It was quite an astounding thing to hear, or for a woman to say. But it was increasingly clear how Miss Wylde had survived fatherless in London from the age of fourteen: a filament of steel in her spine.
“I’m just terribly sorry you witnessed such a thing,” she added. He could hear the sincerity and the ache in her voice. “And lost someone you cared about. And sometimes feeling . . . terribly sorry for someone . . . makes it very hard to speak, doesn’t it?”
The disarming, astute loveliness of this stopped his words yet again.
“I do not want you to spend a moment of your time feeling sorry for me,” he said quietly. “I’m a bloody general and a duke, and here I am, alive, tutoring a notorious soprano in Italian as a punishment for being rude in the parlor. I only hope you shall not be scarred by my awkward attempt at commiseration.”
“Nonsense. I am comforted,” she assured him, perhaps a little too vehemently.
He snorted.
She smiled at him.
He took a moment just to do nothing more than enjoy that smile.
He leaned back in his chair. Drummed his fingers once.
“If it helps at all . . . given that I’ve been so helpful thus far . . . life is cheap and fragile, but ultimately it’s all we’ve got, isn’t it, when we have nothing else? And that makes it such an outrageously precious thing that we’ll do anything to preserve it. It’s quite the paradox. It’s a wonder we’re entrusted with it at all, given how easy it is to lose. And fate can make ridiculous rag dolls of us at any time, even the wisest of us. Even kings and dukes. But when you realize no one is exempt from the caprices of fate, well, that’s the greatest gift of all, I think. A good humbling early on is marvelous for building character.”
It was a rare pleasure to speak this way to anyone, let alone a woman, and to know that she listened because she was actually interested.
“That was a little better,” she said.
He smiled slowly.
At once her face went still and rapt, as if that smile had surrounded her and held her fast.
They were quiet.
He grew more serious. “The last thing on earth your father saw was your smile, Miss Wylde. And as I’m sure you’ve surmised by now, there are far, far worse ways a man can go.”
He literally saw her breath hitch.
Once again his words made her luminous. He watched it, restless with the kind of hunger one watched any lovely thing—a sunrise, a sunset—destined to vanish quickly.
He did have a sense of the potency of his own presence and his own gaze. He was not surprised when she ducked her head.
He also did not think she’d remain overwhelmed for more than a second.
“Do you suppose someone on a ship somewhere found him?” she asked, quietly.
In all likelihood, her poor father had fed hungry eels, or a shark. Perhaps the eels had been made into a pie sold by a monger out on the street. He could no longer be sentimental about bodies themselves; it was so clear in death that they’d just been vessels of transport through life, like a ship.
She must have read his expression. “Don’t answer that,” she said hurriedly. “I’m not delusional. But sometimes I lie awake at night and I imagine him, oh, in China, cobbling shoes so he can make enough money to finally sail home. Or perhaps he’s in Egypt, and making sandals, and he has a lot of friends because he always did.”
“It’s very difficult not to know for certain what became of him,” he said gently.
He tapped his quill. There was something he, for some reason, very much wanted her to know.
“Losing men never became rote, for me, Miss Wylde. Every one of them, I think, is scored somewhere on my soul. Assuming I still possess one.” He tipped the corner of his mouth.
It was yet another thing he’d never said aloud to anyone.
Her face suffused with that ache again, which she quickly disguised.
“Just as some women are made to hold an audience captive with their voices, some men are built to withstand war. The more you endure, the more you can endure. Until one can easily bear weights—troubles, responsibilities, grievances, deaths, triumphs—that look to someone on the outside inconceivable. It happens over time. I was the one able to do it.” He paused. And said, quietly, “So I did it.”
He had not ended that sentence with, until all you’re doing is enduring.
But with a sudden violent clarity, Mariana knew that it was true.
His calling had been consuming. And it was such that now it isolated him. He was unique among men—all men—in the world, and had seen and done things most other men would never see.
That was the source of his gravity. That presence one felt when one was in the room with him.
Who had ever borne weight for him? It stole her breath to think he’d done it alone.
Somehow she knew it hadn’t been his wife. She was certain he’d married the right person, of course. What a funny word that was, when one thought about it. “Right.” It ought not have shades of meaning. It ought to be like day or night.
Perhaps that was why his memoirs were going badly. Perhaps he just couldn’t see beyond the horizon now. Perhaps with less weight on his shoulders, he felt unmoored. His hand, heavy with that signet ring that represented all he now was, lay flat on the table.
“Your Grace . . .”
He looked up at her.
She took a breath. “I should like to say . . . I am very sorry that I hurt your feelings when earlier I implied . . . that you were cold.”
He went still.
Clearly absolutely stunned.
And then, before she realized she was doing it, she reached across the table and slowly, gently laid her hand on top of his.
It was, on the surface, an instinctive transferring of comfort to another human.
His eyes flared at once in surprise. Then, she felt an unmistakable heat at the base of her spine as surely as a torch had been swiftly touched there.
And from there it spread everywhere, everywhere in her body.
Oh, he was too much for her. She’d already known that.
But the deeper truth was that she could not go another moment not knowing if she could feel that force that hummed inside him. The thing that shortened her breath when she walked into a room that contained him. That made her brace herself as if she was about to go off the jetty.
They both stared at her hand over his. His skin was hot.
If she shifted her hand a very little, she could feel his pulse.
Her courage did not extend that far.
And then she withdrew her hand, and folded both hands together as if sheathing weapons.
She fancied her hand still buzzed.
She kept her head ducked.
Neither one of them spoke for a long moment.
She looked up to find him motionless, his expression carefully unreadable, eyes fixed on her, and the clock hand twitching forward to four o’clock.
They heard the rattle of the tea tray borne by Dot coming down the hall.
“I don’t think I want to learn the Italian word for ‘jetty,’” she said, finally. “Hopefully I’ll never again find it terribly useful.”
Chapter Ten
The sitting room that night was filled with chatter and the homey, domestic snick of scissors and the rustle of industry. All feminine hands were needed to fashion stars and roses and to embroider the initials TGPOTT into twenty surprisingly fine white handkerchiefs. No consensus had yet been reached about how to make the ceiling of the ballroom midnight blue.