He went through a dozen inconsequential letters from ladies letting him know that they'd been pleased to make his acquaintance during the Season and hoped he'd call on them when he returned to London for the next Season. While he appreciated their sentiments and attention, the letters truly held no interest for him.
Finally, he came upon a letter that did, "It's from Spellman," he told Camilla. "He thinks our donation to the school is foolhardy, but he's seen to it."
"So typical of Spellman. As tightfisted as he is with your funds, you'd think he thought they belonged to him."
He set the letter on top of all the others he'd read. The next missive came from the school, and immediately he felt the loneliness that had been surrounding him since he'd arrived here lift. "Ah, Camilla, listen to this.
'My lord,
We at the Haywood School for Boys have received the funds you've so generously donated that will allow us to rebuild the dormitory lost to us.
The courage and assistance that you and Lady Sachse exhibited during the dreadful fire—'"
Arch shook his head. "They make it sound as though I'd done something special when I'd done the same thing countless times before while I lived there. Not at the school, of course, but at other buildings."
"What else do they say about my courage?" Camilla asked. She was sitting on the edge of the chair, delight mirrored in her eyes, no doubt because of the praise afforded her.
With a sigh, he continued on.
"The courage and assistance that you and Lady Sachse exhibited during the dreadful fire has earned you our undying gratitude. In your honor, we wish to name the new dormitory Sachse Hall.
We hope you will honor us by attending a ceremony to officially name the building once it is completed.
I have the honor to remain,
Your lordship's obedient servant,
Hubert Beresford, Headmaster,
Haywood School for Boys"
He tossed the letter toward the pile of read missives. "What rubbish."
Camilla rose and crossed over to the desk. "On the contrary, Archie, it's a great honor. A bit confusing for them to give it the same name as this estate, but still…" She picked up a letter and smiling brightly, read aloud, " 'The courage and assistance that you and Lady Sachse exhibited during the dreadful fire has earned you our undying gratitude. In your honor, we wish to name the new dormitory Sachse Hall.' I find it marvelous."
She lifted her joyful gaze from the letter and looked at him. "Whatever is wrong?"
"Apparently a great deal." He reached across his desk and picked up the letter from the school. "You took the wrong letter."
She looked momentarily flummoxed, but quickly regained her composure. "I am well aware of that fact. I was playing a prank on you. You really must advise them that they should select another name."
Slowly he came to his feet. So much was beginning to make sense. The impression he'd had that she'd not read his letter when she'd said that she had. The French book. Her never reading to him. Her keeping her secretary near to spare her fingers being coated in ink and her eyes from the strain of reading. Her confession that she had a secret that would keep him from her bed, and he'd wondered what she could possibly have done that she'd thought he'd find fault with. He was a teacher, and she…
"You can't read," he said quietly.
"Of course I can." She tossed the letter onto the desk, held out her hand, and snapped her fingers. "Hand me the proper letter and I shall read the entire thing to you."
"Even if I didn't read the entire missive to you?"
He felt cruel for lying to her, but he wanted, needed to know the truth. Was this the secret that held her distant? Her fear that he, as a teacher, would more easily discover what she undoubtedly considered a flaw?
"You read me the entire letter."
"Did I, Camilla?" He extended the letter. "You tell me."
"I will not play these ridiculous games. I am a countess. I have no need to prove anything about myself to you. You are a small and petty man, and I don't like you. May you rot in hell."
She spun on her heel and rushed out of the room, leaving him to stare in her wake. How in the world had she managed to convince people that she could read? How had she managed to survive without reading? She was intelligent, had incredible recall, yes. But lacked the ability to read? Her secret. Her damned secret. He'd unwittingly uncovered it at last, but at what cost?
Damn him! She'd known he was a threat, had begun to hope he wasn't. But her fears had been justified.
She'd run from the house without a shawl or cloak. It hadn't seemed that cold outside, only cool in the autumn air, but she was shivering as she sat huddled in a distant corner of the garden. Hidden away… just as she'd done at the children's home when the teacher there had ridiculed her because the marks were unfamiliar. Letters he'd called them. They could have been someone's idea of an odd painting for all she knew. She couldn't decipher them. No matter how long she stared at them, they made no sense. Scribble. Black and hideous.
"Camilla?"
Ah, damnation, how had he found her? She thought she'd come far enough into the gardens that he wouldn't follow.
"Go away."
"I can't."
He knelt beside her.
"Please, I'm fine. I simply grew tired of walking. I'll return to the house soon."
"You're not fine. You're trembling."
He removed his jacket and placed it around her shoulders. The warmth was luxurious, and his scent surrounded her. She'd always taken such delight in the way he smelled. But she could find no comfort in his nearness now. He wasn't stupid enough to believe any of her earlier babblings, and well she knew it.
"Camilla—"
"He called me dim-witted, ignorant."
"Who did?"
"The teacher who taught those of us at the children's home. 'Read!' he commanded. 'Read!' How could I when I'd never held a book. Because I was eight, he thought I should know how. He was the ignorant one, to think knowledge came with age, rather than experience."
"You're not ignorant, Camilla."
"I saw the look on your face, saw the disgust in your eyes—"
"Because you were being dishonest with me, not because you couldn't read." He grabbed her shoulders and jerked her around so she was forced to face him. She saw no disgust now. She saw something far worse.
"Don't you dare pity me," she hissed.
Slowly he shook his head. "Admiration is not pity."
She released a brittle laugh. "Do you think you can fool me? Do you think I don't see the truth?"
"No, I don't believe that you do." Bracketing her face with his hands, he held her steady, leveling his face with hers, holding her pinned in place with the steadfastness of his gaze. "Drop the damned barriers that you use to protect yourself and look into my eyes. Truly look into my eyes, and see what I see when I look at you.
"A woman whom I trust to advise me on matters of which I am totally ignorant. A woman who has the ear of the Prince of Wales, a man who will one day be king. A woman who is charitable in nature, but wishes for no one to know, so she receives no credit for her good works. A woman who pretends to be hard and callous, because she has the ability to care so much but has been hurt so often that she shields herself from the world… and from me."
"You're a teacher!"
He stroked his thumbs across her cheeks. "Then let me teach you."
Tears blurred her vision, threatened to choke her as they gathered in her throat. "So you can ridicule me? Lose all respect for me?"
"I will only lose respect for you if you pass up the opportunity that I'm offering you. I can teach you to read. You are one of the smartest women I know. And I would never ridicule anyone who attempted to learn, even if they struggled, I would respect their efforts."
"What if I can't learn to read? What if I am truly stupid?" It had always been her worst fear.
He gave her a warm, caring smile. "If I believed that for even a moment, I would h
ave never challenged you in the study. I would have pretended that you'd picked up the right letter. I would have let you hold on to your illusion. I believe in you, Camilla, even if you don't believe in yourself. All I'm asking is that you believe in me and my abilities to teach."
She turned away because it hurt so much to look into his eyes. She'd never had such faith directed her way. What if she disappointed him or caused him to doubt himself? If she hurt him?
"Trust me, Camilla."
She looked back at him. "I do, Archie. It is myself that I don't trust. What if I let you down?"
"As long as you give me a chance to teach you, you won't."
Sniffing, she nodded. She'd never been so terrified in her entire life. "All right. I'll let you try, but I don't want anyone to know."
"Of course not. It'll be our little secret. But that means we'll have to celebrate privately once you've succeeded."
"I hear no doubt at all in your voice."
"Because I have none."
Then his mouth was on hers as though he could instill his confidence with the slow, provocative movement of his lips. He'd taken this whole discovery as though it were nothing more than an inconvenience, easily dealt with, easily fixed. But he would soon learn otherwise. What could Archie offer her that she'd not had before?
Then he deepened the kiss, and she was no longer thinking of lessons or letters or how exciting it would be to open a book and have the opportunity to read to him for a change. No, she was thinking that if he were as skilled at teaching as he was at kissing, that he might indeed succeed where others had failed.
The chill of the afternoon gave way to the warmth of passion, swirling through her as lazily as his tongue swirled through her mouth. No hurry. Never in a hurry when kissing.
She became vaguely aware of her hair tumbling around her shoulders, his feral growl as though he'd accomplished some goal. She thought she should take him to task for taking advantage of the moment, but he was going to teach her to read…
He was going to teach her to read.
She pulled back, aware that they were both breathing heavily.
"When do we start?" she asked.
"Immediately. I've just given you your first lesson. The letter O. The shape of a mouth just before it kisses."
She laughed. "Be serious."
"I am. I'm going to teach you as you've never been taught."
Like naughty children, they sneaked away in the afternoons to what would have been the children's wing of the manor if the heir had survived or Camilla hadn't been barren. The wing contained a room in which she was fairly certain her husband and those who'd come before him had been initially taught before they went off to elite schools.
Archie had acted as though he'd found treasure when he began looking through the books on the shelves. "These are very elementary books," he'd said.
"Elementary?" she'd asked.
"Easy reading."
For someone who knew how to read perhaps. For her they were indecipherable. Well, except for the letter O. She was able to point it out, although doing so would often distract her because she'd begin to remember the kiss Archie had given her in the garden. She was fairly certain that teachers weren't supposed to be intimate with their students.
But it was so very hard for her not to imagine that intimacy when Archie's love of learning was so apparent whenever they came to this room. She was beginning to understand why he was as curious as he was, why he asked so many questions and studied everything he saw. He simply loved learning, and more, he loved sharing what he knew.
"Today, I want you to read a sentence to me," he said, getting up from behind the desk where she assumed the tutor would have sat.
"I didn't think you'd taught me all the letters yet," she reminded him, her stomach tightening with dread that she'd fail her first test.
"I haven't." He sat beside her. "But all the letters I've taught you are in this sentence. All you have to do is make the sound of the letter, and you can read the word."
He set a piece of paper in front of her and pointed. "Here's the first word."
She studied where he was pointing. He'd taught her a few simple words, one-letter, two-letter words. How to tell when a word began and ended by the space surrounding it.
She cleared her throat. "A."
He moved his finger over to the next word. Three letters. A challenge to be sure.
"First tell me what the letters are," he ordered.
"C-A-T."
"Very good. Now sound them out."
She did so—keeping her thoughts a secret—until a word began to form that she dared to say aloud. "Cat?"
He grinned, leaned back, and crossed his arms over his chest. "Exactly right. Move on."
She placed her finger under the next word since he apparently had no plans to do so. "Had."
She moved her finger to the next one. Easy. "A."
She pressed her finger beneath the final word. Wrinkled her brow and shook her head. "I don't know."
"What do you think it is?"
She shoved the paper away. "What I think it is doesn't matter. It's obviously wrong as it makes no sense."
"Tell me what you think it is."
"You'll laugh."
"I won't."
But he would. He placed his hand over hers and squeezed. "Have I laughed once since I've begun teaching you?"
"No."
"Then why would I laugh now?" "Because I don't know what it says." "Tell me what you think it says." She glared at him. "A cat had a hat." He grinned broadly. "That's exactly right." "It can't be, Archie. It makes no sense. Cats don't wear hats."
"Sometimes sentences don't make sense." He placed his elbow on the table, his chin on his palm, and studied her as though she made no more sense than the sentence she'd just read. The sentence she'd just read. "Oh, my word." A bubble of unexpected laughter escaped. "Did I read it correctly?" "You tell me."
"Letters don't lie, do they, Archie?" "Not outright, no. Sometimes they try and trick us by not sounding as they should, but we'll deal with those later. In this case, the words were as you read them."
"Oh!" She jumped up because she couldn't contain the excitement. She began pacing around the room. "I did it. I read a sentence. I actually read a sentence." Stopping, she held his gaze. "I'm not stupid, Archie."
"Of course you're not."
"Who would have thought?" She rushed to sit down and slapped her hand on the table. "Give me another sentence to read."
* * *
She was undoubtedly the most intelligent woman he'd ever known. He wanted to find every person who'd ever led her to believe she was stupid and pound them all into the ground with his fists. And now that he'd opened the door, and she'd walked through it, she was insatiable.
"Man," he said, sitting at his desk. He waited while she wrote it out at hers.
The problem he ran across was trying to stop her from going too fast, from trying to grasp what was still beyond her reach—those pesky words that didn't sound at all as they looked. Sachse being one of them. Saxee was closer to its pronunciation.
"Bake. As in, she will bake a cake," he said.
"I think I shall write out cake as well. It's very much like bake. Will you give me extra credit if I spell it correctly?" She peered up at him, such hope and enthusiasm in her eyes that he so did not want to disappoint her.
Having been so badly wounded before, she was easily bruised now, so he worked diligently to expand her scope gradually while shoring up her confidence for the times when words might not come so easily. He was astounded by her capacity for memorization.
"Relax, Archie, you gave me the word last week. I know it is spelled with two different letters that sound exactly the same. Honestly, if you don't ever challenge me, how will I move beyond the simplest of words? I want to be able to read the books in my library, not the ones here in the children's library."
"Why did you purchase books if you couldn't read?"
She shrugged. "I lo
ve the notion of books. Someone took their thoughts, applied them to paper, and shared them with the world. And some authors have such extraordinary thoughts. I'd certainly never think to build a man from discarded parts of other people. Rather macabre, yet fascinating. Don't you think?"
"I read Frankenstein to you, didn't I?"
A look of wistfulness came over her face. "I hope to read to you someday."
Not likely. When she was proficient enough, she'd no doubt be wed to another. She'd sent out her invitations to a host of people, and they would soon have a gathering of people whom they'd be entertaining.
"I look forward to it," he said to keep her spirits up so she'd not know the gloomy direction of his thoughts. "Now, let's continue with the test. Duke."
She applied pen to paper, and he strived not to think about the test that he would have to face in the near future, giving her up to the very word he'd instructed her to spell.
* * *
Chapter 15
He'd opened her up to a world that knew no boundaries. He'd shown her a book that contained every word ever written along with its meaning. A dictionary. Incredible. To have in one place every word that had ever existed. And there were so many.
He was finally beginning to give her more complicated words to learn, words with more syllables. She loved them all. The small words, the big ones.
To look at the letters and to know in an instant the word they'd come together to form. What she'd once thought was so frustratingly difficult, now seemed so amazingly easy. All because of Archie. Because of his patience. And he made learning so enjoyable with his little games and challenges and his sentences that made no sense but were fun to read.
Sitting in bed, reading a book she'd taken from the children's room, she thought she'd rather be reading his silly sentences than this book about a boy and his dog. She'd tried reading some book about pride but had gotten no farther than "It is a truth…" before she'd become stumped.
She'd skipped over the two words she didn't know, and finished the sentence. It seemed the story was about a man searching for a wife. A romance perhaps. Archie never read those types of stories to her.
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