by Mary Balogh
“You can already read and write,” he said. “Who taught you, Emmy? Luke?”
Yes, Luke.
“Damn him,” he said.
She lifted her shoulders.
“And so there is nothing I can do for you, is there?” he said. “Strong, self-sufficient Emmy. You were always the same. It was always a ridiculous fallacy to believe you weak and vulnerable because you could not hear or speak, yet many people believed it. And probably still do. Perhaps I should ask what I can learn from you. We always think of teaching you, Emmy. Teaching you to communicate. Perhaps we should do the learning—and learn not to communicate, or to do it in a different way. Now there is a thought. Perhaps we could learn your peace if we could share your silence. What is it like? ’Tis not a dreadful affliction to you, is it? You have found meaning in silence. You are almost like a different being. You have perhaps the strongest character of anyone I have ever known.”
He had stopped signing. And he had spoken at great length, as he had always used to do. She had always understood him, perhaps because she had loved to gaze at him. She felt anything but strong. At this moment she almost wished she had given in this morning and let life happen to her for the rest of her days. She would have had Ashley—for the rest of her life. As her companion, her lover, her husband. No! No, she would never have had him. Even if she had agreed to marry him, she could never have him. Ashley’s heart was given, buried with his dead wife. She could never be happy with just what was left—especially when it was offered out of a sense of obligation, an obligation she had placed him under.
“Perhaps one day I will learn silence,” he said, and his one good eye smiled gently at her, making him look like the old Ashley despite the mutilation of the rest of his face. “But in the meantime perhaps I should teach you to speak, Emmy. Now that might be a gift worth giving.”
She caught her lower lip between her teeth.
“Have you ever tried?” he asked. He leaned slightly forward toward her. “I suppose ’twould not be impossible. You make sounds, you know, Emmy, especially when you laugh. You could probably speak if you could only hear. Have you ever tried?”
When I was a small child, she told him with busy and eager hands, I did speak a little.
He gazed at her. “You?” he said. “You could speak? You could hear, Emmy? What happened?”
I had a fever, she told him as best she could. And then I could not hear.
“Zounds,” he said, “I did not know that. Do you remember sound, Emmy? Do you remember speech?”
No, she told him sadly. No. I was very small.
“You should be able to speak again then, Emmy.” He had leaned forward, looking eager and almost boyish despite his battered face. “Have you tried?”
She had often sat before a looking glass forming with her mouth the words she read on other people’s lips. She had even tried making sound. But she had no way of knowing if the resulting effort was speech. She had never tried it out on anyone. And she could not remember how it felt to speak.
“Zounds, you have.” He smiled broadly and then fingered his lip again. “Admit it.”
She nodded, feeling embarrassed.
“Say yes,” he said. “Let me hear you.”
She felt breathless, as if she had been running for five miles without stopping. She should never have admitted the truth. But he would have known.
“Say yes to me.” His smile had softened.
She drew breath and moved her lips in careful formation of the word. At the same time she forced what she thought was sound. Then she hid her face in her hands.
There was laughter in his face when she gathered enough courage to remove her hands and peep up at him. He had been laughing. “The word was correctly formed,” he said, “and there was sound. But there was no communion between the two, Emmy. I believe you blocked the sound—perhaps with the back of your tongue? It came through your nose.”
She bit her lip, horribly mortified. What had happened to his idea of learning silence? Would she laugh at him if he got it wrong?
“Try again,” he told her. “Let the sound come through your mouth. Let the air come through your lips.”
She did not know how. She could not remember. Say the word to me, she demanded with one hand. But when he did so, she still did not know how. She wriggled closer to him until their knees almost touched. Again, she commanded.
“Yes,” he said while she stretched out one hand and set her fingertips lightly against his throat. She could feel the vibrations. Again, she motioned, frowning in concentration.
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
She set her fingers against her own throat and tried to make vibrations. He had told her to let the air out through her mouth. She set the other hand before it. She could feel the air—and then the vibrations. She darted a look up at him.
“You have it, by my life,” he said. “Sound, Emmy, coming through your lips. Now say yes.”
“Yyaaahhhzzz,” she said.
The gleam in his good eye was not exactly amusement. It was . . . triumph. The type of look she had seen in Luke’s eyes when Joy took her first step.
“Yes-s-s,” he said, stretching his swollen, cut lips and showing her that the final sound was a more violent one than the one she had produced.
“Zzzzsssss,” she said.
He was enjoying himself. The old Ashley, though somewhat battered. But she was concentrating too hard for the thought to be conscious.
“Yes,” he said.
“Yyaazzss.”
“Yes-s-s.”
“Yyaassss.”
“Yes.”
“Yyass.”
“Yes.”
“Yass.”
He was laughing. “Yes, Emmy, yes,” he said, and he opened his arms to her.
She was laughing too, helplessly, excitedly, like a child with a hard-won prize. She could speak! She could form words and make sound and be understood. She could speak all of one word. She could not stop laughing. She swayed forward a couple of inches—and stopped.
The laughter went from his face even as she felt it drain from hers. His arms dropped back to his knees.
“Emmy,” he said, “marry me. Marry me and make me laugh again. Marry me and teach me your silence, your serenity. Marry me and let me teach you to speak—to hold a whole conversation. To drive people distracted with your constant chattering. Marry me.”
The temptation was almost overwhelming. For a few minutes seven years had fallen away and they had been purely happy together as they had always used to be. In a rare two-way communication he had stepped into her world as surely as she had stepped into his. The temptation to believe that those few minutes could be expanded to a lifetime was powerful indeed.
She shook her head.
He had sat looking at her for a long time before she gave in to a small temptation. She lifted one of his arms from his knee, nestled her cheek against the back of his hand, and turned her head to kiss it. Then she set his arm back over his knee.
“Yes, I know,” he said when she looked into his face again. “You love him, Emmy. And there have been Alice and Thomas in my life. Our fondness for each other will not overcome those barriers. Have it your way then.”
She smiled at him.
“But Emmy,” he said, and he was signing again, “if there is a child—and there may be a child—you must marry me. You must. Do you understand? ’Twould not be just you and me then. There would be someone else, more important than you or me. Children are so very fragile, and so very innocent. Protecting them must always come before any other consideration. Promise me?”
She could see in his face the rawness of memory. The knowledge that there had been one child—his own son—whom he had been unable to protect. His hands made a baby seem a tender, precious being.
She nodded. “Yass,” she said.
“Thank you.” He reached across and took both her hands in his. He raised them one at a time to his lips. “If you do not catch a chill, Emmy, in that soaked dress, there is no justice in this world. Come back to the house with me.”
“Yass,” she said, getting to her feet and grimacing as her dress clung wetly to her. She walked beside him, glad that he did not offer his arm. When they reached the lawn, she smiled at him, gathered her wet skirts about her, and ran off alone in the direction of the side door.
• • •
A maid answered the bell she had rung, and she signaled to the girl that she wanted hot water. When the maid returned, she carried a large jug of steaming water and a message.
“His grace wishes to see you in the study at your earliest convenience, my lady,” she said, bobbing a curtsy.
Emily felt a fluttering in her stomach. Of all of them, Luke was the one she most dreaded having to face. Not that he had ever been harsh with her. He had never chastised her—or any of his own children. But then Luke never needed to use either harsh words or violence in order to impose his will on his household. His very presence was enough. His eyes were worse. The study! It was a formal summons, then. And her “earliest convenience” meant now, or sooner than now.
She washed quickly, pulled on a clean, dry gown over small hoops, dressed her hair in a hasty knot, and drew a few steadying breaths.
A footman opened the study door for her. Luke was seated behind his desk, writing. He neither looked up nor got to his feet for the whole of one minute. Emily stood silently facing him across the desk. This was deliberate, she knew. She was being made to feel like a recalcitrant servant about to be disciplined.
He set his pen down at last and looked up. As she had expected, his eyes were cold. Also as she had expected, he did not speak for so long that she had to make a conscious effort not to squirm and not to drop her eyes—she, who did not deal in words, was suddenly cowed by their absence. He did not invite her to be seated.
“Well, Emily,” he said, “you have made a young man very unhappy and very angry today. You have humiliated him in the eyes of your family and his own. ’Twas not well done.”
She swallowed.
“You have made your family very unhappy,” he said. “Including Anna. Anna’s happiness means more to me than anyone else’s in this world. I do not feel kindly disposed toward you.”
She had glanced down briefly as he had lowered his pen. She had seen his knuckles. There were no marks of violence on his face. It had been punishment pure and simple, then. Ashley had not fought back. Just as she would not fight back now.
“I would ask one question,” he said. “What exactly you did with my brother last night and how it came about is a matter for the two of you alone. I am without curiosity. But I would know if it was by mutual consent, Emily. Were you in any way coerced?”
No. Oh no, she told him. They would never be allowed to think that of Ashley. Had he asked Ashley if he had been coerced?
“Thank you,” Luke said. “I did not believe so, but I felt it necessary to ask. And so, Emily, you have freely and rashly given what you had no business giving, and now you choose not to allow Ashley to make restitution. Is that correct?”
She nodded.
“And there is no chance that you do not fully understand? That when you do you will change your mind? That we may prepare for a wedding within the next week?”
Only if she was with child. But she would not know that within a week. She shook her head.
Luke set his elbows on the arms of his chair and steepled his fingers. “Then you have won back a modicum of my respect,” he surprised her by saying. “It takes character to refuse a man you love more dearly than life merely because marrying him would be the wrong thing to do.”
She had been prepared to stand stony-faced through a scolding and through an argument to allow Ashley to do the proper thing. She felt a rush of tears to her eyes at Luke’s unexpected approval.
He waited for her eyes to clear.
“You are dismissed,” he said, nodding curtly, and he lifted his pen and lowered his head again.
On the whole, she thought, stepping from the room and closing the door behind her, she felt almost as if she had been severely punished. Her legs trembled beneath her and her palms felt clammy. It was a strangely comforting feeling.
• • •
It was no longer pleasant to be at Bowden with his family, Ashley discovered. And that was stating the case very mildly indeed. He wandered into the drawing room, where his mother, his uncle, the Hornsbys, the Severidges, and Lady Sterne were taking tea, and felt that he had collided with a wall of frosty silence. He wandered out again. He climbed to the nursery, where all the children with the exception of the Hornsbys’ newest, who was sleeping, and young Harry, who was taking his private tea with Anna in an inner room, were ecstatic at seeing a potential new playmate and were instantly buzzing with questions about his face. But Doris made him feel decidedly unwelcome, and even Weims merely raised his eyebrows and turned away to deal with a tug at his coat skirts from a tiny son, who clearly wished to be picked up. Ashley smiled at the children, drew roars of delight from them by telling them he had run into an angry bull, which now looked infinitely worse than he did, raised a hand in farewell, and withdrew.
He would stay, he had decided while walking back to the house with Emily, and help her somehow to face down the terrible scandal that had erupted during the day. At least it had been confined to the family. He doubted that Powell had been treated to the full truth—unless Emmy had been rashly honest with him. He would stay, Ashley thought, and court her more slowly. Given time, she would realize that she had no alternative but to marry him. There could be no other husband for her now.
He would stay and teach her to speak. He would do something useful with his life for a change. It seemed an eternity since he had last done that. He closed his eyes for a moment and remembered how very busy and how very happy he had been during most of his years with the East India Company. Learning to speak would be wonderfully liberating for Emmy. And with one word, slightly mispronounced and spoken in a strange little contralto voice, she had shown him that it was possible.
Staying, teaching her to speak, courting her, would be good for him too. They would take his mind off a past that could not be remedied and could not be atoned for. Perhaps. And perhaps too he would stay and learn from her. There was at least as much to learn as there was to be taught, he suspected.
But soon after returning to the house, he changed his mind. Emmy had set her own course today. She had broken off her betrothal with Powell, and she had refused his marriage offer—twice, even though he had tried, and he was sure other members of her family had tried, to explain to her the inevitability of their marrying. She would not change her mind. Emmy was someone who never took the easy course if it was not the course she wished to take. She recognized the inevitability of nothing.
One could only respect her—and wish sometimes to shake the living daylights out of her. He smiled despite himself. He was fonder of Emmy than of anyone else in his life, strange as the thought might be, especially considering the fact that he had almost completely forgotten about her while he was away. Though he was no longer so sure of that—there had been that urgent, quite irrational urge to come home to Bowden. However it was, his fondness for Emmy was the main problem today. He did not want to marry her, if the truth were known. He was as relieved by her stubbornness as he was alarmed by it.
He hated to think of Emmy as a wife, a lover. He remembered her warm, soft, shapely body, naked beneath his own. He remembered her tight virginity. He remembered the urgency of his need driving into her. And he felt something that was definitely not revulsion, but was . . . a great sadness. A deep shame. He had known what he had no wish to know. He had known her as a woman. Yet he wanted to know her only as the sprite he had seen yesterday m
orning, when she had stood on the rock at the falls, refusing to listen to Powell. And he wanted to remember her as his little fawn of seven years ago.
“Where may I find his grace?” he asked a footman in the hall, looking him directly in the eye, scorning to try to hide his face in the shadows. One could be very sure that what the family knew abovestairs, the servants knew in even greater detail belowstairs. That was in the nature of life in a great house. The servants probably knew exactly how many punches Luke had thrown, even though Ashley himself had not kept count.
“He is in the study, my lord,” the footman informed him.
“Ask him if Lord Ashley Kendrick may have a word with him,” Ashley said formally, and waited in the hall until the footman reappeared and beckoned him.
Luke was seated behind his desk. He looked up coolly when his brother came inside but neither rose to his feet nor offered Ashley a chair. Ashley recognized the tactic, which had always been damnably effective. Seated behind his desk, Luke was the Duke of Harndon, undisputed master of Bowden and all its properties, undisputed head of his family. Eight years ago, as a wild, rebellious young man who had been going nowhere in life except to possible ruin, Ashley had stood thus before Luke’s desk more than once. Now he felt like that young man again. He had become an independent, successful, highly respected businessman in India. But he had let his life fall apart, and it had continued its decline in the few days since his return home. It was time he did something about it. The resolve he had made within the past half hour was strengthened.
“You wished to speak to me?” Luke asked.
“I will not ask if she may stay here,” Ashley said. “’Twould be an insult to the love you and Anna have always shown her. I would ask only that you ensure she is left in peace. There are to be no recriminations, no insults, no coldness. She is blameless.”
“And yet, my dear,” Luke said, “she has assured me that she was not coerced.”
Ashley’s jaw tightened. “She was blameless,” he said. “You will promise me something, Luke.”