Page 48 of The Duke’s Hidden Duchess

“I am regretting that you did not see them. It is not quite the same thing.”

“No. It is very nearly gallant.”

“That was not my intention.”

“You should let it stand regardless.”

He held a damp branch aside for her. “There will be bluebells next year.”

“Yes,” she said. “There will.”

Neither remarked upon the assumption.

Their evenings were equally undemanding. Georgiana played the pianoforte with confidence largely unsupported by her ability, while Nathaniel sat with an estate book upon his knee and failed to turn a page.

“The book is upside down, Your Grace,” Selina observed one evening.

“It is closed. A closed book has no orientation.”

He turned it regardless.

At Wexford Park, silence did not always mean that something had been withheld. Sometimes it meant only that three people had remained in the same room because none of them wished to leave it.

The phaeton lesson had been Nathaniel’s suggestion. Selina suspected that it had less to do with her education than with the opportunity to sit beside her in the sun, but she had accepted without requiring him to admit it.

“You have never asked me to teach you anything,” she said once the cob had settled into a steady walk. “Yet now you have contrived a lesson for me.”

“I did not contrive the existence of the phaeton.”

“Only my need to drive it.”

“You said you wished to know the estate.”

“I might have walked.”

“You might.”

She glanced at him. “When you wish to be near someone, do you always find something useful to do beside them?”

Nathaniel considered denying it.

“Yes,” he said at last.

“That is uncomfortably honest.”

“I had no convincing alternative prepared.”

Selina looked ahead again. “You might simply ask.”

His hands, folded in his lap, tightened almost imperceptibly.

“I am learning.”

They took the phaeton out on each of the following two mornings. On the third, the weather turned before they reached the house.

The storm came over the western hills in a dark wall. Nathaniel turned the cob and urged it into a smart trot, but the first drops struck the lane before they had gone a quarter of a mile. Within moments the rain had thickened into a grey sheet.

“There is shelter above the river,” he said.