Chapter 14
Early in the morning, Julian walked to the stables to see to the horses. Louisa’s voice drifted from the third stall, warm and animated, and he slowed his steps, coming to an unthinking halt beside the tack room door.
“You have got the sign for ‘more’ entirely backward,” Louisa was saying, seated on an overturned bucket, the curry comb momentarily abandoned in Kit’s lap while his hands worked through the shape she had shown him.
“Like this. Fingertips together, not palms. You are asking for a slap on the wrist, not for seconds at supper.”
Kit’s hands paused. Then, slowly, deliberately, he repeated the sign exactly as he had done it the first time, palms rather than fingertips, and fixed her with a look that Julian recognized instantly as pure, unrepentant defiance.
Louisa laughed, delighted. “You did that on purpose.”
Kit’s hands lifted again, quick and certain this time. He signed a few words in succession, something about opinions and signs, though the thought was still incomplete.
Louisa understood him almost at once. “He means to say,” she supplied, completing the thought for him, “that I am not the only one permitted to have opinions about how a sign ought to be made.”
She glanced briefly towards the doorway, as though she had known all along he was standing there.
Julian withdrew before she could catch him eavesdropping, and made his way to the house with something unfamiliar sitting warm in his chest the whole distance back.
The next morning, he did not pretend he had an errand.
He simply stood near the paddock fence within sight of the stable doors, close enough to hear if he wished and far enough to go unnoticed, and told himself this was merely diligence, a guardian’s proper interest in his ward’s progress, nothing more complicated than that.
“That is not the sign for horse,” Kit’s hands informed her, though the movement was a little clumsy.
Louisa’s eyebrows rose. “It most certainly is. I have been using it these past three days.”
Kit shook his head and repeated the sign she had used, then pointed towards Louisa and made a small gesture suggesting before, followed by the sign for horse.
Louisa stared at him for a moment. “You mean that was the sign I taught you when we first met?”
Kit nodded eagerly.
“And this”—she repeated the sign she had been using these past three days—“is not?”
Another firm shake of his head.
Louisa’s eyes narrowed in concentration before widening with sudden understanding. “Oh. I see. I taught you one sign when we first met, and somehow managed to teach you another one afterward.”
Kit gave a satisfied nod.
“And you have been waiting three days to correct me?”
Kit's mouth twitched, and he shrugged.
Louisa let out a laugh, a bright, surprised sound that carried clearly across the paddock to where Julian stood. “He says he was trying to be polite.”
Julian found himself smiling, watching the boy’s satisfaction at winning an argument without a single spoken word against a grown woman who had, by her own admission, been correcting people’s grammar since she was old enough to hold a book. But he was also astonished.
He is arguing with her, not merely answering. Arguing. Defending his opinion against hers, entirely unprompted, as though it had not once occurred to him that he ought to be too frightened, or too silent, or too careful to do so.
The third morning brought rain, a soft steady patter against the stable roof. Julian, finding himself with no legitimate excuse to linger near the paddock, took shelter just inside the stables’ back entrance, close enough to hear and far enough to be hidden by an empty stall.
“I do not believe you,” Louisa was saying, arms folded, an expression of theatrical skepticism on her face. “You could not have possibly ridden a horse before you could properly walk. No child manages both at once.”
Kit’s hands moved, quick and insistent. Then he pointed toward Rosalind and made a cradling gesture with his arms.
“Your father held you on a horse when you were an infant. That is rather different from riding one yourself, and you know it.” Louisa’s mouth twitched, fighting a smile.
“You are exaggerating your own accomplishments, Master Kit, and I’m beginning to suspect you have inherited that particular habit from your guardian, who I understand has never once admitted to being wrong about anything in his adult life. ”
Kit’s shoulders shook briefly with silent laughter, and his hands lifted again, quicker now, more animated than Julian had ever seen them.
“He says,” Louisa reported, her own laughter barely contained, “that His Grace is, in fact, wrong often but simply refuses to admit it, and that I ought to ask you directly about the incident with the east paddock fence two summers ago.”
Julian, listening from behind the empty stall, felt his ears flush, recalling with unwelcome clarity the incident in question—a fence he had insisted did not require repair until it very much had, in the middle of a thunderstorm, at considerable cost to his dignity and his second-best coat.
“I shall be having words with my ward about loyalty,” he murmured to no one, failing to keep the smile from his voice.
“Two new signs today,” Louisa announced when the lesson had concluded, and she came to find him where he had taken shelter from the rain, her satchel considerably lighter than it had been the first morning, since she had stopped bringing paper Kit showed no interest in using.
“Stubborn and clever. He insisted he required both, and I confess I could not argue the necessity.”
“Stubborn and clever.” Julian’s mouth curved. “I’m beginning to suspect those signs describe you rather better than they describe him.”
“They describe us both equally, Your Grace, which is precisely why he insisted on learning them. He wished to be able to call me stubborn to my face in a language I could not pretend not to understand.”
“And did he?”
“Twice, this morning alone. I found it rather encouraging on the whole.” She adjusted her satchel and glanced back toward the stables, where Kit was brushing Rosalind with contentment that Julian had come to recognize as the boy’s version of quiet joy.
“He is not merely tolerating these lessons anymore, Your Grace. I do not know exactly when it happened, but somewhere in the last few days, he began to actually enjoy them.”
Julian looked past her toward the stables, toward the boy inside who had, for the length of that morning’s lesson, laughed without sound, argued without words, and defended his horse’s dignity with the same fierce spirit Julian remembered from before his father’s death, a spirit he had feared for years would never surface again.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “So do I.”
* * *
“… and then Mrs. Whitfield informed me, with an absolutely straight face, that the second housemaid has been feeding the barn cats from the kitchen scraps for the better part of a year and considers it entirely her business rather than anyone else’s, which I found admirable even as I promised Mrs. Whitfield I would speak to the girl about it. ”
Julian watched his wife across the table, her hands moving as she spoke, a piece of bread forgotten between her fingers, and found himself, not for the first time this past week, more absorbed in the telling than the tale itself.
“Did you speak to her?”
“I have not yet decided whether I intend to. The cats do keep the mice from the grain store, after all, and I’m beginning to suspect that Mrs. Whitfield’s objection has more to do with the matter of an unauthorized expenditure than any real concern for the cats’ welfare.”
Louisa finally ate the bread, then reached for her water. Julian’s eyes followed the small motion of her hand without his permission.
“The rest of the morning was dedicated to lessons, as usual. Kit is coming along wonderfully, though I confess he has developed rather strong opinions about my teaching methods.”
“Has he?”
“He informed me today that Rosalind does not care for her name.”
Julian set down his fork. “I beg your pardon?”
“Rosalind. He does not believe the name suits her. He said she had never once answered to it in all the time he had called her by it in his head, and he suspects she rather resents it.”
“I gave her that name myself.” Julian frowned, baffled by the direction the conversation had taken. “Three years ago, when Kit first began spending his afternoons with her. Given how often he used it, I assumed that the name had already been settled between them.”
Something flickered across Louisa’s face, quick and entirely too delighted to be accidental. “Your Grace, he has never called her Rosalind at all. He does not know how you came to believe that was her name.”
Julian stared at her. “Then who named her Rosalind?”
“You did, apparently, though I gather you did it by accident.” Louisa’s mouth was twitching now, fighting back a smile. “Kit told me that some years ago, you simply began calling her Rosalind one day because you thought every respectable horse ought to have a respectable name.”
“That is not possible.”
“It is entirely possible, Your Grace, and I understand that it has become a favorite story below stairs, once Kit finally found a way to tell it properly.” Louisa was laughing openly now, and the sound settled over the table like sunlight through a window.
“You have been calling the poor mare by a name she has never once answered to for three years, and no one thought to correct you because no one else in this household understood a single word Kit was saying.”
Julian felt an unfamiliar heat crawl up his neck, something perilously close to embarrassment, an emotion he could not recall experiencing over quite so trivial a matter in a very long while. “I see.”
“Do not look so wounded, Your Grace. It is a very charming mistake, as far as mistakes go. I only wonder what you intend to do about it now that the truth has come out.”
“I suppose I ought to know what her name actually is and use it properly from this point forward.”
“I suspect he would like that very much.”
Louisa reached for her wine, and Julian watched, with an attention he had not permitted himself, the unhurried way she wet her lips before speaking again. An entirely ordinary motion that he found this evening considerably more difficult to look away from than it had any reasonable right to be.
“I discovered all this during our lesson yesterday. I merely mentioned that Rosalind seemed a fine name for a fine horse, the way I always do, and he grew quite insistent that I understood the matter properly.”
“You gathered all of that from him. Through signs.”
“And gestures and expressions, Your Grace. He says a great deal more with his face than most people give him credit for, if one only bothers to actually look rather than simply waiting for him to speak aloud. The tilt of his head when he disagrees with something. The way his mouth thins when he is holding back an objection he has decided not to voice after all. I have learned to read a great deal of him, simply by paying the sort of attention no one else seemed to think worth the effort.”
Julian sat with that for a moment, turning it over slowly, the way he turned over any fact that unsettled some previously comfortable arrangement of his thinking.
“I have lived with the boy for years,” he said finally, quieter now. “And you have gathered in a fortnight that my ward has been silently correcting my mistaken belief about his mare’s name the entire time, and I never once noticed.”
“You were not looking for it the way it needed to be looked for, Your Grace. That is not a failing so much as an accident of circumstance. Grief teaches people to protect themselves in the ways they know how, and yours has simply never required you to read a room the way mine has required of me my whole life, growing up beside a grandmother the rest of the world dismissed as having nothing worth listening to.”
She said it plainly, without unkindness, before reaching for another piece of bread as though the observation cost her nothing at all.
Julian found himself watching her hands again, the unhurried way she executed the smallest gestures, entirely at ease in her own skin in a manner he had rarely encountered in anyone of his acquaintance.
She is remarkable. Not merely clever, though she is certainly that.
She sees people the way most men study a ledger, missing nothing, holding every figure in her memory until it balances properly, and she has done in a fortnight what I could not manage in years.
Not through any greater skill with signs than the tutors, governesses, physicians I hired, but through the simple patient act of actually looking at him.
The observation arrived with an ease that startled him more than the thought itself.
He caught himself watching the candlelight catch the auburn in her hair as she laughed again at some other detail of Kit’s opinions on his own mare’s dignity, caught himself cataloging the curve of her smile when it was entirely unguarded, honest amusement rather than the careful composure she wore in company.
Stop that. He reached for his wine. This is a practical marriage.
I promised her respect, protection, and my name for Eleanor’s sake, and I promised myself, long before I ever met her, that I would never again risk what loving someone deeply enough to lose them costs a man.
Admiration is not the same thing as danger.
I am permitted to admire her cleverness without doing anything further.
“What was the mare’s name, then?” he asked, steering the conversation back to safer ground. “Her actual name, if not Rosalind.”
“He would not tell me. It seems that it would be between himself and the horse when he finally decides on one, and that you had gone three years without asking properly, so you could wait a little longer to learn it.” Louisa’s eyes danced with open delight.
“I find I rather admire him for his discipline. Not many people hold their ground so firmly against a duke.”
“No,” Julian agreed, and found, despite the small private battle he had just fought and only partially won against his own wandering thoughts, that he was smiling regardless. “I do not suppose they do.”