Page 13 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

Then, slowly, uncertainly, Kit’s small hand lifted from the sketchbook. His fingers moved, hesitant and imprecise, nothing like the fluid motion of long practice, but it was unmistakably the same sign she had shown him a moment ago.

Horse.

Louisa’s chest went tight, but she did not permit it to reach her face. She did not gasp. She did not clap her hands together or exclaim, the way she suspected every governess before her had done, delighted past discretion by the smallest crumb of progress. She simply smiled, small and warm, and signed back.

“Yes,” she said softly, her hands mirroring his sign. “Exactly that.”

Kit’s eyes flicked up to her, wary, assessing, the way one might look at a stranger who had just proven unexpectedly harmless. Then they dropped back to his sketchbook, and his hand returned to the charcoal. He said nothing more, gave no further sign; he simply retreated behind whatever wall he had built for himself three years ago.

But he had reached. For the first time in longer than anyone could properly measure, he had reached toward another person of his own will, and Louisa found she did not need anything more than that, not today.

She rose quietly, brushing the charcoal dust from her skirts. “I will call again tomorrow, if I may,” she said to the room, to Kit, to Julian standing very still near the door. “There is no hurry. We have time.”

She did not look back as she left the room. Somehow, she suspected that looking back might undo whatever small thread had just been laid between them.

* * *

Julian remained in the doorway a moment after Louisa had taken her leave, listening as the front door closed softly behind her.

He stood staring at his ward with an attention Kit did not seem to notice, absorbed once more in his drawing as though the last ten minutes had not happened at all.

Except they had happened. Julian had seen it with his own eyes. He had watched Kit’s hand lift, unbidden, and form a sign that no one had made him repeat, that no one had bribed or coaxed or pleaded out of him.

In three years, Julian could not recall a single occasion on which Kit had offered anything to anyone without first being asked a dozen times and refusing eleven of them.

He said nothing, unwilling to disturb whatever fragile thing had just settled into the room, and made to leave Kit to his drawing.

Some instinct made him pause, and he glanced back, and found Kit’s hand lifted again, unwatched but for Julian standing silent in the doorway.

Horse.

The boy formed the sign again, slowly, correcting some small error in the shape of his fingers without any teacher present to correct it for him, practicing it in the empty room with the same quiet, absorbed concentration he gave his drawings. He did not know Julian was watching. He was simply holding onto the one new thing a stranger had given him that morning, turning it over the way another child might turn over a toy.

Julian stood very still, something moving through his chest, some mix of astonishment and a grief so old it had gone quiet, and beneath both, something that felt absurdly like hope, an emotion he had stopped extending toward Kit’s silence somewhere in the second year of failed physicians and tutors.

Six people. Six people, three years, every resource I possess, and she has done in a quarter of an hour what none of them had managed in all that time.

He thought of her sitting cross-legged on the schoolroom rug without the smallest concern for her own dignity, patient in a way he had not expected from a woman who had proposed marriage to him with the brisk efficiency of a solicitor drawing up terms.

He thought of the careful, unhurried way she had let the silence sit rather than filling it, the discipline that must have been required, when every instinct in a room usually screamed to fill a child’s silence with noise and reassurance.

She did not try to win him over.

The realization settled into him with a weight he immediately recognized as true.

She simply gave him room and waited to see whether he would step into it.

He withdrew from the doorway without disturbing Kit’s quiet practice, made his way back to his study, and sat for a long while behind his desk without touching pen or paper, turning the morning over in his mind until he had examined it from every angle he could find.

He had spent years searching for someone skilled enough to reach his ward. He had, it seemed, found her within the space of a single unconventional proposal, delivered by a woman who wanted nothing from him but a name for a child not her own and asked for nothing more than what she had already told him she required.

Julian drew a fresh sheet of paper toward himself.

He began to write to his solicitors and did not permit himself to hesitate over the words a second time.

CHAPTER 7

“Your Grace. This is unexpected.”