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She had discovered it. Over the course of their acquaintance, she’d been made aware of the many, many ways in which he failed at perfection. It was just that he kept making her forget them all.
“All things between the two of us considered,” he said slowly, “there is something else you ought to know.” His eyes met hers. “It’s rather a secret, and so I’d prefer you not spread it about.”
He could not have been considering all things, since he didn’t know who she really was. Still, his smile made her wish that he did know everything. And that, having been apprised of the truth, he still thought she was worthy to hear his secrets.
She felt a sick lump form in her throat. He might be the only person in the world who believed she mattered. It would be the most extraordinary gift she could imagine, if she told him who she was, and if he still looked at her with that light in his eyes—
“After all,” he said with a wry shrug of his shoulders, “if the Dalrymples ever discovered this, they’d tear me to shreds and leave my corpse to be ravaged by buzzards.”
—but no. He wouldn’t.
“But I’m babbling,” Ash said with a sigh. “Here it is.” He swallowed and blew out his breath. “I can’t read.”
Margaret’s wistful longings evaporated in a shocked curl of smoke. Her mouth dropped open, and before she could stop herself, a gasp escaped her.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Not like that. I’m capable of making out words on a page. I know my alphabet. It’s just…I am not any good at making sense of all those symbols. I can pick out words, but by the time I’ve got the next one down, I’ve practically forgotten the last. They never quite manage to coalesce into sentences.” His voice was whisper-quiet, but he spoke with a dire urgency.
Of all the things Margaret could have imagined Ash telling her, this…this came dead last.
“But you’re so…” Margaret waved a hand, almost futilely, trying to describe what she meant. “So competent.”
There were a great many people who couldn’t read. But most of them were chimney sweeps and milkmaids. Not heirs to dukedoms. Not nabobs from India, who had amassed personal fortunes in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.
“How have you possibly done all this?” She spread her arms wide as she spoke, indicating the library, the desk, the account books in front of him.
Ash shrugged and turned one shoulder away.
Margaret followed. “You’re a successful businessman. You don’t speak as if you were…”
He turned to her abruptly. “Stupid?” He was suddenly standing too close, his eyes tight, his lips compressed.
Margaret shook her head, unable to respond.
“Don’t ask me to explain,” he said. “I don’t know what it is. I just can’t understand words when they’re written down. They feel slippery in my mind. Now, if someone were to have a conversation with me about any subject, I could follow along, and gladly. And, for some reason, numbers have never posed a problem. I can figure. But I can never understand the back-and-forth of negotiations if I cannot look a man in the eyes. That’s what I need.”
“But how is it that you never learned? Your father was a wealthy mill owner. Surely you had tutors. Some sort of education.”
Ash shrugged. “I had a tutor. He taught me my letters. And once he realized there was a…a problem with the rest, he was as eager to hide the truth as I was. After all, if he couldn’t teach a five-year-old child to read, he’d have been sacked for gross incompetence. After my father died, there were no tutors at all. Perhaps if I’d gone to Eton, as my brothers did, I’d have learned.” He sounded dubious.
As he spoke, he looked into her eyes. Margaret shivered.
“Or perhaps I wouldn’t have. Paper isn’t enough for me. I need to see.” His voice dropped low. “To hear. To smell.” His gaze wandered down her face. She could feel a flush rise on her cheeks as he stopped at her lips. “To taste.” He raised his eyes to hers again, and a small smile played across his face. “I can understand anything, if I but look it in the eyes.”
She felt her chest expand on an inhale. The air was painful in the confines of her lungs. She knew this about him. He didn’t even know her true name. “Ash,” she said, her voice trembling, “that note I left you—I didn’t know.”
“I understood.” His fingers constricted around hers. “Even on paper, I understood.” He sat down again, this time sitting directly on the surface of his desk. As he did, his arm brushed hers.
“There you are,” he said. “I’m not very ducal, am I? Tell me you’ll keep my secret.”
It was a measure of how deeply she had fallen under his spell, that she had not realized until this moment that she could use this against him. The news that Mr. Ash Turner had difficulty reading would send a ripple of consternation through the House of Lords. After all, how many bills would pass his desk for a vote? How many papers would he be expected to keep abreast of?
The truth would sink him, in their minds. Instantly and without question. Confirming a commoner as one of their own was one thing, if they begrudgingly admitted he had the bloodlines in his distant past. Confirming a near illiterate? It would never happen. They’d legitimize her brothers in an instant. She should have been singing for joy.
So why did she feel like weeping instead?
He gestured at the table. “One of my men is copying out the book Mark is writing,” he said quietly. “I keep hoping that somehow, after everything I’ve accomplished, this time the words will come out right. I promised Mark, after all.”
A flicker of emotion crossed his face—something powerful and vulnerable at the same time. The look of a man who had been knocked down but was determined to get up as many times as necessary to march on ahead.
“Besides,” he added mulishly, “I heard that until Parford’s setback, he spent hours in the evening in his study.”
A hint of jealousy, too. She could take this opportunity to insinuate doubt into the conversation—something to magnify the vulnerability she saw on his face. It wouldn’t take mu
ch. A sentence. A few words, even, to plant seeds of uncertainty in his mind.
That seemed a shabby recompense for what he’d given her.
Instead, Margaret took his hand. The cut across his palm was a brief line of red—not even bleeding. His fingers were warm and dry, and as she touched him, he lifted his eyes to hers. For all his vulnerability, there was an unquenchable relentlessness in his eyes. He wouldn’t give up, no matter how much doubt she planted. And she didn’t want him to give up on her.
She stood and silently tugged him to his feet and led him out the door. In the gallery, she dropped his fingers, lest a passing servant spot them. She padded through the columned space, Ash’s footfalls echoing behind her.
She stopped at the door before her father’s bedchamber and fumbled with her necklace.
The master key was still threaded through the chain, the iron skin-warm where it had lain against her breasts. The door opened inward on silent hinges.
“The duke’s study,” she announced. “Not currently in use.”
He stepped inside; Margaret took a lamp from a nearby side table before entering herself. The light flickered unevenly as she walked.
“This,” Margaret said, gesturing at a large wingback chair settled to the side of the room, “is the seat where Parford spent many an evening.” She looked Ash in the eyes. “Sit,” she commanded.
He sat.
“There, to your right, in that cupboard—those are the books Parford studied of an evening.”
Ash glanced at her and then at the ornate brass knob on the carved doors. He hesitated.
“Go on, then. Open it.”
The door opened silently.
Inside, her father’s decanter stood next to three cups of cut glass. The glasses gleamed in the light. Amber liquid reflected the rays streaming from her lamp, setting colored lights to dancing about the room as she placed that lamp on the table.
