Page 38 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

Nathaniel rang for fresh tea and remained at a careful distance while she collected herself. Bassett entered, replaced the tray and closed the door behind him with more care than the door required.

“I was wrong about the printer,” Selina said. “I made the accusation before I possessed the facts, and Giles knew it. For one full minute, he had the better of me.” She pressed her fingers briefly to her eyes, the first unguarded gesture Nathaniel had seen from her all afternoon. “I do not do that. I have never done that.”

“You were angry.”

“I was careless. They are not the same.” She lowered her hand. “Then he told me that my father had written to him while awaiting trial. I should like to believe he invented it, but he did not. Giles has not the imagination. My father wrote to him about the timber.”

Nathaniel remained silent.

“He will not stop at the jewels,” he said at last. “That final remark about the estate’s debts was not merely temper. It was a seed. He wants us to lie awake wondering what else he may know, because uncertainty will soften us for his next demand.”

“The debts were settled. I watched it done. There is nothing outstanding which a court could touch, and Giles knows it. He is relying upon my not being certain.”

Selina accepted the cup Bassett had brought but did not drink.

“And yet he is not entirely wrong to rely upon uncertainty, because there is something I have not told you. I shall tell you, because we promised one another no lies and because anything Giles half-knows becomes more dangerous when kept in darkness.”

Nathaniel became very still. “Tell me.”

“Not tonight.” She turned the cup a quarter turn within its saucer. “It is not dangerous, only private, and I spent all the courage I brought downstairs upon Giles. Ask me again after I have slept.”

“I shall not ask. You will tell me when you are ready.” His voice softened. “I have grown unexpectedly skilled at waiting in this house.”

He did not sit beside her. He remained where he was, with the tea cooling between them, and allowed the afternoon to end in silence.

***

When Selina eventually went upstairs, Nathaniel was still standing.

He was courting his own wife.

The knowledge had been assembling within him for several days and chose that afternoon to become complete. He had sat through Giles’s threats with his hands upon the arms of a chair, aching to intervene and holding to his promise because Selina had asked it of him. Alone in the cooling room, he examined that fact and discovered that it did not alarm him.

That surprised him more than the fact itself.

That evening, he performed the first deliberate act of the courtship.

He sent for white violets and paid considerably more than violets had any right to cost. Then he sat at his desk with a card before him and composed the message four times. The first three attempts went into the fire.

Not from pity. Not from duty. From your husband.

He read the words once and allowed them to stand. Then he entrusted the flowers and the card to Bassett, with instructions that they be placed in Selina’s room while she was at supper. She would find them without Nathaniel standing there to watch her response.

He did not ask that evening or the following morning whether she had kept the card.

Bassett supplied the answer regardless. With the studied indifference of a butler determined not to appear pleased, he mentioned that Her Grace had asked for the violets to be kept in water beside her bed rather than sent downstairs with the other flowers. The card, he added, was nowhere to be found.

In a house where Bassett found everything, Nathaniel understood what that meant.

“Will there be anything else, Your Grace?”

“No. Thank you.” Nathaniel turned over a paper upon his desk which required no attention. “Bassett… the violets. When they fade, replace them. Quietly. Do not mention it to Her Grace, and do not allow the vase to remain empty.”

“Very good, Your Grace.”

Bassett withdrew. If there was a satisfaction in his step which had not been present before Selina entered the house, Nathaniel chose not to observe it.

He closed the study door and remained for a moment with his hand upon the handle. Then, alone, where neither ledger nor wife could witness it, he allowed himself one unguarded smile.