Page 32 of A Family Bargain with the Duke

“Has he?” Piers’s eyebrows rose, his expression turning thoughtful. “I confess I have been rather curious to see for myself. He writes the most maddeningly brief letters, my brother, three lines where any sensible correspondent would write thirty, and I have had to piece together the whole of this marriage from scraps, like a magistrate assembling evidence.”

“What have the scraps told you?”

“That Kit has learned to sign more than in three years of tutors. That my brother has taken to breakfasting at an hour he has never once kept in his adult life, which I understand from the housekeeper coincides suspiciously with when you rise. And that he has stopped mentioning his estate ledgers in his letters to me, which I confess alarmed me more than anything else in the whole account, since previously I could not get him to write a single page without at least one reference to drainage improvements.”

Louisa felt her cheeks warm despite herself and busied her hands with straightening Eleanor’s blanket rather than examining why. “I could not say what has become of his interest in drainage, Dr. Cavendish.”

“Piers.”

“Piers.” She allowed herself a small smile. “Though I suspect the estate’s drainage remains exactly as pressing a concern as it ever was. He simply has other matters occupying his correspondence these days.”

“So it would seem.” Warmth moved behind Piers’s teasing then, brief and genuine. “I am glad of it, whatever the cause. He has needed other matters occupying him for some years now, and has stubbornly refused every suggestion I made toward that end, so I confess myself rather relieved that circumstance managed what my own advice could not.”

Later that afternoon, they found their way to the small blue morning room Louisa had begun to use as her own, tea between them and Eleanor asleep upstairs, Piers settled into the chair opposite with an easy manner, entirely comfortable in whatever room he happened to occupy.

“May I ask you something? And forgive me if it strays somewhere too personal for so new an acquaintance.”

“You may ask. But I reserve the right to answer.”

“Entirely fair.” Piers considered his tea for a moment before continuing, some of his earlier lightness settling into something gentler. “Do you find the household suits you? I ask because my brother would never think to ask it himself, being far too preoccupied with whether the arrangement suits Kit and Eleanor to think of whether it suits you, and someone in this family ought to be minding that particular ledger as well.”

Louisa turned her cup slowly in its saucer, considering how much of the truth she meant to offer a man she had known for scarcely a day.

“I worry, sometimes,” she admitted finally, “that Eleanor will grow up sensing herself a burden. That however much love I give her, some part of her will always feel that she arrived into this family sideways, through grief and inconvenience rather than through the ordinary joy that welcomes most children.”

“That is no small worry to carry.”

“It is not new to me, if I am being honest. I have spent a good part of my life feeling I was too much for most rooms I entered. Too outspoken. Too sharp. Too unwilling to make myself smaller for anyone’s comfort. I do not wish Eleanor to inherit that burden from me, on top of whatever burden her own circumstances already hand her.”

Piers was quiet for a moment, studying her with an attention that had entirely shed its earlier teasing, something thoughtful and careful in its place.

“Do you know,” he asked eventually, “that Julian was the quietest person in every room we occupied, growing up?”

Louisa’s eyebrows rose. “Your brother? Quiet?”

“Entirely. Not because he had nothing to say, mind you. I have never once known Julian to lack opinions, whatever face he shows the world now. But our father ran a household where children were meant to be seen rarely and heard even less, and Julian, being the elder, bore the brunt of that philosophy for six years before I arrived to share the burden with him. By the time I was old enough to notice, he had already learned that speaking his mind earned him correction rather than conversation, so he simply stopped offering it, until stopping became a habit he has never quite managed to break.”

“I did not know that.”

“Most people don’t. He carries himself so thoroughly like a man who has always commanded a room that few think to ask whether he was ever permitted to fill one with his voice instead.”

Piers set down his cup. “I’m only telling you this because I suspect, whatever concerns you have for Eleanor, you have already given her something my brother went a great many years without receiving himself—someone who asks to hear what she has to say, rather than simply teaching her to keep it to herself. Your grandmother’s kindness has already reached farther than either of you ever imagined. She taught one little girl to hear a voice the world might otherwise have overlooked. That little girl grew into the woman who could do the same for my nephew, and now for Eleanor.”

Something in Louisa’s chest tightened unexpectedly at the thought of Julian as a boy, sitting silent through dinners much like the ones she now shared with him, learning that his voice was a liability rather than a gift.

“He mentioned my grandmother to you,” she said slowly, working it out even as she spoke.

“He did. In one of those maddening three-line letters, no less, though he managed to include that your grandmother was born without a voice, that she taught you sign language because she loved you, and that you had carried it with you every day since out of love for her rather than any obligation.” Piers smiled, something knowing in it. “I confess I was rather surprised he bothered to include it at all, given how sparingly he writes about people who are not related to estate business.”

“He remembered that. After one conversation.”

“Julian rarely speaks of people,, unless they have come to matter to him more than he is prepared to admit.” Piers’s smile widened, warm and entirely unhurried, watching the realization settle over her face with affectionate amusement. “I would not read too much into a single detail if I were the cautious sort. But I have known my brother my whole life, and I have never once known him to remember a stranger’s grandmother.”

He leaned back in his chair with a satisfied air when the door opened with a knock, and Mrs. Whitfield swept in bearing a fresh pot of tea.

“My Lord.” She set the pot down. “I might have known the noise coming from this room belonged to you. The entire east wing has been treated to your laughter. I daresay every servant between here and the kitchens knows you’ve arrived.”

“Mrs. Whitfield.” Piers rose halfway from his chair, all wounded dignity. “I have been in this house for scarcely four hours, and already you scold me as though I were twelve years old and had tracked mud across your good floors.”