Chapter Two #2
“I am tying it. I am also asking who put three blades in your side and left you alive to grow scars over them.” She knotted the strip at his flank, firm and flat, and her fingers stayed against the old marks longer than the knot required.
“And whether the men over your south wall tonight were the same men, come back to finish what they began. You may answer in your own time. I have a great deal of patience and no intention at all of leaving.”
“You are not going to go,” he said, and it was not a question.
“No. I have lost the taste for leaving a room before I have understood it, and I understand almost nothing in this one yet.”
“You ask questions the way other women breathe.”
“I ask questions because no one in my life has ever once offered me an answer unasked. I learned young that silence is kept for the keeper and never for the asker.” She lifted her hand from his side at last.
“There. It will hold until morning, provided you do nothing heroic, which I am aware must be impossible for you.”
The pain spiked then, and his hand shot out and closed over hers where it rested on his knee.
The long fingers folded her whole hand inside his until the knuckles ached, and he held on the way a drowning man holds to whatever floats.
She did not pull away. She turned her hand within his and set her palm to his, giving him something to grip that would not break.
They stayed so in the dark while the bandage between them went slowly dark again at its edges.
“Breathe,” she said, before she could hold the words. “I have you. It will pass.”
“Giselle.” Her name came out of him stripped of the title and the surname and the cool distance he had held all afternoon, and it landed in the dark like a thing he had not meant to set down. “Forgive me. I have not earned your Christian name, but I find I have taken it regardless.”
“You may keep it for tonight.” She did not let go of his hand. “Tonight you may call me whatever keeps you upright. We return to Miss Linfield in the morning, when you are a duke again, and I am again the woman who scolds your filing, and neither of us will mention that you said it like that.”
“Said it like what?”
“As though it cost you something to say.” Her thumb moved once across the back of his scarred hand.
She allowed herself that, and then she made herself be still.
“Do not make me find a meaning in it, Your Grace. I have spent my whole life finding meanings in things written for other people, but I am tired, and you are bleeding, and the hour flatters neither of us.”
His grip eased as the pain ebbed, and still he did not let her go, and she did not ask it of him.
“You are trembling,” he said.
“I am cold. The fire is out, the hour is wicked, and I have given my best petticoat to your ribs. Do not flatter yourself; it is anything finer than the cold.”
“I would not dare.”
“You would dare a great deal, Your Grace. You simply do not have the blood left for it tonight, which is the only reason I am still kneeling here and not halfway up the stairs.”
“There is a thing I must tell you”, he said. “Not the whole of it. I do not have the strength for the whole of it tonight, and you do not have the safety. But you found a crest this afternoon you should never have come near.”
“You said that already, and you said it like a man closing a door.”
“I close doors for a living. It is the largest part of what a title is for.” The breath he drew caught on the wound. “I am trying to hold one of them open for you, which is not a thing I am in the habit of doing, and you are making it a great deal harder by being clever with me while I bleed.”
“Then stop holding it ajar and tell me what stands behind it.”
“Your mother’s name is in some papers I have spent seventeen years pretending I never read.
The men who came over my wall came because somewhere in this house there is proof of a thing a very great person would rather have stayed buried.
” He breathed against the pain. “That is more than I meant to give you in the dark with a blade perhaps still in my house.”
Her hand went cold inside his. “What was my mother to you, that her name should be in your papers at all?”
“That is the part I cannot give you tonight.”
“That is the part you will give me first, or I will walk out of this room, ring every bell in the house and let your forty servants and your one traitor settle the matter among themselves.” Her voice held level only by an effort that scraped her throat raw.
“You do not say my mother to me and then go quiet. Not to me. Not with your blood drying under my fingernails.”
“Helena,” he said, as though the word had edges that cut on the way out.
“Her name was Helena. The men hunting these papers knew her. One of them has desired her family’s ruin since before you were born.
That is all I will say in the dark. The rest you shall have when there are walls between us and those who would climb them, and not an hour before. ”
The name went through her like cold water down her spine.
She had three letters in a tin box under a floorboard in a rented room two miles distant, each signed with that name in a hand she had taught herself to copy as a girl, for the private comfort of pretending the woman still wrote to her.
In all her years of asking, she had never once heard another living soul say it aloud.
“How do you know my mother’s name?” she whispered. “How does a duke I met this morning come to carry the name my mother signed to letters no one else has ever read?”
His mouth opened, and beyond the locked gallery door, out in the dark of the long corridor, a single board took the careful weight of a foot that did not wish to be heard, and then another, and the footsteps came on towards the library.