Chapter 6
“He will not speak to you. I feel I ought to warn you again before you go in.”
“You have warned me three times already, Your Grace, in the carriage ride from the front door to this one.” Louisa smoothed her skirts and looked toward the closed door of the schoolroom with far more calm than she actually felt. “I promise you I have taken it in.”
“I only wish to prepare you. He does not respond well to strangers.”
“Neither do I, ordinarily, and yet here we are.” She glanced at him, and something in his face, drawn tight with a worry he was clearly unaccustomed to showing anyone, softened her tone despite herself.
“Your Grace, I have not come to perform miracles. I have come to sit with him. That is all I intend to do this morning. Whatever happens after that will happen in its own time, not because I have willed it to.”
“He has had six people attempt exactly that. None of them succeeded.”
“Then I shall be the seventh, and if I fail, you will be no worse off than you were yesterday.” Louisa reached for the door handle before he could offer a fourth warning. “May I?”
Julian opened it for her instead and stood back to let her enter first.
The schoolroom was smaller than she had expected, sunlit, with a scarred table pushed against one window.
There, in the far corner near the empty hearth, sat a boy with dark hair falling over his eyes.
There was an open sketchbook on his knees, a stick of charcoal moving in slow, absorbed strokes across the page.
He did not look up when the door opened. He gave no sign that he had heard it.
“Kit.” Julian’s voice was careful, quiet in a way Louisa suspected did not come naturally to him. “This is Lady Louisa. I have asked her to call this morning.”
Nothing. The charcoal kept moving.
Louisa did not wait for a greeting. She crossed the room slowly, settled herself on the floor a respectful distance from Kit rather than looming over him from a chair, and said nothing at all for a long moment. She simply looked with open curiosity at the image taking shape beneath his hand.
“That is a very fine horse,” she said eventually, to the room in general rather than to him directly. “Better than anything I have ever managed. I once tried to draw my grandmother’s spaniel and produced something that resembled a potato with legs.”
No response.
Kit’s hand paused briefly over the paper, then resumed moving.
Good. He heard that, even if he would not admit it.
She did not ask him a single question. She had decided this on the carriage ride over, turning the problem over in her mind.
Every person who had failed with him had, by Julian’s account, tried questions first, coaxing, patient waiting for an answer that never came.
She would try something else entirely. She would simply exist beside him, unhurried, undemanding, and let him decide in his own time whether she was worth noticing.
She began to sign slowly, speaking the words aloud as her hands moved, the way she always did when teaching.
“Horse,” she said, forming the sign, then let her hands fall to her lap.
She did not look at him to see whether he watched. She simply picked up a stray piece of charcoal from the floor beside his knee and turned it over in her fingers, as though the sign had been nothing at all, merely something she’d done because her hands wanted occupying.
Julian, standing near the door, said nothing. She was grateful for that. She suspected his silence cost him some effort.
“Horse,” she repeated a few minutes later, signing it once more, and this time added another. “Kind.” Her hands moved through both signs together, unhurried. “A kind horse. That is what you have drawn, I think, from the way her ears are turned.”
Kit’s charcoal stilled.
Louisa did not look at him. She kept her eyes on the drawing, as though the pause meant nothing, as though she had all the patience in the world and no particular interest in whether he responded at all. Inside, her pulse had quickened, though she gave none of it away.
Wait. Do not reach for him. Let him reach, if he means to reach at all.
The silence stretched. She let it stretch, resisting every instinct that urged her to fill it with more words, more signs, more coaxing.
Then, slowly, uncertainly, Kit’s small hand lifted from the sketchbook. His fingers moved, hesitant and imprecise, nothing like the fluid motion of long practice, but it was unmistakably the same sign she had shown him a moment ago.
Horse.
Louisa’s chest went tight, but she did not permit it to reach her face.
She did not gasp. She did not clap her hands together or exclaim, the way she suspected every governess before her had done, delighted past discretion by the smallest crumb of progress.
She simply smiled, small and warm, and signed back.
“Yes,” she said softly, her hands mirroring his sign. “Exactly that.”
Kit’s eyes flicked up to her, wary, assessing, the way one might look at a stranger who had just proven unexpectedly harmless.
Then they dropped back to his sketchbook, and his hand returned to the charcoal.
He said nothing more, gave no further sign; he simply retreated behind whatever wall he had built for himself three years ago.
But he had reached. For the first time in longer than anyone could properly measure, he had reached toward another person of his own will, and Louisa found she did not need anything more than that, not today.
She rose quietly, brushing the charcoal dust from her skirts. “I will call again tomorrow, if I may,” she said to the room, to Kit, to Julian standing very still near the door. “There is no hurry. We have time.”
She did not look back as she left the room. Somehow, she suspected that looking back might undo whatever small thread had just been laid between them.
* * *
Julian remained in the doorway a moment after Louisa had taken her leave, listening as the front door closed softly behind her.
He stood staring at his ward with an attention Kit did not seem to notice, absorbed once more in his drawing as though the last ten minutes had not happened at all.
Except they had happened. Julian had seen it with his own eyes. He had watched Kit’s hand lift, unbidden, and form a sign that no one had made him repeat, that no one had bribed or coaxed or pleaded out of him.
In three years, Julian could not recall a single occasion on which Kit had offered anything to anyone without first being asked a dozen times and refusing eleven of them.
He said nothing, unwilling to disturb whatever fragile thing had just settled into the room, and made to leave Kit to his drawing.
Some instinct made him pause, and he glanced back, and found Kit’s hand lifted again, unwatched but for Julian standing silent in the doorway.
Horse.
The boy formed the sign again, slowly, correcting some small error in the shape of his fingers without any teacher present to correct it for him, practicing it in the empty room with the same quiet, absorbed concentration he gave his drawings.
He did not know Julian was watching. He was simply holding onto the one new thing a stranger had given him that morning, turning it over the way another child might turn over a toy.
Julian stood very still, something moving through his chest, some mix of astonishment and a grief so old it had gone quiet, and beneath both, something that felt absurdly like hope, an emotion he had stopped extending toward Kit’s silence somewhere in the second year of failed physicians and tutors.
Six people. Six people, three years, every resource I possess, and she has done in a quarter of an hour what none of them had managed in all that time.
He thought of her sitting cross-legged on the schoolroom rug without the smallest concern for her own dignity, patient in a way he had not expected from a woman who had proposed marriage to him with the brisk efficiency of a solicitor drawing up terms.
He thought of the careful, unhurried way she had let the silence sit rather than filling it, the discipline that must have been required, when every instinct in a room usually screamed to fill a child’s silence with noise and reassurance.
She did not try to win him over.
The realization settled into him with a weight he immediately recognized as true.
She simply gave him room and waited to see whether he would step into it.
He withdrew from the doorway without disturbing Kit’s quiet practice, made his way back to his study, and sat for a long while behind his desk without touching pen or paper, turning the morning over in his mind until he had examined it from every angle he could find.
He had spent years searching for someone skilled enough to reach his ward.
He had, it seemed, found her within the space of a single unconventional proposal, delivered by a woman who wanted nothing from him but a name for a child not her own and asked for nothing more than what she had already told him she required.
Julian drew a fresh sheet of paper toward himself.
He began to write to his solicitors and did not permit himself to hesitate over the words a second time.