Page 79 of Duke of Sapphire

Henry looked at her. She was not asking to fill the silence. She was asking because she wanted to know, and the distinction was the reason he answered.

“He was everything I was not,” he said. “I mean that as a plain fact, not a complaint.” He turned the letter over in his hands. “He walked into rooms and people smiled. He remembered every name. He could talk to a stable hand and a lord in the same hour and make both feel they were the more interesting of the two.” He paused. “I could not do that. I never could.”

“What could you do?”

“Manage things.” Henry said it without self-pity. “Accounts. Estates. Negotiations. All the things Nathan found tedious.” He looked at the letter. “He told me once that I was the most reliable man he had ever met, and it was the greatest shame in England.” A pause. “He meant it affectionately.”

“It sounds like him,” Charlotte said. “From what Ian has said.”

“It was very like him.” Henry set the letter aside. “He was the only person, for a very long time, who told me the truth about myself without also wanting something from me for it.” He heaved a sigh. “Nathan thought I should live differently. He said so frequently. He was not entirely correct, but he also didn’t understand that not everyone finds it simple to choose otherwise.” He stopped. “I did not particularly want to examine that at the time.”

“And now?”

Henry looked at her. “Now I am somewhat less certain of my conclusions.”

The fire shifted. A log dropped, and the light changed in the room, and the silence between them felt natural. Henry noticed the shift with a quiet jolt. Back in Scotland, amid the relentless strain of events, every silence had been charged and defensive. This stillness, by contrast, carried no armor.

“Tell me about your own fond memories, Charlotte.” He felt himself smile when her eyes widened at his question. “You must have some despite being the daughter of a tyrant.”

She chuckled at that. “I do have many fond memories of my mother. She was the kindest person I have ever known.”

He did not say anything and waited for her to continue.

“Not softly kind.” She looked at the fire. “She walked into a room and everyone in it felt more settled for it.” She turned a page without reading it. “She made everything feel possible. The way she moved through the world, through people—it was as though she had found a way to be wholly present that most people never quite manage.” She paused. “I have spent thirteen years wondering how a woman like that married my father.”

Henry said nothing.

“I don’t mean it as an accusation,” she said. “I have tried, genuinely, to understand it. Whether she loved him once and it changed. Whether she chose it knowingly and found a way to make peace with it. Whether she thought she could improve him.” A quiet breath. “I cannot ask her. So I don’t know. I only know that she was extraordinary and that she made me believe the world was larger than it looked. Then she died when I was ten, and after that no one ever quite inspired the same feelings inside of me.”

Henry sat with that for a moment. He thought about Ian in the drawing room this afternoon, asking about Nathan, and the look on Charlotte’s face while she held the boy.

“Your father,” Henry said, his voice dropping, “failed to honor the gift he was given in her.”

Charlotte tilted her head at him, surprised by the emotional depth of his observation. “He may carry the memory of her,” Henry continued quietly, “but he allowed his own coldness to overshadow everything she brought into his life. You.”

Charlotte’s lips curved. “That is either the most perceptive thing you have ever said or the kindest.”

“It is simply true.”

“You say that about most things.”

“Most true things, yes.”

She laughed, small and genuine, and it settled into the room like a thing that belonged there.

He saw a curl, deep brown, which had come loose from the arrangement above her ear and fallen forward against her cheek. She had not noticed it.

Henry was now aware of his own hand, resting on the arm of the chair between them. He could move it toward her and feel the silken strands run between his fingers.

He looked at the fire instead and swallowed.

You are in a great deal of trouble, Sappherton.

CHAPTER 22

“Isimply had to come,” Lady Hartwell said, setting her teacup down. “The moment I heard, I said to myself—Margaret, you must call on the Duchess of Sappherton at once. Congratulations are so much better delivered in person, don’t you think?”

Charlotte thought a great many things. She arranged them neatly behind her smile.