Page 32 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“I am.”

“I would rather you scolded me. Nathaniel scolds me, and then it is over, and I know where I stand.”

“Hand me the next letter,” Selina said.

Georgiana looked for a moment as though she meant to say more. She turned the letter over, read several lines in her own hand and placed it face down upon the carpet as though that settled the matter. Then she picked it up again and passed it to Selina. Without looking at her, she folded her hands in her lap and unfolded them once more.

“You are going to tell me that it was Nathaniel’s fault. That he starved me of attention. Or perhaps you will say it was mine. I am tired of believing the blame must belong entirely to one of us. I only want the matter to be over. I want to wake tomorrow and find that it is July already.”

“I am not going to tell you whose fault it was.” Selina set aside the letter she held. “I am going to tell you something more difficult: you liked it.”

Georgiana’s hands stilled above the pile.

“You liked being chosen. A man noticed you when no one else in this house appeared to be looking, and it was the best feeling you had experienced in a year. Rowland found that need already waiting for him and made himself at home in it. You would have written a great deal more than this to preserve the feeling.”

“Is that so terrible?”

“No. It is common. That is why he chose someone who had begun to doubt whether she was valued.”

Georgiana’s mouth opened and closed. She looked at the letter in her hand, then at the fire. When she began speaking again, the words emerged in a rush and in no proper order. She had not meant any of it; she had meant all of it. Once, he had told her that she possessed a fine ear for music, and she had gone to her room and wept for an hour without knowing why. She had recognised the danger by the second letter and written the third that same evening.

She ran out of breath before she ran out of words. Selina had not interrupted once and continued sorting.

“You are not saying anything,” Georgiana said.

“No.”

The girl returned to the pile.

They worked amid the soft sounds of paper and fire. Somewhere below, a door opened and closed. By degrees, the room became easier than it had been at the beginning of the hour. After a while, the shrillness left Georgiana’s voice, and a steadier tone emerged beneath it.

“Did anyone ever choose you?” she asked. “When you were my age. Before your father, I mean. Was there a man who saw you as I believed Mr Rowland saw me?”

Selina squared a pile which required no attention.

“There was a young man when I was seventeen. Perfectly ordinary, with a perfectly ordinary future before him. He liked me, and I liked being liked, and for a little while I thought a great deal of it. Then my father was arrested, and the young man discovered a pressing engagement in another county. I never saw him again.” She reached for the next letter. “That is the whole of it. There is no lesson at the end. I have looked.”

“I am sorry. That was an unkind question, though I did not mean it to be.”

“It was not unkind. The next letter, if you please.”

Georgiana passed it across, then placed the one after it upon the sorted pile herself, with a steadier hand than she had possessed at the beginning.

“He does love me. Nathaniel, I mean. I know that he does, in his way, but his way is so cold that I have never been able to warm my hands at it. He gives orders instead of asking questions. He forbids instead of listening. I used to think that he simply did not care. But since you came, I have watched him, and I no longer believe that. I think he does not know how to show that he cares without turning it into a rule.”

“That is very nearly the truest thing you have said about your brother.” Selina sat back upon her heels. “He is not cold. He is frightened, and he has been frightened for longer than you have been old enough to recognise it. A duke may not be seen to be afraid, so his fear emerges as authority. When he forbids you a masquerade, he believes that he is protecting you, though the protection may feel very like a cage. I do not yet know what first taught him to fear losing control. But I know the shape of a man who has carried that fear for years.”

Georgiana studied her for a long moment, and some part of her old resentment loosened its grip.

“You are defending him.”

“I am. I did not expect to when I first entered this house.” Selina gathered the sorted letters and knocked their edges square against the floor. “I expected to spend my entire employment standing between the two of you and translating. You may hold it against me whenever I am wrong. But I am not wrong about his fear.”

***

She learnt the origin of that fear the same evening, in the library, which had become by unspoken agreement the room where she and Nathaniel said the things for which the rest of the house was too bright.

Selina sat in the chair he had placed beside the south window, the last of the light failing over a book she had ceased to read, when Nathaniel entered carrying a decanter and two glasses. With him came the particular quiet of a man who had brought a burden to set down and did not know how to begin.