Chapter 21
“Have you a quarter hour to spare this morning, before your correspondence claims you entirely?”
Louisa looked up from her letters, spread across the small writing desk in the blue morning room, to find Julian in the doorway, still in his riding coat, a faint dampness in his hair suggesting he had come straight from the stables rather than pausing to change.
She felt her pulse quicken at the sight of him, some unwelcome echo of the previous night’s candlelit gallery rising unbidden, the way he had looked at her mouth before the floorboards’ settling had startled them both back to sense.
Do not be foolish.
She almost shook herself.
“I have considerably more than a quarter hour, Your Grace, provided you tell me what you mean to spend it on.”
“Lessons.” He came further into the room, something almost sheepish in the admission.
Louisa noted that he seemed to be keeping a more careful distance than usual, as though he too had spent the night turning over the same moment and had arrived at the same uneasy conclusion that some proper space between them was urgently required.
“I have exhausted every sign in Piers’s notes twice over, and I find myself wanting more than a physician’s hasty sketches can teach me. I thought, if you were willing, you might show me properly. Beyond what Kit and I have managed to stumble through between us.”
“I would like that very much.” Louisa set down her pen, pleased by the request in a way she did not think about too closely.
“Though I think we should not do it here. This desk was not built for two people gesturing across it, and I should hate to knock over the ink in the middle of teaching you the sign for careful.”
“Where would you suggest?”
“The morning room upstairs, I think. West-facing, good light this time of day, and considerably more open floor than this room affords.” She rose, gathering her shawl from the back of her chair.
“Come. I have a mind to make a proper pupil of you, Your Grace, and proper pupils require proper space to fail in.”
“I slept very little, incidentally,” Julian said, following her toward the stairs. The admission had arrived somewhat abruptly, as though he had been turning it over and could not quite keep it contained a moment longer. “After our conversation in the gallery.”
Louisa’s steps faltered slightly on the landing. “Nor did I, if I am being honest.”
“I found myself thinking more about my great-grandfather’s coat than any sensible man ought to.”
“Only the coat?”
A pause, brief but unmistakable. “Not only the coat.”
Louisa did not trust herself to answer that directly, and busied herself instead with opening the morning room door, grateful for the excuse to turn her face away from him for a moment, her cheeks growing warmer than the cool corridor accounted for.
The upstairs morning room caught the late morning sun in a long, warm wash across the floorboards, and Louisa settled onto the low settee while Julian took the chair opposite, angled toward her, his hands resting loosely on his knees in readiness, determined to apply himself properly to whatever came next.
“Show me what you remember first,” she said. “I want to see where we are actually starting from, rather than where you believe we are starting from.”
Julian’s hands lifted and moved through a short sequence, slower than her own practiced fluency but entirely correct in shape: good morning, then horse, then, with only the faintest hesitation, friend.
“That is considerably more than I expected.”
“I have had a great deal of quiet evening hours since our guests departed.” Something almost proud crossed his face, quickly tempered. “I did not wish to arrive at this lesson entirely empty-handed.”
“Then let us build on it properly.” Louisa’s hands moved, unhurried, and she spoke the word aloud as she always did, out of habit as much as instruction. “This is family.”
Julian watched closely, then repeated it, his fingers finding the shape with only a small correction needed to the angle of his thumb.
“House,” she signed next, and he copied it, quicker this time, gaining confidence with every repetition. “Bend this way for safe and that for trust.”
He worked through each in turn, his brow furrowed in concentration.
Louisa found herself, despite her best intentions toward professional detachment, rather charmed by the sight of a duke applying himself so thoroughly to something that offered him no ledger’s satisfaction of a balanced sum, no visible proof of progress beyond the shapes his hands could manage.
“You are improving remarkably quickly, Your Grace.” She said it plainly, meaning it. “Faster than most adults I know. I’m beginning to suspect you have more natural facility for this than you give yourself credit for.”
“I have had considerable motivation.”
“So it would seem.” She smiled, and moved on to the next sign, patience, watching him copy it with only the smallest hesitation.
They continued in this manner for a while longer, the morning light shifting slowly across the floorboards.
Julian’s hands grew surer with every new shape she taught him, though there remained one particular sign that persistently eluded him. Each time he attempted it, one finger bent where it should not, the angle just slightly awry.
“No,” Louisa said with an amused shake of her head. “You keep insisting that finger belongs somewhere else.”
He looked down at his hand with faint suspicion, as though it had betrayed him of its own accord. “Has it?”
“Repeatedly.”
She rose from her chair and crossed the narrow space between them. Standing beside him, she reached for his hand without ceremony and gently turned it over in her own.
“Here. Do not think so much about it.”
Her fingers nudged his thumb into place, then straightened the stubborn finger that refused to cooperate.
“There. Let your hand settle naturally.”
Julian watched the movement with the concentration he had brought to every lesson, studying her corrections rather than her face.
“Again,” she instructed, releasing him.
He repeated the sign. “Better?”
Louisa nodded, pleased. “Much better.”
A small, almost boyish satisfaction crossed his features before he attempted it once more on his own, this time without prompting.
“You see?” she said, smiling as she returned to her chair. “You were perfectly capable all along. You merely needed convincing.”
“I shall endeavor to remember that.”
“One more,” Julian demanded, before she could suggest as much herself.
“Of course. Which would you like?”
He hesitated. It was a small thing, barely perceptible, the faintest pause before he answered, and yet Louisa noticed it immediately, some old instinct sharpening at the sight of a man who rarely hesitated over anything at all suddenly finding himself uncertain.
“Teach me how to say I love you.”
Louisa went completely still.
For one long, impossible moment, the whole room seemed to narrow to the space between them, his eyes steady on hers, his hands resting in his lap, and some foolish, unguarded part of her heart leapt straight past reason and asked, Is he speaking to me?
“I—” Her voice came out smaller than she intended, and she cleared her throat, furious with herself for the sudden unsteadiness of it. “Whom… whom do you mean to say it to?”
“Kit.” Julian’s answer came quickly, and something in his expression shifted.
“I do not know when he will be ready to hear it, from me or from anyone. But I find I would like to have the words ready all the same so that when the day comes, I am not left fumbling for them the way I fumbled for every other sign before you taught me properly.”
“Of course.” Louisa exhaled and told herself the small, foolish drop in her chest was relief rather than disappointment, though she did not entirely believe it. “That is a very good reason.”
She lifted her hands, forming the sign slowly, deliberately, so he could follow every part of the shape. “Like this. Thumb, index, and smallest finger extended, the rest folded down. It is one of the oldest signs there is in every variation of the language. Watch.”
She repeated it, and Julian’s eyes followed her hands with the same close attention he’d given every sign that morning. Then he lifted his hands and attempted it, his fingers close but not quite correct, his thumb tucked too far beneath his palm.
“Nearly,” Louisa said. “Your thumb wants to extend further. Here.”
Louisa rose from her chair and crossed the small distance between them and closed her fingers gently around his hand, the way she had done a few minutes ago, guiding his thumb into the proper angle.
His hand was warm beneath hers, larger, the faint calluses of a man who rode often and did not entirely leave his estate’s rougher work to others. Louisa found her own fingers considerably less steady than they had any business being, adjusting a simple thumb’s angle.
“Like this?” He turned toward her as he asked it.
The movement brought him unexpectedly close.
“There.” She almost faltered. “Just like that.”
Julian held the shape, his eyes lifting from his hand to meet hers, and only when she looked up did she realize how little distance remained between them, her hand still resting lightly over his. Neither of them looked away or spoke.
The room had gone very quiet, the lesson forgotten entirely. His eyes met hers, warm and impossibly steady, close enough now that she could make out the faint flecks of amber hidden within the green.
Good heavens.
His gaze was steady and searching in a way that asked nothing and yet seemed somehow to ask everything at once. She could hear her own pulse in her ears, entirely too loud for so small and ordinary a moment as correcting the angle of a man’s thumb.
The moment lingered. One breath. Two. Neither of them moved to end it, and Louisa felt something in her chest tilt dangerously close to a precipice she had spent weeks carefully refusing to name.
She suddenly became aware that she was still holding his hand, so she withdrew hers.