Page 57 of To Wager with Love

“You don’t know a bloody thing about it, Harry!” He swung around and the pain in his expression devastated her, the glitter in his eyes making her chest tight. “You don’t know….” he began again, the words raw but his voice cracked, and he turned away from her.

“Jasper!” she cried, running to him, throwing her arms about him. “Oh, my love…. Whatever it is, tell me, please. I can’t bear to see you so unhappy. Why do you think such a thing? Who on earth has put such a thought in your head?”

“Who?” he said, the word incredulous, spoken with an edge of bitter laughter as he raked a hand through his hair. “Every tutor and school master I ever had, that’s who!”

“But why? Because you skipped lessons and cheeked them?”

“No!” he cried, and it was such an anguished sound she could only hold him tighter.

He was breathing hard now, so obviously distraught that Harriet didn’t know what to do or say, and so she did the only thing she could think of. She held him tightly as she looked up at him.

“I love you, Jasper. Whatever the problem is that won’t change.”

To her dismay, he shook his head and his throat worked.

“You’ll leave me,” he said, the words sounding so broken that she felt her heart shatter with them. “You’ll despise me.”

“I will not!” she exclaimed, wishing she had strength enough to shake him. “Good Lord, Jasper. I’ve been in love with you my whole life. My whole life! Do you think whatever dark secret you think you have can change that? Even when you sneered at me and made fun of me and made me feel like a dull little bookworm, I still loved you. I tried not to, believe me, I did, but I couldn’t stop. I won’t stop, Jasper. Please, my love,” she said. “Won’t you trust me?”

Harriet watched as he covered his face with his hands and she reached up, covering them with her own and drawing them away. She put them to her own face and kissed first one, then the other.

“Tell me,” she urged, feeling her throat close with emotion as a tear slid down his cheek.

He was silent for a long moment and then he drew in a deep breath and she saw him steel himself for her response, her rejection.

“I c-can’t read, Harry,” he said, and it was an effort not to react, not to say don’t be silly, that’s not possible… because how on earth had he managed all this time if that were true?

She stared up into his beautiful face, recognising the fear in his eyes, knowing that he was waiting for her to laugh at him or reject him, or to recreate whatever it was he’d experienced in the past that had hurt him so deeply.

Harriet took a breath. “Why do you think that is?” she asked, her voice calm before adding, “and don’t say because you’re stupid, Jasper, because I won’t have it. You’re not stupid.”

“You said I was,” he countered, that brittle, defensive edge creeping into his voice.

“Perhaps that was because I didn’t understand,” she said. “Like I didn’t understand why you were so cruel to me, and you didn’t understand why I didn’t love you anymore. I think we’ve made too many foolish mistakes over the past years, Jasper, and all of them could have been resolved so easily if we’d only explained ourselves.”

He swallowed hard and then wiped his eyes with an irritated swipe of his hand. “I don’t know why. I… I tried so hard, Harry,” he said, and the anguish in his voice made her want to wail for the hurt he’d held inside all these years. “I m-mean I can read, only it’s so difficult, and it takes forever and then when I try to write, it… it comes out all wrong. I get things back to front and it’s… it’s such a bloody mess.”

“Jasper,” she said, reaching up to touch his face, but he pushed away from her, out of her embrace.

“Don’t pity me,” he stormed, backing away from her and thrusting his hands into his hair like he’d tear it out by the roots. “Don’t you dare! Not that.”

“I don’t pity you,” she said, struggling to keep her voice even when she wanted to cry and hold him and rage at the world for having caused him such pain. “I’m in awe of you, Jasper. How hard you must have worked, how clever you must have been to conceal this from everybody all this time.”

“Don’t be so bloody patronising,” he growled, pacing up and down now, like something wild that had been trapped in too small a space for too long.

“I’m not, I swear it. I can’t imagine how you have run this vast estate all these years, let alone how you got through school. Good heavens, no wonder you didn’t want to go to university.” She paused, sucking in a breath as another thought occurred to her. “Oh, my God… and how I treated you, the things I said,” she whispered, appalled by her cruelty, even though it had not been her intention to cause such hurt. If only she’d known!

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, kicking at a stone and sounding so weary that she longed to go to him and make it all better, but she didn’t know how.

“Does anyone know?” she asked.

He shook his head, and she knew he’d been struggling with this alone his whole life, terrified someone would find him out.

“I think perhaps Merrick suspects,” he said, still not looking at her.

“Your valet?”

Jasper nodded. “I have to ask people to read things for me. My secretary just thinks I’m too high in the instep to do it myself and that’s fine. That’s how I’ve got through most situations but… but it becomes tricky with more personal matters.”