Chapter Twelve
“You are not reading that. You have held it upside down for ten minutes.”
Royce looked at the page in his hand, which was indeed upside down, and did not hurry to right it. “I am considering it from every angle. It is a method.”
“It is a method for a man who is not reading at all.” Giselle did not look up from the box she had open on the long table, three candles burning low beside her, the cypher pages spread under her hands.
“You have turned four documents the wrong way since dinner, you have answered two of my questions, and you have been standing on the same board of the floor since nine, which creaks, so I have had a report of every time you shifted your weight. You are not working, Your Grace. You are loitering in your own library.”
“A man may loiter where he likes. It is the chief privilege of owning the house.”
“You own seven houses, by Beatrice’s count. You might loiter in any of the other six and leave me with my candle.”
“None of the other six has you in it, which makes them poor loitering.”
“That is very nearly a compliment. I am told loitering is beneath a duke.”
“By whom?”
“By the same scandal sheets that promised me a rake. They had you ravishing widows in three counties, and here you are turning documents upside down, afraid of a cypher and a woman with ink on her hands.”
“I am not afraid of the cypher.”
“No,” she agreed, and bent back to the page. “You are not afraid of it. You may also tell me what you are loitering about, since the loitering is putting your shadow across my only good candle, and I have a cypher to break and a duke in the way of it.”
He set the page down, the right way up, and crossed the room to the table, which put him at her shoulder where the candlelight was.
He had meant to read over her arm. Instead, he found himself reading the back of her neck, where a strand had come loose from the pins, and the discipline of seventeen years held by a margin that thinned every hour she sat bare-handed across the table from him.
“The cypher,” he said. “Show me where it fights you.”
“Here.” She set a finger to a line of her mother’s small hand.
“She uses the family cant for the first third, the substitutions you taught me, and then here, at the fold, she changes to something else, something I do not have the key to, as though she stopped trusting even her own code halfway through writing it.”
“Or she changed the key because the first key had been read,” he said.
“A woman who burns a settlement does not stop trusting by halves. If the cant breaks here, it is because she learned here that someone could follow the cant. The change is not fear. It is intelligence arriving too late to save her and just in time to save this.”
“That is a grim reading.”
“It is the reading of a man who has watched people change their cyphers. They never do it early enough, and they always do it for a reason, and the reason is usually standing in the room while they write.” He set a finger beside hers on the fold.
“Find me the date here. If I am right, something happened to your mother that week, and the second half of this will tell us what she did about it.”
“You see? You can do this when you try.”
“A lucky interval. It will not last.” Her finger moved along the line, and his eyes did not follow it. “You are doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Looking at me instead of the page. You have been doing it for a week. You did it across Amabel’s table, you did it in the carriage, and you are doing it now, over a cypher that might hold the whole of why my mother died.
” She turned her head, and the loose strand swung, and she looked up at him from a distance of nothing at all.
“Explain the method to me, Your Grace. I am a quick study. You have said so yourself.”
“The method is that I made you a promise.” His voice had gone low and even.
“I told you I would not touch you unless you asked. I have kept it, and I intend to keep it. It is the only clean thing I have done in seventeen years, and I find I am unwilling to spoil the record, even now, even with you looking at me like that, which you should stop doing, in your own interest, while one of us still has the discipline for both.”
“Why should the asking fall to me?”
“Because everything else in your life has been decided for you by someone standing where I am standing. Your name, your mother, your place in every room. I will not add myself to the list of things that simply happened to you while you were busy surviving them.” He did not move closer, which cost him.
“If it is to be me, it will be because you reached across the table and not because I did. I have taken enough from people who could not stop me. I would rather be the one thing you choose.”
“That is a very pretty speech for a man who claims to apologise only sideways.”
“It is not an apology. It is a condition, and you of all people should mark the difference.”
“I mark it.” She studied him the way she studied a watermark held to the light. “You have thought about this as much as I have.”
“I have thought of very little else, which has made me poor company and worse at cyphers. You may add it to your report on me.”
“Then answer the thing you have been circling since the carriage door shut. You read silences for a living. Read mine. I have held one open for you for a week, and you have catalogued it twice and answered neither time.”
“I answered by keeping the promise. The keeping was the answer. A man who wanted nothing would not need the fence.”
“Fences are not answers, Royce. They are questions a coward leaves for someone braver to open.”
“Then I am the coward, and you are the braver, and the latch is yours. I have shown you where it sits, but I will not lift it for you.”
She was quiet, and the candle guttered, and somewhere in the house, a clock let go of the hour.
“You are a very inconvenient man,” she said at last. “Do you know how much easier this would be if you would simply behave like the rake the scandal sheets promised? I was prepared for a rake, and I had a strategy for one.”
“And what is the strategy now?”
“Now I have a husband who writes me conditions and keeps them, which no scandal sheet ever prepared a woman for, so I am improvising, Your Grace, badly, in a library, at midnight, over a candle you keep standing in front of.”
“I am sorry to disappoint the sheets.”
“You are not sorry at all. You are standing there being honourable on purpose, where I can see it, which is the most provoking thing you have done yet, and you have done a great many provoking things.” She set the cypher down.
She turned on the stool to face him fully, and put both her bare hands flat against his waistcoat, over the place where his heart worked harder than his face allowed, and left them there. “Then I am asking.”
He went still under her hands. “Giselle.”
“I am asking, Royce. I have thought about it on an ordinary afternoon, with the curtains open, having slept, exactly as you instructed, and the answer was the same in the daylight as it is now, which you said would be the test.” Her hands did not move, and neither did her eyes.
“Do not make me ask twice. I have spent my whole life asking for things once and being refused, and I find I have no patience left for the second asking. Kiss me, or tell me plainly you will not, but do not stand there being noble at me for one more minute.”
The discipline of seventeen years did not break so much as set itself down, like a weight carried so long that its carrying had become the shape of his hands.
He took her face in both of his, gently, the way a man handles a thing he has decided to stop pretending he does not want, and he kissed her.
Slowly at first, because he had promised himself that if it ever came it would be slow, that she would have every instant to change her mind and find him already stopping, but she did not change her mind.
She rose off the stool into it, her hands fisting in his waistcoat to pull him down to her, and the slowness did not survive her coming up to meet him.
He had not been kissed like this in his life, as though the other party had been waiting at a locked door and the door had opened, and the sound she made against his mouth undid a knot in his chest he had stopped believing would ever come loose.
His hands left her face for her hair, the pins gave up their loose hold, and the rest of it came down over his fingers.
He turned them both until the table took her weight and his, and she kissed him back with the whole of the focus she gave a forged seal, complete, exacting and without mercy.
He let her, and gave it back, and for a long moment there was no archive and no Veyr and no seventeen years, only her mouth, her hands and the small fierce sounds of a woman who had asked for a thing and meant to have all of it.
It was she who broke it, by a breath, to speak against his mouth. “There. That was not so difficult. You build the most elaborate fences around the simplest doors.”
“I am out of practice at simple doors.” His voice had gone to gravel. “Giselle. Tell me this is not the bad night we had at Amabel’s, still talking. Tell me you slept.”
“I slept, I woke, and I chose. Stop interrogating the witness, Your Grace; the witness is cooperative.”
“The witness is cooperative, and the interrogator’s hands are shaking.”
“Seventeen years is a long while to hold a thing still. They will settle. Give them an occupation that is not a forged seal.”
“Gladly,” he said, and he did, and the second kiss was slower than the first, but surer.
She kissed him again, briefly, to prove it, and the laugh started in her before it reached the air.
“Seventeen years, and you kiss like a man making up for every one of them at once. We are going to have a great deal to discuss about your fences, and we will discuss them at length. I shall want a full accounting. Every fence, the date of its building, the threat it was raised against.” She had not let go of his waistcoat. “You may begin with the carriage.”
“The carriage was not a fence. The carriage was a man drowning politely.”
“And tonight?”
“Tonight is a man who has stopped being polite about it.” He kissed the corner of her mouth because he could, because the inch was gone and he was still learning the country on the far side of it. “Ask me again tomorrow. I should like to learn if it survives a second daylight.”
“It will survive a great many daylights, Your Grace. I am nothing if not thorough.”
“You catalogued me once. The genus of distracted men. Do you withdraw the classification?”
“I revise it. You are no longer loitering; you are committed, which is a rarer genus entirely, and I shall want new instruments to study it properly. Tell me one true thing, then, and not sideways. You are good at sideways, but give me one straight.”
“One.” He rested his forehead against hers.
“I stopped wanting to take you out of rooms somewhere this week and started wanting to be in them with you. That is the whole of the new tool. You handed it to me in a carriage, and I have been insufferable ever since, trying to learn it before you saw that I could not.”
“I saw.”
“You see everything. It is the most alarming thing about you, and I keep a list.”
“Read me one item from it.”
“You hum when you work and do not know you do it. You bite the side of your thumb over a hard cypher. You called me Royce three times tonight, and each time your shoulders came down half an inch, the way I taught you.”
“That is more than one item.”
He had a reply, but he never made it because the knock came at the library door.
It was Crispin’s knock, two and a pause and one, the knock that meant a thing that could not wait until morning.
Royce stepped back from her by the width the household required, and watched her put her hair to rights with the steadiness of a woman who had broken into harder rooms than this.
He opened the door, and Crispin stood with a salver, and on the salver a single sealed note.
“It came by a man who would not give his name, Your Grace, and would not wait for an answer, which I did not care for.” Crispin’s eyes did not move to the duchess, and that was its own kind of report. “It is addressed to Her Grace. By hand.”
“A man who will not name himself and will not wait wishes to be remembered as a feeling and not a face,” Royce said. “Did you mark anything of him?”
“Tall. Town clothes and country boots, which do not marry. And he came to the side door, Your Grace, the one the trade uses and strangers do not. He had been told the way.”
“He had been told the way.” Royce turned the sentence over and did not care for its shape. “Thank you, Crispin. Stay near the hall, and wake Hodge, and let no one leave the house tonight who cannot account for himself.”
“At once, Your Grace.” Crispin paused at the threshold, which was not his habit. “The hand on the direction. I have carried this house’s letters for forty years, and that is no tradesman’s or footman’s hand. Whoever wrote it was taught his letters in a good room.”
“I know the room it was taught in. Go.”
Royce took it before she could.
“Royce. Your face has gone to the war face. What does it say?”
“I have not opened it. It is the outside that has stopped me.”
“Then show me the outside.”
He did not turn it to her. He turned it to the candle, and the direction on the front of it stopped the warmth in him as though a window had been opened in winter, because it was not addressed to the Duchess of Calder at all.
It was addressed, in Vale’s dry procedural copperplate, to the Honourable Giselle Westmere, a name she had never once spoken aloud outside this room, a name her mother had burned a settlement to bury, written now on the outside of a note by a Crown solicitor who had no lawful way on earth to know it.