Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“It is a leaf, Seraphina! It was attached to a living oak branch not twenty minutes ago. You deliberately misled the inquiry.” William scoffed, a laugh bubbling in his chest despite his best efforts to maintain a stern scowl.
He crossed his arms over his unbuttoned waistcoat, leaning back against the rough trunk of the oak tree.
“I answered the question as stated,” Seraphina replied.
She did not so much as blink. “You asked, and I quote, Is the subject a living, breathing creature? A plucked oak leaf possesses no respiratory system, nor is it currently attached to the tree’s primary vascular trunk.
Botanically speaking, the moment it was severed from the branch, cellular death commenced. It is non-living organic matter.”
William threw his hands up, his coat discarded several feet away on the wool blanket, his cravat untied and his linen sleeves rolled up past his forearms. “It is a game. We are sitting on a blanket in the shade, not defending a thesis. You knew precisely what I meant when I asked if it was alive.”
“A lawyer does not guess what an opponent means. He reads the text. A physician does not guess at a symptom. He measures it.” Seraphina offered him a victorious little smile that made his pulse do a strange, erratic jump.
“If you wish to defeat me, William, you must frame your inquiries with greater care.”
William narrowed his eyes at her, though the exasperation in his chest was rapidly giving way to an overwhelming, dangerous sense of amusement.
For weeks, he had lived with a woman whose mind operated like a perfectly calibrated piece of clockwork.
She approached conversation the way a general would approach a siege or a scholar approached a rare manuscript.
It was exasperating. It was absurd...
...It was, he was beginning to realize, completely captivating.
“You are utterly ruthless,” William muttered, reaching for a glass of lemonade to mask the rise of blood to his face. “A tyrant.”
“I am a lover of accuracy,” Seraphina retorted, pouring herself a splash of tea. “The leaf is dead, William. It has been separated from its life source. It is no longer living.”
“It is green! It was attached to the branch five minutes ago!” William countered, setting his glass down. “If I pluck a flower, it does not instantly become a corpse the second my fingers sever the stem. It retains its vitality. Ergo, for the purpose of a game, it is alive.”
“By every law of nature, once the vascular supply is severed, it enters a state of decay. It is biologically dead.”
“It is alive,” William insisted. “You are twisting the definition simply to deny my victory.”
“It is dead,” she maintained, smiling.
“It is green, it is intact, and it is winning this argument. It is alive.”
“It is dead.”
The tiny voice cut between them like a blade.
Seraphina paused, while William sat back, completely stunned, staring at Alice as she took another bite of her strawberry. Her words were tiny, no louder than the rustle of a breeze through the grass, but he heard her loud and clear.
Beside them, tucked safely on the far corner of the wool blanket, Alice was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin.
She was holding a half-eaten strawberry in one hand, her eyes wide, clear, and fixed directly on William.
There was no hesitation in her face, no shadow of the terrifying retreat that had claimed her for the past couple of months.
“It is dead,” Alice repeated.
The world seemed to shrink down to the space of that blanket. Inside William’s chest, his heart gave a massive thud, followed by a hammering rhythm. Alice had looked him in the eye and spoken directly to him.
Every protective instinct in William’s body screamed at him to throw his arms around her, to call for the servants, to sigh with relief.
But months of guidance warned him that a grand spectacle would be fatal.
If he made a fuss, if he treated this miracle like a fragile glass vase breaking, Alice would retreat right back into her shell like a startled snail.
So, swallowing the lump in his throat, William forced his features into a look of lighthearted betrayal. He placed a hand over his heart and glared at her.
“You too, Alice?” he grumbled, putting on his most aggrieved, grumpy facade.
“You are taking her side? Is that what this household has come to? I am your family too. I buy you sweetmeats. I spent hours yesterday teaching you how to identify the constellations, and you side with the woman who abuses botanical definitions to win a silly game?”
Alice bit into her strawberry, a tiny giggle escaping her lips. She didn’t look down. She didn’t flinch. She just watched him through her long lashes, her small shoulders shaking with bubbling laughter.
“Don’t you dare attempt to bully my ally,” Seraphina interjected smoothly, as she reached out and gently patted Alice’s shoulder. “She simply possesses superior analytical reasoning, Your Grace. Accept your defeat with dignity.”
“Traitorous, the pair of you,” William muttered, though the feeling spreading through his limbs was so warm, so dizzyingly sweet, he felt almost intoxicated by it.
He turned back to Alice. “Very well then, Lady Genius. Since you are so exceptionally clever at this game, it is your turn. Go pick an object, and let us see if Seraphina’s analytical reasoning can save her this time. ”
Alice’s eyes lit up. She dropped the green stem of her strawberry onto a silver tray, scrambled up from the blanket without a single trace of her usual languor, and went trotting off toward the edge of the rose garden.
Her small leather slippers rustled softly through the clover as she began peering under leaves and bushes, utterly absorbed in her quest for a secret object.
The very instant Alice was out of earshot, the playful air evaporated, leaving a taut, breathless quiet beneath the trees.
William turned his head toward Seraphina, his chest heaving as if he had just run a mile. “Did she just—” he spoke in an urgent, hushed rasp.
“—speak directly to you?” Seraphina finished.
“That has never happened before. Usually she refuses to meet my eye,” William whispered. He ran a hand through his hair, gripping the back of his neck.
“It was magnificent,” Seraphina whispered back. “Perhaps all she needed was time. Who knows the weight she carries? A gentleman of high standing, a powerful man of the town, may have intimidated her in the past. It would explain why she is so wary around people.”
She paused, watching Alice crouch near the rose bushes. “We read together almost every afternoon, you know. We speak of society, of rank, and... we speak of you.”
William tilted his head, a curious stillness settling over him. “What, precisely, do you tell her about me?”
Seraphina offered a conspiratorial smile.
“I tell her that you are kind. I tell her that while you may carry yourself with a stern, intimidating air... the grand Duke of Norwyn, brooding over his estates... you are a true gentleman at heart. I tell her you are fiercely protective of those you love. I honestly did not know if she was truly absorbing my words, but perhaps... perhaps she was listening all along.”
William let out a quiet breath, his eyes locking onto hers with a depth of feeling he didn’t care to hide. “Then I owe this to you, Seraphina. You made her see me in a different light.”
“Do not give me all the credit just yet,” she replied gently, shaking her head.
“The truth is, until Alice finds her own voice completely, until she feels safe enough to tell us what truly happened in her past, we will never fully understand why she was so frightened, or why she withdrew from the world. But for today, William...”
Seraphina turned to face him fully. “For today, we call this progress.”
He looked out toward the lawn where Alice was currently squatting near a stone urn, her small fingers carefully inspecting a piece of bark.
A tangle of emotions tightened in his chest. Gratitude, immense and overwhelming, was the largest part of it.
He knew, with absolute certainty, that without Seraphina’s presence over the past weeks, Alice would still be locked in her prison.
But running parallel to that gratitude was a prickle of competitive pride.
The blackmailer.
For weeks, he had promised Seraphina that he would handle it. The venomous, anonymous letters targeting her remained a looming, unresolved shadow. He had found small leads, dead ends, and cold trails, but no culprit.
She had made progress with Alice, and he had not even delivered her peace of mind.
“I will have an update on the blackmailer soon,” he said then. “I assure you. I should have found the person behind them by now.”
“Oh, I know you’re working,” Seraphina said softly. “You have made far more progress in four weeks than I made in months of searching on my own. You are investigating a ghost, and you are doing so while protecting me from the scandal.”
Just then, she reached over to place her hand on his knee, smiling with wide eyes. “I trust you with it. Completely.”
William stopped breathing.
Her words were profoundly kind. They were the words of a true partner, a woman who saw him far beyond the cold mask he wore for the rest of the world.
To the ton, to society, and to his business associates, he was entirely unyielding, a man who showed no mercy, made no friends when profit or legacy was on the line, and rarely graced anyone with a smile.
Yet, he had never once turned that ruthless edge upon her.
He had often wondered what she had done differently to unlock this warmer, softer side of a man so widely feared.
But as much as his mind tried to absorb the grace of her speech, his physical body had completely abandoned the topic of blackmail and letters.
All of his sensory awareness had violently narrowed down to the exact five square inches where her hand still rested on his thigh.