She turned the book slightly. “Marmion.Sir Walter Scott. I could not resist it.”
“You care for poetry?”
“I care for language, Your Grace. Especially when it is well employed.” A faint smile touched her lips. “My father used to read aloud in the evenings. Scott, Byron, Wordsworth. He believed such things improved the spirit.”
Dominic moved toward the sideboard, where a decanter of brandy stood. He poured two glasses before considering the impropriety.
“Forgive me,” he said. “I did not mean to assume—”
“Yes.” The answer came swiftly, almost before he had finished. “Thank you.”
He handed her the glass and took the opposite chair—the less comfortable one, seldom used. The leather was cold. He welcomed it.
“Your father,” he said, after a moment. “A literary man?”
“A country gentleman with literary inclinations.” She sipped the brandy, her appreciation evident. “We had a small estate in Hampshire. Books were his chief indulgence. My mother despaired of it.” A shadow passed over her expression. “She died when I was twelve. He followed some years later.”
“I am sorry.”
“Do not be.” She shook her head lightly. “I am grateful for the years I had with him. That is more than many can say.”
Dominic thought of his own father—cold, distant, perpetually disappointed in a son who never seemed to meet the measure set before him. The old Duke had never known how to love anything except the estate, and Dominic had spent most of his childhood striving for an approval that was never offered.
“Indeed,” he said quietly.
She studied him over the rim of her glass, and he felt, not for the first time, that she saw more than was comfortable.
“May I ask you something, Your Grace?”
“You may ask. I make no promise to answer.”
A faint curve of her mouth. “That seems fair.” She drew the shawl more closely about her shoulders. “Yesterday morning. With Thomas. Why did you come?”
He had expected questions of a different sort—of war, of William, of the past he refused to name. This—simple, direct—caught him unprepared.
“I heard him,” he said. “That night. The nightmare.”
“I know. I felt you watching from the doorway.”
Of course she did.
“I wished to go to him.” The words came with difficulty. “I stood there, and I wished to go to him—and I could not.” He drew a breath. “I thought that, in daylight, it might be… easier.”
“Was it?”
“No.” A short, humourless laugh escaped him. “It was intolerable. He looked at me as though I might harm him. I could think of nothing to say beyond kestrels.”
“The kestrels were well chosen,” she said gently. “You spoke to him of something he loves. That is more than most would bother to do.”
“It was not enough.”
“It was a beginning.” She leaned forward slightly, the firelight catching in her hair, in the shifting blue-green of her eyes. “Your Grace, may I speak plainly?”
“You appear to do so whether permitted or not.”
“True.” That brief, bright smile—gone almost at once. “Thomas is afraid of you. Not because you have been unkind—you have not—but because you are absent. To him, you are a shadow in the corridor. A closed door. He does not understand you, and so he has made you into something to be feared. Children do that.”
The words settled, heavy with truth.
