Page 102 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“You are laughing at me.”

“Not yet.”

“I shall throw you into the fire after them.”

“That would require a larger grate.”

She stared at him for a moment and then laughed.

It surprised them both. The sound went quickly, but something in her face remained easier afterwards.

She fed the second letter to the flames.

“Everyone was frightened of these.”

“Yes.”

“I was frightened of them.”

“You had reason to be.”

“But look at them.”

Nathaniel looked. A line of ink blackened, shrank and disappeared.

“They were dangerous because Rowland had them,” he said. “Not because you wrote them.”

Georgiana was quiet. She looked over her shoulder.

“Selina has been teaching you,” she said.

“Yes.”

“She charges too little.”

“I have told her so.”

Georgiana opened the next letter. This one she read for longer. Nathaniel did not ask why. She placed it carefully upon the fire and watched until nothing legible remained before reaching for another.

They went that way through the packet. Some she barely glanced at. Some she read to the bottom. Once she laughed under her breath; once she went very still. Nathaniel stayed where he was and let every choice belong to her.

At last, there was only one. Georgiana turned it over.

“The first,” she said.

Nathaniel recognised nothing about it.

“The first I wrote him. Before I had even met him properly.” She looked at the page. “I thought he understood me. He did understand me, I suppose. That was how he knew what to say.”

There was no useful answer to that.

Georgiana folded the letter again along its old crease.

“I do not think I was foolish to want to be understood.”

“No.”

“Only to mistake being studied for being known.”