Page 34 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“I am sorry,” she said at last. “I asked to see the shape of it. I did not understand what it would cost you to show me.”

“You did not force it from me.”

“No. But I will not pretend it was lightly given.”

“It was not.” He left the window and stopped a few feet from her chair. “But it is outside me now. That is a peculiar thing. It weighs less in the room than it did in my chest.”

“Is that why Georgiana’s secrecy frightened you so much? You feared the same ending?”

“I did. And I mistook that fear for proof that the stories were the same.”

“You were standing too near the memory to see the difference clearly,” Selina said. “I arrived without it. I saw only a lonely girl in the wrong gloves.”

“And saw her more clearly in one afternoon than I had managed in a year.”

“You saw her through the fear of losing her. Fear is not an impartial observer.”

“You describe me to myself more accurately than I have ever managed. I am uncertain whether to thank you or ask you to stop.”

“Neither. Only hear it. You have carried the judgement alone for twelve years; you need not also be the only one to answer it.”

He looked at her then. “You make that sound remarkably simple.”

“No. Only possible.”

She turned the glass between her hands, choosing her next words with care.

“There are other ways of allowing an old loss to govern what one does,” she said. “You are not the only person in this room who has kept part of the past hidden because speaking of it cost too much.”

His attention sharpened, but he did not press her.

Selina drew a slow breath.

“I sold my mother’s jewels.”

He did not move.

“Four winters ago, when the last of my money was gone and there was no prospect of more, I had kept them through the trial, the sale of the house and years of cheap rooms. They were the only possessions which were wholly mine, the one thing my father’s ruin had never been entitled to reach and which had never been his to lose. When I became hungry enough, truly hungry, I took them to a dealer in Ludgate and received less than half their worth. I did not weep. Grieving over the last remnant of one’s mother is a luxury, and I had rent to find.” She looked down at the wine in her glass. “I retained what I required to live. The rest went elsewhere. I cannot tell you where… Not yet.”

“Then keep that part,” he said. “I shall not ask for what you are not ready to give.”

“I took a situation after that, as companion to an elderly woman in Suffolk. I remained with her for three years under the name Gray, reading aloud, answering the few letters she received and winding a remarkable number of clocks. Every quarter, I was paid, and every quarter I set aside a portion of my wages for the same purpose as the money from the jewels. She died during the winter, and her family had no further need of a companion. I returned to London with a character and four pounds. Six months later, you found me at a placement assembly with enough money for another fortnight’s lodging.” She turned the glass between her hands. “I tell you because you have entrusted me with something you had never spoken aloud, and it seemed unjust to accept that confidence while offering none in return. And because I know what it is to make the only choice necessity appears to permit, then carry the cost of it long afterwards.”

Nathaniel looked at her and allowed the silence to remain for some time before attempting to fill it.

“What were they?” he asked. “Not their value. What were they?”

“A garnet necklace, old-fashioned even when she owned it. The earrings which matched. A small brooch which she pinned upon me on the morning of my first ball.” Selina’s voice did not alter. “She wore the set to every occasion which mattered in her life, and to a great many which did not. She left them to me by name, in a codicil written in her own hand and initialled twice in the margin because the lawyer had required her to do it again.” Her fingers tightened slightly around the glass. “I kept them through the trial and the sale of the house, wrapped in a stocking at the bottom of a box. Then I became hungry in the manner which ceases to be dramatic and becomes merely arithmetic. I took them to Ludgate. I have not spoken of them to another living soul until tonight.”

“I wish you had never been forced to choose between them and hunger,” Nathaniel said.

“I do not require pity.”

“It is not pity. It is anger that such a choice was required of you; and admiration for the woman who survived it.”

“Then let it remain admiration,” Selina said. “Do not turn it into a debt which must be repaid.”

“I shall not.”