“I’m fine from here. Thank you, Dot.”
“Good luck!” Dot said. And then, touchingly, she gave her elbow a little squeeze. “I shall return at four, Miss Wylde. It’s when he likes a bit of tea.”
It was an anteroom of sorts that must have been a library a century or so ago, when the building was new. Shelves were built into the wall.
He glanced up and saw her framed in the doorway.
“Buonasera, Miss Wylde. I commend you on your punctuality. You are, in fact, a few minutes early. I am just replying to some correspondence from my solicitor.”
Behind him sat a handsome brass and wood clock about a foot tall. Its face was pale, and black roman numerals marched around it. A brass pendulum swung back and forth inside it.
“Buonasera, Your Grace. Grazie. I wasn’t certain how long the journey from the house to this suite would take. I shouldn’t like to be flogged for tardiness.”
“You’ll be grateful to learn that we no longer flog for tardiness in the military.” He sounded abstracted. He didn’t look up from the sentence he was inscribing. “We put men on the rack. Or tell their mothers.”
She smiled cautiously.
He swept one hand out without looking at her. “If you’ll take the seat opposite me, I shall just be a moment.”
She settled in, gingerly.
Folded her hands, primly.
She watched his quill fly across the page like a living thing, darting and leaping to make letters. She was a little sleepy from her midday meal and it was soothing, almost mesmeric, to watch. Two miniatures were propped on stands in frames on his table, a pretty dark-haired woman and a young man who looked like a precise blend of the duke and the pretty, dark-haired woman. She wondered whether he had ever taken his family to the seashore, or if he had always been off fighting.
It seemed odd and possibly a little dangerous to be so close to him. He was something better appreciated from a distance, like a gryphon. If he turned, his shoulders would all but block the sun from the window.
Next to him was a stack of foolscap. She peered at it. Across the page on top were the words “Chapter Two.” It thus far seemed to be comprised of about three sentences, several scratched out words, and small drawings.
“I see you’ve drawn . . . a little horse, and a flower of some sort. And is that . . . is that meant to be a dog?”
He smacked his left hand lightly down on the foolscap and pushed it aside, all the while continuing to write. He hadn’t even looked up.
“The horse and dog looked rather similar. Perhaps if you made the horse’s tail a bit fluffier?”
He cast a swift but potently baleful glance upward at her, then re-dipped his quill and continued his correspondence.
“Three sentences only. Chapter Two must be the one where you reminisce about all your pleasurable pursuits.”
She wondered just how much piss-taking she could get away with when it came to a duke.
He ignored this while he sprinkled sand on the letter and pushed it aside, too.
And then sat back and directed the whole of his attention to her, one eyebrow arched as though he was assessing how to handle a recalcitrant subaltern.
Everything he did was brisk and precise. She was reminded of the time she’d witnessed a man loading a rifle, the sharp, swift, finite, methodical steps. She wondered if life was like that for the duke: he knew precisely each step to take, and when, and what the result would be.
How must that feel?
“So, Miss Wylde . . . how much Italian do you in truth speak or write, if any?”
She cleared her throat. “Ah . . . very little.”
“If you would kindly share a few words with me.” It wasn’t a question. It was a command. She supposed she’d better get used to that.
“Buonasera. Grazie. Prego. I know the meanings of those words. Aria. Aria di sorbetto. Cadenza. Mostly musical words of that nature. Man, woman. You, me. Some pronouns.”
“So far during your career . . .” She didn’t care for the slight ironic lilt he’d given to the word “career”—it rather suggested the words “of vice” ought to follow it. “. . . you’ve learned all your singing roles, and the lyrics to arias, by ear?”
“By parroting, if you would, Your Grace.”
There ensued a pause during which she could almost hear him meticulously re-looming his fraying patience.
“I apologized, Miss Wylde,” he reminded her heavily. “Might I suggest we move on?”
“What fun would that be?”
He pressed his lips together.
“You are a . . . cobbler’s daughter, you said?”
“Yes.”
“And have you had any formal education?”
“By formal—”
“A tutor. A governess. That sort of thing. To teach you languages and maths.”
“Not . . . as such.”
His little confirming nod indicated both that he took that as a no, and that it was precisely what he’d thought. “Yet you’re fairly well-spoken.”
Well. She was almost amused. Her pride took that as a glancing blow. “Fairly,” she repeated, musingly. “Damned with faint praise. May I say ‘damned’ in here?”
“Do you see a jar?” he said. He gestured broadly.
He was studying her again, a little thoughtful shadow between his brows, as though she were a map to an unpromising territory. His forehead indeed featured a faint line, and there were a few more of those raying from the corners of his eyes. She wished his shoulders weren’t so admirably vast.
“If you learn the arias well by listening, what do you hope to gain from Italian lessons?”
She hesitated, her pride and impulse toward sarcasm warring with the genuine desire to know. The blessed relief that would bring. Here, for the first time in her life, was someone, an intelligent someone even if he was rather a bastard, who could teach her. And she could endure a bastard if there were some return on the investment of endurance.
And so she told him the truth.
“Well, it’s like trying to see through a dirty window, isn’t it? It can be done, but you never see all you want to see, only bits of it. And the effort is so . . . it’s ultimately exhausting. I can glean quite a bit from context, but am always at a slight disadvantage, and I want to never be at a disadvantage again.”
His expression shifted subtly. It could not precisely be said that it softened. It became interested, she would have said.
“How much money do you have?” she asked kindly.
“Refuse,” he said smoothly without so much as an eyebrow twitch. “How was it you came by your facility—ease—with speech?”
“I know ‘facility,’” she said calmly. “You needn’t translate every word longer than two syllables.”
“Very well,” he said with equanimity. “Why don’t you just tell me when you’d like something defined? Two people who have survived insulting each other without fighting a duel should not stand on ceremony.”
It was the oddest sensation to be yanked between seething resentment and the impulse to like him, the latter of which she felt he did not quite deserve. But he was difficult in an interesting way, and one could so seldom say that about men.
“Well, my mother taught me to read and write. She made sure of it from the moment I could walk. Of course, it helped in the shop, to do accounts and take orders and the like. Our shop was near the theater, and we had quite a variety of customers. Actors and actresses and singers, and lords and ladies and everyday folks. It was Madame Elaine Guillaume—”