Chapter 13
“Which way to the stables, if you please?”
“Straight along the gravel path past the rose garden, Your Grace, and through the second archway. You’ll hear the horses before you see them.”
Louisa thanked the gardener and set off in the direction he’d pointed, her skirts gathered slightly against the morning dew still clinging to the grass.
A small satchel of paper and charcoal was tucked under one arm, in case Kit wished to draw rather than sign, along with a slim primer of her own devising, written out the night before by candlelight, in case he wished for neither.
She had lain awake longer than she meant to the previous evening, debating how to begin.
Every tutor before her, by Julian’s account, had arrived armed with lesson plans and expectations, had sat Kit down at a desk and waited for him to perform to some standard he had never agreed to meet.
She did not intend to make that mistake.
This morning, she intended to make no demands of him whatsoever, and see what came of that instead.
The stables emerged through the second archway exactly as promised, long and low, golden light slanting through the high windows onto scattered straw. The warm, comfortable smell of horse and leather and hay settled over her the moment she stepped inside.
A groom near the entrance touched his cap. “Looking for Master Kit, Your Grace? He’ll be with Rosalind. Third stall from the end, on your left.”
“Thank you.”
She found Kit there, exactly as she’d expected, perched on an overturned bucket beside a bay mare with a gentle eye and a white blaze down her nose, a curry comb moving in slow, careful strokes along the horse’s flank.
He did not look up as she approached, though the set of his shoulders told her that he had heard her footsteps in the straw and had simply decided, as he decided most things, to withhold judgment until he’d seen what she meant to do about it.
Louisa did not go to him directly. Instead, she crossed to a second bucket and settled herself onto it a respectful distance away, close enough to be present but far enough not to crowd him. She looked at the mare rather than at him.
“Rosalind,” she said, to no one in particular. “That is a very fine name for a very fine horse.”
Kit’s hand did not pause this time. The curry comb kept moving steadily, though Louisa noted with some satisfaction that his shoulders had not gone rigid the way they had on that first morning in the schoolroom.
He was neither welcoming her nor shutting her out.
He was simply waiting, the way he seemed to wait for everyone, to see whether she would prove worth the trouble of noticing properly.
“My grandmother had a mare rather like her, when I was your age. Chestnut, though, not bay, with a temper considerably worse than this one’s, from the look of her.
” Louisa reached down and picked up a stray wisp of straw, turning it over in her fingers, giving her hands something to occupy while her voice did the work.
“She bit my father’s coat sleeve clean through once, when he tried to urge her to go faster than she wished to.
He never forgave her for it, though I always admired her for it.
There is something to be said for a creature who simply refuses to be rushed. ”
Kit’s eyes flicked toward her, then back to the mare.
“I expect Rosalind has never bitten anyone’s sleeve in her life.
She looks entirely too well-mannered for it.
” Louisa let the silence sit for a moment, comfortable rather than expectant, watching the curry comb move in a slow rhythm along the mare’s coat.
“Though I imagine even the best-mannered horse has opinions.”
She said nothing further for a while. She simply sat there and let the silence stretch, resisting every urge to fill it with more words.
The stables settled around them—a horse shifting its weight two stalls down, a bird fussing somewhere in the rafters, the curry comb scraping rhythmically across Rosalind’s flank—and Louisa found that she did not mind the silence at all.
After a while, she began to sign, speaking the words aloud as she did.
“Gentle,” she said, slowly forming the sign, then let her hands fall still in her lap.
She did not look at him directly. She reached down instead and brushed a stray piece of straw from her skirt, as though the sign had cost her nothing at all, merely something her hands had wanted to do.
A moment later, she signed it again. “Gentle.” Then, after a pause, a second sign, her hands moving through the shape slowly enough that anyone watching could have followed it without difficulty.
“You are very gentle with her. I think that is exactly what you have here, from the way she leans into your hand.”
The curry comb had gone entirely still now.
Louisa kept her eyes on Rosalind, whose ears turned lazily toward the sound of Kit’s quiet breathing, and let the silence stretch again, longer this time, resisting with everything in her the urge to look at him, to coax him, to fill the space with anything more than what she had already offered.
The silence held. One breath. Two. Three.
Then, slowly, Kit set down the curry comb. His fingers moved hesitantly, the shape imprecise, nothing like the fluid ease of long practice, but it was unmistakably the same sign she had shown him a moment ago.
Gentle.
“Yes,” she said softly with a smile, her hands mimicking his own. “Exactly that. You have done very well.”
Kit’s eyes flicked up to hers, wary still, assessing. Louisa held his gaze steadily, offering nothing more than the same quiet, patient warmth she had offered the whole morning.
After a moment, his eyes dropped again, not in retreat this time, but simply in the shyness of a child uncertain what to do with being looked at so kindly.
“Would you like another?” she asked, and did not wait for an answer she knew would not come aloud.
She lifted her hands, forming a second sign, slower this time, breaking the shape down as her grandmother had once broken it down for her all those years ago on a sunlit terrace.
“Friend.” She signed it, her fingers tracing the shape carefully enough that he could follow every part of the movement. “A friend is someone who stays. Someone who does not ask you to be anything other than exactly what you are.”
Kit watched her hands with an intensity that struck her oddly as much older than his eight years, the same keen attention she had watched him give his sketchbook, as though he were committing every movement to memory the way he committed a horse’s musculature or the fall of light through a stable window.
Then, slowly, his hand lifted again.
This time, the sign came more easily, his small fingers finding the shape with rather more confidence than his first attempt, an eagerness in the movement that had not been there before, as though some small cautious door inside him had opened a crack, willing to let a little more light through than it had a moment ago.
“Friend,” Louisa echoed, her smile widening despite her best efforts to keep it contained. “Yes, just like that.”
Rosalind, entirely unbothered by the small, silent triumph unfolding at her flank, swished her tail and shifted her weight.
Kit’s hand fell back to the curry comb and resumed the steady strokes along her flank, though Louisa noticed that some of the earlier rigidity had gone out of his shoulders and been replaced by something looser, something that looked almost like ease.
She did not press for a third sign. She had learned enough, in a fortnight, to know that this much, freely given, was worth considerably more than anything coaxed or demanded.
She simply sat with him a while longer in the golden hush of the stables, watching the curry comb move, watching the mare’s ears turn lazily toward every small sound, content for now to let the morning be exactly what it was.
Louisa let the quiet settle a while longer before she finally rose to her feet, brushing the straw from her skirts with a soft rustle that made Rosalind’s ears flick toward her.
“I ought to leave you both to your morning,” she said, gathering her satchel. “I have taken up more of your time with Rosalind than I intended, and I suspect she has strong opinions about visitors who overstay their welcome.”
Kit did not look up from the curry comb, though his hand slowed slightly at her words.
“I shall come again tomorrow, if that suits you. Same time, same stall, and I promise not to make you sign anything you do not wish to.” She latched the stall door gently behind her, pausing a moment longer than she strictly needed to. “Have a good day, Kit.”
She had turned to go, taking perhaps three steps toward the wide doorway, when a rustle made her glance back.
Kit stood at the stall door, one hand still resting on the latch. As she turned, he lifted his other hand and pointed first toward Rosalind’s patient head hanging over the door and then slowly, deliberately, toward Louisa herself.
She understood him at once, and felt something in her chest go warm and full in a way she had not expected a single small gesture to accomplish.
“Yes,” she said softly, smiling, answering the question he had not spoken aloud but had asked as plainly as words could have managed. “I will come back. Tomorrow, and the day after that, and every day after that for as long as you’ll have me.”
Kit held her gaze a moment longer, something unguarded flickering in his dark eyes. And then, before she could say anything further, he turned back to Rosalind and lifted the curry comb already once more, the conversation obviously concluded.
Louisa stepped out of the stables with her chest still warm, the satchel of unused paper and charcoal forgotten under her arm, only to find Julian waiting.
* * *
He stood a little way from the entrance, near the paddock fence, one hand resting on the top rail. He had clearly been there for a while, though Louisa could not have said how long.
“Your Grace.”
“How did it go?”
“Better than I dared hope for a first morning.” She came to stand beside him at the fence, watching a pair of geldings graze in the far paddock, unable to keep the satisfaction out of her voice.
“He learned two signs: horse and friend. Neither perfectly formed, but close enough that I understood him without difficulty, which is really all that matters at this stage.”
“Two signs.” Julian’s voice carried a careful disbelief, as though he were turning the number over and finding it almost too small to account for whatever had shifted in his chest upon hearing it. “In a single morning.”
“In half an hour, if I am being honest. I did not press him for more. I thought it wiser to leave him wanting the next lesson rather than dreading it.”
“And did he? Want the next lesson?”
Louisa’s smile widened, remembering. “As I was leaving, he pointed to Rosalind’s stall and then to me. I believe he was asking whether I meant to come back tomorrow.”
Julian went very still beside her, his hand tightening slightly against the rail. “He asked you a question?”
“In his own way, yes. He did not need words for it. The meaning was entirely clear.”
“He has not asked anyone anything, in any fashion, since his father died.” Julian’s voice had gone quieter now, something moving beneath it that he seemed to be working carefully to keep contained.
“Not a governess, not a physician, not Piers, not me. Three years, and I have not once seen him make so much as a gesture toward another person unprompted.”
“He made one this morning.” He turned to her to find her studying him. “It was only a small thing. A pointed finger, nothing more. I do not want you to build too much hope on so little, Your Grace, in case tomorrow proves harder than today.”
“I understand that. This past year, I have learned not to expect too much of a single morning.” He was quiet for a moment, his eyes flicking to the stable doorway.
“And yet I find myself hoping regardless. I am not entirely certain what to do with the sensation. It has been a while since I last permitted myself the indulgence.”
“Hope is not generally an indulgence one permits or withholds by choice, Your Grace. It tends to arrive on its own schedule, whether we have made room for it or not.”
“So I am beginning to discover.” A wistful smile crossed his mouth. “Thank you, Duchess. For this morning. For whatever tomorrow brings as well, though I know better than to ask you to promise it will bring anything at all.”
“I promise only to keep showing up, Your Grace. The rest is entirely his to decide, in his own time.” She adjusted the satchel under her arm, offered him a small nod, and turned toward the house, leaving him at the paddock fence with the morning sun warm on his shoulders.
Julian watched her go, her figure growing smaller on the gravel path, and then turned back toward the stables, toward the boy still bent over his horse inside it, the curry comb moving in slow, contented strokes along a coat that scarcely needed further grooming.
He stood there for a long moment in the quiet morning air.
Two signs. Two years of governesses, tutors and physicians, and she has produced in a half hour more progress than the whole of it combined.
He thought of the crumpled sketch he still kept folded in his coat pocket some days.
He thought of every silent evening he had sat across from Kit at dinner, searching for some crack in the boy’s composure and finding none.
He also thought of the small, pointed gesture Louisa had just described to him—a question asked without words, offered freely to a woman Kit had known for scarcely a fortnight.
Something loosened in his chest, cautious and unfamiliar, a sensation he recognized after a moment’s consideration as the thing Dominic had accused him of abandoning some months into Kit’s silence—hope.
Not the reckless, unguarded hope of a man who expected easy answers, but something quieter, more patient, the sort that could survive a difficult tomorrow because it had already survived so many of them before.
Julian closed his eyes for the briefest moment, allowing himself, for the first time in longer than he cared to admit, to simply stand with it for a while, and did not immediately reach for a reason to set the feeling back down.