Chapter 5
“There you are.”
Kit did not look up. He stood in Rosalind’s stall, the curry comb moving in slow, careful strokes along the mare’s flank, utterly absorbed in the work, as though his guardian had not just spoken directly to him.
Julian stepped inside, careful of the straw, careful of the boy’s space, the way he had learned to be over three years of trial and considerably more error. “She looks well groomed.”
Nothing. The currycomb moved on, steady, unhurried.
Kit’s dark hair had fallen over his eyes, and he did not push it back, did not glance toward the doorway, gave no sign that he had registered another person entering the stall.
“I understand you’ve been down here most of the afternoon.”
Silence.
Julian had grown, against his own wishes, almost accustomed to it, to the quality of it—thick and deliberate, nothing like the ordinary quiet of a shy child. It was a wall built brick by careful brick, and Julian had spent three years failing to find a single gap in it.
He felt, standing there, the same low familiar ache he always felt in this stable, the sense of reaching toward something just out of his hand’s span, again and again, until his arm had grown tired of the reaching.
“Rosalind’s fortunate,” he tried again, leaning against the stall door, keeping his voice even, the way Piers had once told him worked better than urgency ever did. “Not every horse gets brushed twice in one day.”
Kit’s hand paused briefly over the mare’s shoulder.
For one instant, Julian’s chest tightened with something close to hope, foolish and immediate, that he might have found some thread worth pulling.
Then the boy’s hand resumed its motion, and whatever had flickered there closed over again, smooth as water settling, and Julian’s hope closed over with it.
His eyes fell to the sketchbook tucked beneath Kit’s arm, the corner of a page visible, some study of the stable rafters or the mare’s head, rendered with a careful, patient hand that he had only ever glimpsed in fragments, since Kit guarded the sketchbook more fiercely than he guarded anything else in his small, silent world.
“May I see?” Julian reached for it slowly, the way one reached for anything wary and easily startled.
Kit moved before Julian’s fingers had properly closed on the cover. He wrenched the sketchbook away, clutched it to his chest, and for one raw, unguarded moment, his eyes came up and met Julian’s, furious, wounded, entirely unwilling to be looked at.
Julian went still, the way he’d learned to go still around him, as though stillness alone might undo whatever damage his reaching hand had just caused.
The boy tore the page free in one sharp motion, crumpled it, and dropped it in the straw at Julian’s feet. Then he turned and walked out of the stable, shoulders set with a rigidity that belonged on a man three times his age, and did not once look back.
Julian stood alone with the mare, the curry comb abandoned on the straw, and bent slowly to retrieve the crumpled page.
He smoothed it against his knee. It was a sketch of a horse, rendered in quick, sure lines, more skill in it than most drawing masters managed by twenty.
Beneath it, half-erased, was the ghost of a word Kit had begun and then scrubbed away before anyone could see it.
He could not make out what the word had been. He suspected that had been the point.
Julian folded the page carefully into his coat and left the stable with the hollow feeling that always followed these attempts, the sense of having reached toward something only to watch it recede a fraction further out of reach, and no clearer idea now than he’d had three years ago of how to close the distance.
Dominic Carter, the Viscount Carwell, arrived a little after nine, let himself into the study with the ease of a man who had been doing so since the two of them were boys at Eton together, and dropped into the chair opposite Julian’s desk without waiting to be invited.
He had a way of entering a room as though he owned a share of it, unhurried, faintly amused, the sort of man whose steady company Julian had relied on through his father’s funeral, his inheritance of the title, and the long, grim year after Daniel’s accident when Dominic had simply appeared at Ashvale House most evenings and said very little, which at the time had been exactly the right amount.
“You look like a man who has lost an argument.”
“I have not lost anything. I have merely had an unusual afternoon.”
“Unusual is not a word I associate with you.” Dominic reached for the brandy Julian kept for exactly these visits, poured himself a measure without asking, and settled back.
“Before you tell me whatever it is, I want it noted that I have had a thoroughly tedious week and require some entertainment as compensation. My aunt has decided I ought to marry before the year is out, and has taken to seating me beside a fresh candidate at every dinner she hosts. Last week, it was a Miss Pratt, who spoke for forty minutes about her spaniel’s digestion. ”
“You have my sympathy.”
“You have never once offered me sympathy in your life. Do not begin now; it does not suit you.” Dominic swirled his brandy, eyeing Julian over the rim of his glass. “How is Kit?”
Julian’s jaw tightened, and some of the evening’s earlier hollowness crept back into his chest. “The same. Perhaps worse. He tore a page from his sketchbook this afternoon and left it in the straw rather than let me see it.”
“He lets no one see his sketchbook. You know this.”
“I know it. It does not make his refusal easier, though.”
“No,” Dominic said, quieter. “I imagine it does not.” He let the silence sit for a moment, the comfortable kind that only came from years of friendship, before his mouth curved again, some of the lightness returning.
“And how is your brother? Still saving London one patient at a time and insufferably pleased about it?”
“Piers is well. He called last week to tell me, at considerable length, that a man he treated for a fever in Spitalfields has recovered fully, as though I had personally doubted his competence.”
“He has always required an audience for his triumphs. I blame you for spoiling him as a boy.”
“I did not spoil him. I merely failed to discourage him sufficiently.”
“A distinction without a difference, in my experience.” Dominic set his glass down, stretching his legs toward the fire.
“Now, you have that look about you, Julian, the one you get when something has actually happened rather than merely occurred to you. Out with it. What sort of afternoon warrants that face?”
“I received a young woman this afternoon. Lady Louisa Everly. Fluent in sign language, apparently, and rather more direct than most women of my acquaintance.” Julian rubbed a hand across his jaw, aware, even as he said it, how strange the next part would sound to the one man alive who might actually believe him. “She proposed marriage to me.”
Dominic’s glass paused halfway to his mouth. “She what?”
“You heard me correctly.”
“I did, and I find I would still like you to repeat it, because it improves considerably with a second telling.” Dominic set his glass down, grinning now, thoroughly delighted.
“A woman walked into your study and proposed marriage to the coldest duke in London after just meeting him. Julian, tell me everything and leave nothing out, I beg you.”
“There is less to tell than you imagine. She has taken in a child—her maid’s orphaned daughter—and requires a husband to give the girl a name.
I require someone Kit will trust. She pointed out, not without some justice, that marriage would solve both problems more thoroughly than simple employment. ”
“Was she very plain and very desperate? I confess I had not thought your reputation had sunk quite so low as to attract proposals from strangers.”
“She was neither plain nor, as far as I could determine, desperate.”
“Good God.” Dominic sat back, genuinely startled now, the teasing edge falling away for a moment. “And what manner of woman proposes such a thing with a straight face?”
“The sort who has already refused four proposals, I gathered, and did not seem to think this one required any greater sentiment than the ones she’d turned down.”
“I like her already sight unseen.” Dominic’s grin returned, sharper now. “And what did you tell her?”
“That I needed time to consider it.”
Dominic’s grin widened, and then, slowly, it faded into something else, something more careful.
He set his glass down entirely and studied Julian with the particular attention he reserved for the handful of moments each year when he judged their friendship worth more than his amusement, the look that had, over two decades, come to mean he intended to say something Julian would not enjoy hearing.
“Julian.” His voice had dropped. “May I ask you something, and would you actually answer it, rather than retreating behind that very useful silence of yours?”
“Go on.”
“If Kit were your own son—not your ward, not Daniel’s boy inherited out of duty and grief, but your own blood, your own child—sitting silent in that stable every day for three years while every tutor and physician in London failed him, would you still refuse a solution because it arrived in an unconventional shape? ”
Julian did not answer. He felt the question settle into him somewhere he would rather it hadn’t, and found he had no ready argument to push it back out.
“You have tried everything else,” Dominic continued.
“Governesses. Physicians. That specialist Piers dragged down from Edinburgh who charged you a small fortune to sit in a room with the boy and accomplish precisely nothing. Three years, Julian. Three years of patience, money, and every method available to a man of your resources, and Kit is exactly where he was the day his father died, except older, and further away, and considerably better at hiding whatever he draws in that sketchbook of his.”
“I am aware of the timeline, Dominic. I do not require you to recite it to me.”
“I recite it because I do not think you have looked at it plainly.” Dominic held his gaze a moment longer, then softened, some of the old warmth returning to his face.
“I do not say this to wound you. You have given that boy everything money and title could purchase. I only wonder whether what he needs was never for sale.”
Julian said nothing, and Dominic, reading the silence correctly, did not press further. He finished his brandy, set his glass down with a small, decisive clink, and rose, checking his pocket watch with a faint grimace.
“I ought to go. I promised my aunt I would call before ten, and if I arrive later than that, she will assume I have died in a ditch and send the entire household out with lanterns, which would be considerably more embarrassing than simply being punctual.”
He retrieved his hat from the chair beside him and paused at the door, his usual lightness entirely gone now.
“You have been searching for a teacher, Julian. Someone skilled enough, patient enough, clever enough to reach a boy who has decided the world is not safe enough to speak into. But Kit does not need another teacher. He has had six of them, and every one of them has failed for the same reason. He needs someone who will not leave. He needs a family, not another employee who arrives each morning and departs each evening back to a life that has nothing to do with him. This woman offered you one in a single afternoon, Julian. I would think carefully before deciding that was too strange a shape for the solution to take.”
“Go and see your aunt, Dominic, before she sends out a search party.”
“I am going.” He grinned once more, some of the gravity lifting off him as easily as it had settled. “Send word when you’ve decided. I find I am unreasonably invested in the outcome, and I intend to say a great many insufferable things at your wedding if it comes to that.”
“There will be no wedding to speak insufferable things at.”
“We shall see.” Dominic tipped his hat and was gone, his footsteps receding down the corridor, and the study fell quiet behind him.
Julian remained at his desk a long while after Dominic’s departure, the crumpled sketch still folded in his coat pocket where his fingers found it twice without quite meaning to.
His mind returned, against his will, to the study that afternoon, to Louisa Everly sitting across from him with her chin lifted and her terms laid out as plainly as a solicitor’s brief.
A practical arrangement, built on mutual respect.
She had not once dressed the proposal up as anything nobler than what it was, had not feigned affection she did not feel, had simply looked at the shape of his problem and the shape of her own and pointed out, with a directness he had not encountered in a decade of London drawing rooms, that the two fit together.
It was absurd, marriage to a woman he had known the length of one conversation, on the strength of nothing more than her fluency in a language most of Society had never heard of and her unshakable will.
But he had run out of other options a long time before she ever walked into his study, and Dominic was right, damn him, that three years of patience and money and every conventional method available had produced nothing but a torn page in the straw and a boy who would not look at him.
Julian drew a fresh sheet of paper toward himself, dipped his pen, and began to write a letter.