Chapter 16
Louisa was halfway down the corridor to her rooms when she heard it—a low, even voice drifting from the cracked nursery door. She stopped to listen, curious despite herself.
“… and the tenant in question maintains that the boundary hedge has stood in its present location since his grandfather’s time, which may well be true, though it does not appear to match the estate survey conducted in my grandfather’s day.
A discrepancy I intend to resolve before either family takes up arms over three feet of hedgerow. ”
Louisa edged closer to the door and found Julian seated in the low nursery chair, his coat discarded over the back of it, sleeves rolled to the forearm in a state of undress she had not yet seen him allow himself anywhere else in the house.
Eleanor was red-faced and fretful against his shoulder while his hand rubbed slow, steady circles against her back.
In his other hand, he held a sheaf of papers, and he was reading from it quite seriously, as though the boundary dispute between two tenant families constituted the most soothing bedtime story ever composed.
“You are not meant to enjoy this reading, I am aware,” he continued, undisturbed by Eleanor’s fussing, “but I confess I find the whole business rather less trying with an audience so entirely unconcerned with whether I resolve it correctly or not. Why always discrepancies, you may ask.”
Eleanor let out a thin wail, and Julian shifted her slightly, one hand splayed wide and warm against her back, and continued reading in the same even voice.
“There is another matter concerning the western drainage, which I confess interests me more than it ought to interest anyone, and which I suspect explains why my brother finds me such tedious company at present.” He turned the page one-handed, the movement unhurried, practiced.
“The steward proposes redirecting the channel along the northern boundary rather than through the Bertram land directly, which would spare us another dispute about hedges, though it will cost more in labor than the alternative.”
Eleanor’s cries had softened into a series of small, hiccuping protests, her tiny fist resting against the front of his waistcoat. Julian, entirely unbothered, simply shifted his weight and kept reading, his voice never rising, never hurrying, steady and low as a heartbeat.
Louisa stood in the doorway, unable to look away.
She watched the fall of dark hair across his forehead, longer than fashion strictly dictated, watched him lift his free hand at one point to push it back with an absent gesture that struck her as far more attractive than it had any right to be.
She watched the forearm braced beneath Eleanor’s weight, the fine hair dusting it, the corded muscle visible even in so simple and unhurried a motion, and found her breath catching in a manner she chose not to examine.
She tilted her head, watching his thumb trace one slow, absent circle against Eleanor’s back.
He is only reading her his correspondence. Any man might do the same, presented with a fretful infant and no better notion of how to settle her.
Except she did not entirely believe that. She had seen enough nursemaids and fathers to know that most people, when presented with a crying infant, either panicked or performed, raising their voices into some exaggerated singsong meant to distract rather than soothe.
Julian did neither. He simply continued as he had begun, his voice never changing register, treating the baby’s distress with the same calm, unhurried attention he gave his ledgers, as though she deserved nothing less than his full consideration.
“The final matter,” he murmured, and Eleanor’s eyes had grown heavy now, her small fist loosening against his waistcoat, “concerns the autumn planting, which I confess holds even less interest for you than the drainage. And yet you have not once complained about my choice of reading material, which I consider generous of you, given the available alternatives.”
Her eyes closed.
Julian did not stop reading immediately, continuing another full minute in the same low, even voice, as though testing the depth of her sleep before he dared trust it.
Only once he was satisfied did he let the page fall to his knee, resting his head back against the chair with something that looked like quiet relief.
Louisa did not go in. She stood a moment longer in the doorway, watching the rise and fall of his chest beneath the sleeping child, watching his hand still resting against Eleanor’s small back long after the reading had stopped serving any practical purpose, and felt something in her chest tighten.
Then she withdrew, quietly, before he could notice her there, and made her way back down the corridor toward her rooms. She pressed her hand to her flaming cheek.
He is simply a kind man. A kind man who notices things other people overlook, and who happens to be better with a fretful infant than most gentlemen of his rank would trouble themselves to be. It means nothing beyond that. Nothing at all.
She did not entirely believe it, but she made herself repeat the thought once more regardless, as though repetition alone might make it true.
* * *
“Fingers together. Thumb across the palm. Not—” Julian frowned down at Piers’s hastily sketched diagram, attempted the shape again, and produced something that looked more like a man shooing away a fly than any letter of the alphabet, spoken or signed. “Not that, apparently.”
He glanced toward the study door, confirmed it was closed, and tried again to no audience but the crackling fire and a stack of his brother’s notes covered in small, hurried illustrations, hand shapes rendered from three different angles with Piers’s characteristically unhelpful commentary scrawled beside them.
This one is trickier than it looks. Ask Louisa if you get stuck; she’ll set you right in half the time it took me to learn it from a book.
“I have no intention of asking Louisa,” Julian informed the empty room, flexing his fingers into the shape a third time. “The entire point of this exercise is to manage without her assistance, which I cannot do if I am obliged to ask for her assistance at every turn.”
The shape still felt wrong.
He turned his hand over, studied it from the angle Piers had drawn, and attempted the correction, only to find his wrist bent at an angle that felt neither natural nor, he suspected, remotely legible to anyone actually fluent in the language he was so determinedly failing to learn.
“Kit.” He said it aloud, testing the sound of his own voice forming the boy’s name alongside the sign he’d just attempted, a habit Louisa employed constantly and one he had begun, without quite admitting it to himself, to imitate.
He held the shape for a moment, considering it.
“That cannot be correct. Piers’s drawing does not agree with what my hand is presently doing. ”
He tried once more. Then again. By the fifth attempt, he had progressed from mild irritation to something closer to genuine frustration, an emotion he was not accustomed to feeling over anything in his study, where he generally commanded every problem set before him with reasonable efficiency.
“This is considerably harder than she makes it appear.”
A knock sounded, brisk and familiar, and the door opened before he had properly gathered breath to answer it.
Louisa stepped into the room with a ledger under one arm before she registered the scene in front of her—papers scattered across his desk, his sleeves pushed back, his hand still caught mid-gesture in some shape that plainly matched nothing on the page beside it.
Julian’s hand dropped immediately, and he reached down, with rather more haste than dignity strictly permitted, to gather the papers into some semblance of order.
“Your Grace.” Louisa’s eyes moved past him to Piers’s unmistakable hand scrawled across half a dozen sheets, and whatever composure Julian had hoped to salvage collapsed thoroughly under her steadily dawning understanding. “Are those signs?”
“Correspondence.”
“They are very clearly signs, Your Grace, unless your steward has taken to illustrating his letters with diagrams of the human hand, which I confess would represent a considerable departure from his usual style.” A smile was building at the corners of her mouth.
“You are teaching yourself sign language.”
“I am attempting to. With middling success, as you have probably gathered.”
“Why did you not simply ask me?”
Julian set down the papers and found, meeting her eyes, that there was little use in further pretense.
“Because I did not wish to rely on you for every word I might one day wish to say to Kit directly. I thought, if I learned enough on my own, I might manage a conversation with my own ward without requiring a translator standing between us.”
The teasing edge softened into something warmer, and she set her ledger down on the corner of his desk and crossed to stand beside him, studying the scattered pages with more serious attention than her earlier amusement had suggested.
As she drew near, the scent of clean linen touched with lavender that always seemed to cling to her tickled his nostrils. It was subtle, scarcely more than a whisper, yet it caught him entirely off guard.
His breath hitched. Before he could stop himself, his eyes drifted shut for the briefest moment as he drew in a quiet breath, committing the scent to memory before sense returned and he opened them again, hoping she had not noticed.
“These drawings are correct,” she said, turning one page toward the light.
“Piers has a fair hand for it, actually, better than I’d have credited him.
But a drawing can only show you the shape at its finish, Your Grace.
It cannot show you how the hand ought to move to arrive there, and that is very often where the whole sign goes wrong. ”
“That would explain a great deal.”
“Show me what you were attempting.”
Julian hesitated, some reluctance rising at the prospect of failing in front of her rather than merely in front of an empty room, then set his jaw and formed the shape he had been attempting for the better part of the last quarter hour.
Louisa studied it for a moment, her head tilted slightly, and then reached out and closed her fingers gently around his wrist.
Julian went very still.
“Here.” Her touch was light, entirely businesslike, and yet he found himself acutely aware of every point where her fingers met his skin, the cool brush of them against his pulse, which he suspected was beating faster than usual.
“Your wrist wants to bend inward, not outward. Like so.” She guided the angle of it, slow and deliberate, and then released him. “Try again.”
He tried again, his wrist held at the angle she had shown him, and immediately felt the shape settle into something considerably more correct than his previous five attempts combined.
“Better.” Louisa’s smile had returned, warmer now, genuinely pleased.
“Much closer. You got the shape nearly right, Your Grace. You were simply bending your wrist in the wrong direction the whole time, which I imagine felt entirely natural to you and looked, I confess, more alarming than the sign was meant to.”
“I am relieved to hear it was only alarming and not entirely unintelligible.”
“A close thing, but no. Try it once more, so I am certain it has settled properly.”
He repeated it a third time, and this time she simply nodded, satisfied, before stepping back to gather her ledger from the corner of his desk.
“You are doing this for him,” she said, not quite a question.
“I would like to tell him something; I do not say that as criticism of your help, which has been crucial and which I am entirely grateful for. I simply find that I would like to eventually manage a conversation with my own ward using my own hands.”
Louisa studied him for a long moment, something in her expression he could not entirely read, warmer than simple approval and yet carefully, deliberately restrained.
“That is a very good reason, Your Grace.” She tucked the ledger under her arm. “I would be glad to help you practice, whenever you find the time for it. Properly, rather than leaving you to puzzle it out alone from my brother-in-law’s rather ambitious sketches.”
“I would be grateful for that.”
“Good.” She paused at the door, glancing back at him with the faintest trace of her earlier amusement.
“Though I suggest that you lock the door next time you mean to practice unobserved. I nearly announced myself with the ledger before I noticed what you were doing, and I should hate for a footman to walk in on you mid-gesture and report below stairs that His Grace has taken up some private, unexplained habit of waving at his own correspondence.”
Julian’s ears warmed despite himself. “Noted.”
She smiled, clearly satisfied with herself, and reached for the door before stopping again.
“Ah.” She looked down at the ledger tucked beneath her arm. “That was not, in fact, why I came.”
“No?”
“No. I received Catherine’s confirmation this morning.” Crossing back to his desk, she laid the ledger open between them. “She and Alaric will be dining with us next Thursday, with Henry and Oliver in tow. Lord Carwell has also written to say that he will be joining us.”
Julian glanced down at the neatly ordered pages. “Then I take it Mrs. Whitfield is awaiting her marching orders.”
Louisa smiled. “With admirable patience, though I suspect I am rapidly exhausting it.” She turned another page of the ledger, neat columns of dishes already filling the paper. “I thought we ought to settle the menu before she decides the matter herself.”
“A wise precaution.”
“Fiona writes that she cannot come, sadly. Her mother has decided she is to spend the fortnight with an aunt in Bath, and Fiona writes that she would rather eat her own bonnet than argue the matter twice in one letter. She sends her regrets, and considerable envy, and instructions that I am to report back every detail of the dinner in a letter twice the length of any I have sent her yet.”
“Then we shall have to make it a dinner worth reporting.”
“I intend to, Your Grace. Mrs. Whitfield has already had her input on the proper order of a first course, and even stronger ones on gentlemen who claim not to care what they are served.” Her eyes flicked to him. “I believe you have already found yourself among the latter.”
Julian’s mouth curved. “Have I?”
“She informs me that any gentleman who answers, ‘Whatever Cook pleases,’ has surrendered all right to complain thereafter.”
“An entirely reasonable policy.”
Louisa’s eyes danced. She gathered the ledger beneath her arm and turned toward the door. “Good afternoon, Your Grace.”
With that, she slipped out into the corridor, leaving Julian shaking his head with a smile.