Chapter 15
“Good God, is that the famous duchess who proposed marriage within a quarter hour of meeting my brother? I confess I expected someone considerably more terrifying.”
Several weeks had passed, and the nursery no longer looked quite so unfamiliar beneath her hands. Kit's lessons had become a part of the daily routine, and she was beginning to recognize which corridors led where without having to think about it.
Louisa turned away from the nursery window to see a young man striding into the room without so much as a knock, dark-haired and green-eyed in a way that made his relation to Julian unmistakable at a glance, though everything about his bearing, the easy grin, the coat slightly rumpled from travel, suggested a man who had never once in his life practiced the stillness his older brother wore like armor.
“You must be Dr. Cavendish.”
“Piers, please, unless you intend to stand on ceremony with me, in which case I shall be forced to stand on it right back, and neither of us will enjoy that half so much as simply being informal from the start.” He crossed the room and peered into the cradle where Eleanor lay, wide awake and studying the ceiling with the solemn focus of infants.
“And who is this small person glaring at the plasterwork as though it has personally offended her?”
“Eleanor.”
“Eleanor.” Piers leaned over the cradle and made faces so thoroughly ridiculous that Louisa found herself biting back a laugh despite her surprise at his appearance.
Eleanor’s solemn study of the ceiling slowly gave way to a delighted attention on the stranger looming above her, and within a minute, she had produced a gurgling coo of pure approval that Louisa had rarely heard her offer to anyone outside the staff.
“There.” Piers straightened, entirely pleased with himself. “I have always had a talent with infants. It is widely considered my finest quality, ahead of my medical training, which I find rather insulting given the years I spent acquiring the latter.”
“You have known her all of ninety seconds.”
“Ninety seconds is ample time to establish oneself as a person of quality, provided one commits fully to the enterprise.” He turned his attention to Louisa properly now, studying her with frankness, though rendered considerably warmer and less guarded.
“You do not look terrifying at all, incidentally. I feel rather cheated. Julian wrote to me describing a woman who proposed marriage to him within the hour of their meeting, and I confess I built up an image of someone rather more fearsome in my head.”
“I am fearsome when the occasion calls for it, Dr. Cavendish. I have simply not yet found the occasion, in your case.”
“Piers, please, I insisted on that already.” He grinned, delighted rather than chastened. “And I shall take that as a warning rather than a comfort, since I gather my brother has learned the same lesson rather thoroughly these past weeks.”
“Your brother has survived the acquaintance well enough so far.”
“Has he?” Piers’s eyebrows rose, his expression turning thoughtful.
“I confess I have been rather curious to see for myself. He writes the most maddeningly brief letters, my brother, three lines where any sensible correspondent would write thirty, and I have had to piece together the whole of this marriage from scraps, like a magistrate assembling evidence.”
“What have the scraps told you?”
“That Kit has learned to sign more than in three years of tutors. That my brother has taken to breakfasting at an hour he has never once kept in his adult life, which I understand from the housekeeper coincides suspiciously with when you rise. And that he has stopped mentioning his estate ledgers in his letters to me, which I confess alarmed me more than anything else in the whole account, since previously I could not get him to write a single page without at least one reference to drainage improvements.”
Louisa felt her cheeks warm despite herself and busied her hands with straightening Eleanor’s blanket rather than examining why. “I could not say what has become of his interest in drainage, Dr. Cavendish.”
“Piers.”
“Piers.” She allowed herself a small smile. “Though I suspect the estate’s drainage remains exactly as pressing a concern as it ever was. He simply has other matters occupying his correspondence these days.”
“So it would seem.” Warmth moved behind Piers’s teasing then, brief and genuine.
“I am glad of it, whatever the cause. He has needed other matters occupying him for some years now, and has stubbornly refused every suggestion I made toward that end, so I confess myself rather relieved that circumstance managed what my own advice could not.”
Later that afternoon, they found their way to the small blue morning room Louisa had begun to use as her own, tea between them and Eleanor asleep upstairs, Piers settled into the chair opposite with an easy manner, entirely comfortable in whatever room he happened to occupy.
“May I ask you something? And forgive me if it strays somewhere too personal for so new an acquaintance.”
“You may ask. But I reserve the right to answer.”
“Entirely fair.” Piers considered his tea for a moment before continuing, some of his earlier lightness settling into something gentler.
“Do you find the household suits you? I ask because my brother would never think to ask it himself, being far too preoccupied with whether the arrangement suits Kit and Eleanor to think of whether it suits you, and someone in this family ought to be minding that particular ledger as well.”
Louisa turned her cup slowly in its saucer, considering how much of the truth she meant to offer a man she had known for scarcely a day.
“I worry, sometimes,” she admitted finally, “that Eleanor will grow up sensing herself a burden. That however much love I give her, some part of her will always feel that she arrived into this family sideways, through grief and inconvenience rather than through the ordinary joy that welcomes most children.”
“That is no small worry to carry.”
“It is not new to me, if I am being honest. I have spent a good part of my life feeling I was too much for most rooms I entered. Too outspoken. Too sharp. Too unwilling to make myself smaller for anyone’s comfort.
I do not wish Eleanor to inherit that burden from me, on top of whatever burden her own circumstances already hand her. ”
Piers was quiet for a moment, studying her with an attention that had entirely shed its earlier teasing, something thoughtful and careful in its place.
“Do you know,” he asked eventually, “that Julian was the quietest person in every room we occupied, growing up?”
Louisa’s eyebrows rose. “Your brother? Quiet?”
“Entirely. Not because he had nothing to say, mind you. I have never once known Julian to lack opinions, whatever face he shows the world now. But our father ran a household where children were meant to be seen rarely and heard even less, and Julian, being the elder, bore the brunt of that philosophy for six years before I arrived to share the burden with him. By the time I was old enough to notice, he had already learned that speaking his mind earned him correction rather than conversation, so he simply stopped offering it, until stopping became a habit he has never quite managed to break.”
“I did not know that.”
“Most people don’t. He carries himself so thoroughly like a man who has always commanded a room that few think to ask whether he was ever permitted to fill one with his voice instead.”
Piers set down his cup. “I’m only telling you this because I suspect, whatever concerns you have for Eleanor, you have already given her something my brother went a great many years without receiving himself—someone who asks to hear what she has to say, rather than simply teaching her to keep it to herself.
Your grandmother’s kindness has already reached farther than either of you ever imagined.
She taught one little girl to hear a voice the world might otherwise have overlooked.
That little girl grew into the woman who could do the same for my nephew, and now for Eleanor. ”
Something in Louisa’s chest tightened unexpectedly at the thought of Julian as a boy, sitting silent through dinners much like the ones she now shared with him, learning that his voice was a liability rather than a gift.
“He mentioned my grandmother to you,” she said slowly, working it out even as she spoke.
“He did. In one of those maddening three-line letters, no less, though he managed to include that your grandmother was born without a voice, that she taught you sign language because she loved you, and that you had carried it with you every day since out of love for her rather than any obligation.” Piers smiled, something knowing in it.
“I confess I was rather surprised he bothered to include it at all, given how sparingly he writes about people who are not related to estate business.”
“He remembered that. After one conversation.”
“Julian rarely speaks of people,, unless they have come to matter to him more than he is prepared to admit.” Piers’s smile widened, warm and entirely unhurried, watching the realization settle over her face with affectionate amusement.
“I would not read too much into a single detail if I were the cautious sort. But I have known my brother my whole life, and I have never once known him to remember a stranger’s grandmother. ”
He leaned back in his chair with a satisfied air when the door opened with a knock, and Mrs. Whitfield swept in bearing a fresh pot of tea.
“My Lord.” She set the pot down. “I might have known the noise coming from this room belonged to you. The entire east wing has been treated to your laughter. I daresay every servant between here and the kitchens knows you’ve arrived.”
“Mrs. Whitfield.” Piers rose halfway from his chair, all wounded dignity. “I have been in this house for scarcely four hours, and already you scold me as though I were twelve years old and had tracked mud across your good floors.”
“You are always twelve years old to me, My Lord, whatever your letters now say, and you tracked mud across my good floors as recently as your last visit, so I hardly see the injustice in the comparison.” She turned him properly toward the light with the brisk, proprietary hands of a woman who had known him since he was in leading strings, her lips pursed. “You have lost weight since Christmas.”
“I have not.”
“You have. Your coat hangs off you like a scarecrow’s, and I will wager you have not eaten a proper dinner in a fortnight, too busy tending every cough and fever in Spitalfields to sit down at a table like a Christian.”
“I eat regularly, Mrs. Whitfield, I promise you.”
“You eat irregularly, and I shall be having a word with your cook in London the moment I have five minutes to write her a proper letter about it.” She reached up and smoothed a lock of his hair back into place the way Louisa suspected she had done since he was a boy far younger than the one currently protesting under her hands.
“Sit down properly and finish your tea before I bring you something more substantial, and do not think I have not noticed you have already charmed Her Grace into laughing herself half to death, which I am sure has done nothing whatsoever for your appetite.”
“I have charmed no one, Mrs. Whitfield. I have merely been informative.”
“You have been exactly as you always are, My Lord, which is to say entirely too pleased with yourself and thin as a rail besides.” She straightened, satisfied with her inspection, and turned to Louisa with a considerably softer expression, the sort reserved for someone she had decided deserved more warmth than her employer’s younger brother currently merited.
“Forgive the interruption, Your Grace. I have known this one since he was in leading strings, and I confess I have never quite broken the habit of treating him accordingly.”
“Please do not apologize on my account, Mrs. Whitfield. I have found it rather instructive, watching someone manage him so thoroughly. I’m beginning to see where he came by his opinions of himself, and where someone occasionally corrects them.”
“Someone must, Your Grace, since he has never troubled to correct them himself.” Mrs. Whitfield’s mouth twitched, very nearly a smile, before she composed herself back into proper severity and swept out of the room, leaving strict instructions over her shoulder that the biscuits were not to be left untouched.
Piers watched the door close behind her, then turned back to Louisa with an expression of theatrical suffering entirely undercut by the fondness beneath it.
“You see now what I have endured my whole life. That woman has terrified better men into eating vegetables, and I do not exaggerate when I tell you that she once made our father apologize to a scullery maid for raising his voice, which I am reliably informed no one else in England has ever managed.”
“I’m beginning to think that Mrs. Whitfield is the true power governing this household, and that both Cavendish brothers are merely tenants of her good opinion.”
“An entirely accurate assessment. And I would advise you to secure her favor as quickly as possible, though I have gathered from her manner just now that you have already done so more thoroughly than Julian himself managed in his first several years under her roof.” Piers reached for a biscuit, grinning.
“She scolded him for thinness for the better part of a decade, you know, before he finally grew tall enough that she was forced to find some other fault to worry about. I daresay you shall be next on her list, now that you have joined the household. Enjoy these last weeks of escaping her notice while they last, Your Grace. They will not last long.”