Chapter 1 #2
“She does not speak, she does not cooperate with lessons, and she wakes at night.” His voice was entirely even. The voice of a man describing something that cost him a great deal. “She has been variously diagnosed as nervous, melancholic, and intractable, depending on which physician one consults.”
Cynthia folded her hands in her lap. A child who did not speak, woke at night and had lost her father two years ago, was described in her own uncle’s household as intractable.
“What does she like?” she asked.
He stopped, and the silence that followed was remarkable.
He had been speaking with careful fluency, as though from a rehearsed script, and then she had asked that particular question and he had simply stopped.
The controlled fluency ran out. He looked at her, and for three seconds, the mask shifted.
Beneath it, she saw something like being caught off guard, like bewilderment. Like a man who had been asked something so obvious and so completely unanticipated that he had no prepared answer.
He recovered, of course, because he was a duke; recovery was practically in the job description.
“She is a child, Miss Browne,” he said. “She likes what children like.” He made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “You may begin tomorrow. Mrs. Poole will show you the schoolroom.”
He looked back at the papers on his desk. The interview, apparently, was over.
Cynthia rose. She crossed to the door, which was heavy and dark with age, and she had her hand on the latch when she heard it.
An exhale. Behind her, from the direction of the window.
Not the exhalation of a man impatient to return to his papers. Not a sigh of dismissal or irritation. Something heavier, something that belonged to a man who had been carrying too much for too long and occasionally, in unguarded moments, let the weight show through the breath.
She did not look back. If she turned, he would put the mask back on, and the moment would close, and she would never be able to forget what she had just heard.
She went up the stairs.
Her room was at the end of the corridor that ran alongside the schoolroom, and it was small and cold. She set her trunk down, sat on the edge of the bed and looked out the window.
The moors stretched in every direction, enormous and uninterested. And on the hill behind the house, visible from this window with a clarity that seemed almost deliberate, was a small graveyard.
Stone markers, a low iron railing, a single bare tree. She could see it perfectly from here.
She sat with that for a moment, and then she looked down at her hands.
They were slightly cold and slightly shaking, which was entirely reasonable given the circumstances.
She was twenty-two years old with no family, no money, no friends within three days’ ride.
The man downstairs was either a monster or something considerably more complicated.
The child upstairs was broken in ways that would take more than French verbs to mend.
The wool merchant on the coach had offered his opinion that she would come to grief here, the housemaids had given her a month, and the cart driver had refused to come inside the gates.
She had walked through those gates anyway. She had come in through the servants’ entrance, climbed three flights of stairs and asked a duke what his niece liked and heard his careful composure come undone in a single breath.
He doesn’t know the answer. He has lived with this child for two years, and he doesn’t know what she likes. And it shames him.
She made herself a promise, there on the narrow bed with the cold light coming in: she would not let fear decide for her.
She had made this promise when her uncle died, and she had found herself utterly alone, with no inheritance and no connections.
She had made it when she walked into the clerk’s office and when she picked up her trunk at the estate gates.
She was not going to be a coward now.
She opened her trunk and began to unpack.
One blue dress, one gray dress, three chemises, four pairs of stockings, a volume of Greek poetry she could not afford to leave behind, a small watercolour of the village where she had grown up, a penknife that had been her uncle’s, and a thin silver necklace with a cross that her uncle had given her the Christmas before he died.
She arranged these things with the care of someone making order out of very little.
The room began to look, if not like home, then at least like her room.
Lavenham Hall creaked around her in the way of old houses that have held a great deal of weather.
She was beginning, quietly and against her better judgment, to want to know what else the Duke was.
Stop that, she told herself firmly, and went to unpack the Greek poetry.
That night, over dinner in the servants’ hall, Mrs. Poole told her three things.
The schoolroom had not been properly used since the child arrived.
The child had not spoken more than a handful of words to anyone in the household in two months.
And the duke took his meals alone, and had done so since his brother’s death.
“He wasn’t always like this,” said one of the younger housemaids, whose name was Mary, and who clearly had not yet absorbed the lesson that Mrs. Poole’s expression delivered in these situations.
“My mum’s cousin worked here when his late brother was alive, and she said the house used to have music sometimes, in the evenings. ”
“Mary,” said Mrs. Poole.
Mary subsided.
Cynthia ate her soup and thought about a house that had once had music in its evenings and now had locked doors, dismissed governesses and a child who did not speak.
“Does he ever visit her?” she asked. “The child. Does he go to the schoolroom?”
The silence that followed was the kind that answered the question.
“He provides for her,” Mrs. Poole said at last. “Everything she needs.”
“Yes,” Cynthia said. “Of course.”
She finished her soup. She thanked Mrs. Poole, whose face went briefly blank at the courtesy. She went up to her small, cold room, lay in the narrow bed and listened to Lavenham Hall breathe around her.
Somewhere on the third floor, one door along, a child slept.
Somewhere three floors below, a man sat in a study, alone.
The wind off the moors pressed against the window glass. The graveyard on the hill was invisible in the dark, but she knew it was there.
Whatever the duke is or isn’t, I am here now. And I have nowhere else to go.
It was not, perhaps, the most romantic resolve. But it was the most honest one she had.
And honesty, she had always found, was a better foundation than romance.