Page 27 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

Kit’s eyes flicked toward her, then back to the mare.

“I expect Rosalind has never bitten anyone’s sleeve in her life. She looks entirely too well-mannered for it.” Louisa let the silence sit for a moment, comfortable rather than expectant, watching the curry comb move in a slow rhythm along the mare’s coat. “Though I imagine even the best-mannered horse has opinions.”

She said nothing further for a while. She simply sat there and let the silence stretch, resisting every urge to fill it with more words.

The stables settled around them—a horse shifting its weight two stalls down, a bird fussing somewhere in the rafters, the curry comb scraping rhythmically across Rosalind’s flank—and Louisa found that she did not mind the silence at all.

After a while, she began to sign, speaking the words aloud as she did.

“Gentle,” she said, slowly forming the sign, then let her hands fall still in her lap.

She did not look at him directly. She reached down instead and brushed a stray piece of straw from her skirt, as though the sign had cost her nothing at all, merely something her hands had wanted to do.

A moment later, she signed it again. “Gentle.” Then, after a pause, a second sign, her hands moving through the shape slowly enough that anyone watching could have followed it without difficulty. “You are very gentle with her. I think that is exactly what you have here, from the way she leans into your hand.”

The curry comb had gone entirely still now.

Louisa kept her eyes on Rosalind, whose ears turned lazily toward the sound of Kit’s quiet breathing, and let the silence stretch again, longer this time, resisting with everything in her the urge to look at him, to coax him, to fill the space with anything more than what she had already offered.

The silence held. One breath. Two. Three.

Then, slowly, Kit set down the curry comb. His fingers moved hesitantly, the shape imprecise, nothing like the fluid ease of long practice, but it was unmistakably the same sign she had shown him a moment ago.

Gentle.

“Yes,” she said softly with a smile, her hands mimicking his own. “Exactly that. You have done very well.”

Kit’s eyes flicked up to hers, wary still, assessing. Louisa held his gaze steadily, offering nothing more than the same quiet, patient warmth she had offered the whole morning.

After a moment, his eyes dropped again, not in retreat this time, but simply in the shyness of a child uncertain what to do with being looked at so kindly.

“Would you like another?” she asked, and did not wait for an answer she knew would not come aloud.

She lifted her hands, forming a second sign, slower this time, breaking the shape down as her grandmother had once broken it down for her all those years ago on a sunlit terrace.

“Friend.” She signed it, her fingers tracing the shape carefully enough that he could follow every part of the movement. “A friend is someone who stays. Someone who does not ask you to be anything other than exactly what you are.”

Kit watched her hands with an intensity that struck her oddly as much older than his eight years, the same keen attention she had watched him give his sketchbook, as though he were committing every movement to memory the way he committed a horse’s musculature or the fall of light through a stable window.

Then, slowly, his hand lifted again.

This time, the sign came more easily, his small fingers finding the shape with rather more confidence than his first attempt, an eagerness in the movement that had not been there before, as though some small cautious door inside him had opened a crack, willing to let a little more light through than it had a moment ago.

“Friend,” Louisa echoed, her smile widening despite her best efforts to keep it contained. “Yes, just like that.”

Rosalind, entirely unbothered by the small, silent triumph unfolding at her flank, swished her tail and shifted her weight. Kit’s hand fell back to the curry comb and resumed the steady strokes along her flank, though Louisa noticed that some of the earlier rigidity had gone out of his shoulders and been replaced by something looser, something that looked almost like ease.

She did not press for a third sign. She had learned enough, in a fortnight, to know that this much, freely given, was worth considerably more than anything coaxed or demanded.

She simply sat with him a while longer in the golden hush of the stables, watching the curry comb move, watching the mare’s ears turn lazily toward every small sound, content for now to let the morning be exactly what it was.

Louisa let the quiet settle a while longer before she finally rose to her feet, brushing the straw from her skirts with a soft rustle that made Rosalind’s ears flick toward her.

“I ought to leave you both to your morning,” she said, gathering her satchel. “I have taken up more of your time with Rosalind than I intended, and I suspect she has strong opinions about visitors who overstay their welcome.”

Kit did not look up from the curry comb, though his hand slowed slightly at her words.

“I shall come again tomorrow, if that suits you. Same time, same stall, and I promise not to make you sign anything you do not wish to.” She latched the stall door gently behind her, pausing a moment longer than she strictly needed to. “Have a good day, Kit.”