesses had come and gone, that physicians had offered opinions and little else, and that a mutual acquaintance had mentioned a young woman fluent in sign language who might succeed where so many had not.
He does not beg, Louisa noted privately, with something close to admiration. A lesser man would have padded three paragraphs with flattery before asking anything at all. This one simply states the challenge and waits to see if I am up to it.
She rather liked that, whoever he was.
“He wishes to meet at his townhouse in London,” she said aloud, “to discuss the particulars in person.”
“Absolutely not,” Lord Henswick scoffed, with the swift finality of a man who had until three minutes ago believed his day already contained sufficient difficulty. “You will not call on a duke, unmarried and unchaperoned, over some arrangement he declines to explain in writing.”
“He does explain it, Father. He simply has not finished explaining before I have finished reading, which tends to happen when one interrupts a letter every third sentence.”
“Louisa.”
“Father, I am reading as fast as you will permit me.” She dropped her eyes back to the page, and her voice, when she found the final lines, went quieter, more careful, as though she wanted to be certain she had not misread them.
“I understand you may require something in return. I am prepared to listen,” she whispered, but everyone seemed to hear.
The hallway went silent again, differently this time. Even her father, mid-objection, seemed to lose the thread of whatever he had been about to say.
Louisa read the line a second time. Then a third.
He is offering to bargain with me.
The thought arrived with a small, unfamiliar jolt, something between wariness and interest.
Not asking me to help out of the goodness of my heart, not offering charity dressed up as employment. He has a need, and he has guessed correctly that I might have one too, and he is apparently prepared to hear mine before he decides whether it is worth his.
It was, Louisa reflected, the single most interesting sentence any man had ever written to her, and she had received four separate marriage proposals that contained considerably more words and considerably less sense.
She looked down at Eleanor, still asleep in her basket, one small fist curled loosely against her cheek.
“Louisa.” Lady Henwick’s voice was gentle, cautious. “What are you thinking?”
“I am thinking,” Louisa said slowly, “that a man who has not spoken to me once in his life has just offered me something no one else has bothered to offer.”
“And what is that?”
“A bargain.” Louisa folded the letter along its crease, her mind already moving several steps ahead of the conversation in the hallway, already assembling and discarding sentences with the same brisk efficiency she suspected the Duke had used to write his own.
“Everyone else who has ever wanted something from me has asked prettily and hoped I would not notice I was being managed. The Duke has simply told me what he needs and asked what it will cost him. I find I respect that rather more than I expected to.”
“You cannot seriously be considering it,” Lord Henswick protested.
“I have not decided anything yet, Father, beyond the fact that I intend to answer him.” Louisa was already moving toward the small writing desk against the far wall, letter still in hand.
“A duke does not write to a woman he has never met unless he is genuinely out of better options, and a man out of better options is a man worth hearing.”
“And what,” Lady Henswick asked carefully, “do you imagine you might require, in return for your help with his ward?”
Louisa did not answer immediately. She set the letter down beside the inkstand, drew out a fresh sheet of paper, and looked for a moment toward the basket where Eleanor slept.
“I do not yet know,” she said, which was not entirely a lie, only a partial truth, and dipped her pen into the ink.
Lord Henswick opened his mouth to protest further. Lady Henswick laid a hand lightly on his arm, a silent request for patience that he reluctantly honored by falling quiet.
Louisa did not look up again. She smoothed the paper flat beneath her hand, considered her opening line for the length of exactly one breath, and began to write.
The room did not see what she wrote. Only that she wrote for a long while, without pause, without once glancing up to ask her mother’s opinion, and that when she finally set down the pen and folded the letter closed, there was a look on her face that her mother had not seen in some time.
It was the look Louisa always wore when she had decided something, and had no intention whatsoever of being talked out of it.