Page 39 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

“The distinction escapes me entirely.”

He smiled. The real smile, the one that started slowly, reaching his eyes before it reached his mouth. He settled against the bench. The lemonade sweated in his glass. From the croquet lawn, a shout erupted as somebody hit somebody else’s ball into the flowerbed.

“Tell me about your childhood,” he said suddenly.

She blinked. “My childhood?”

“Everyone talks about the Season. Dresses, dances, who will marry whom. Nobody ever talks about what came before. I want to know what you were like before London got hold of you.”

She turned the glass between her palms.

“I was unremarkable.”

“I do not believe that for a second.”

“I was. I was quiet. I read too much. I followed my older cousins about the garden pretending to be their servant because they told me I lacked the imagination to play a princess.” She paused. “I stole jam from the larder with dedicated regularity. Mrs. Pritchard, our cook, caught me every single time. She would stand in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded, watching me eat it with my fingers directly from the jar, saying nothing. After I finished, she would hand me a cloth for my face.”

“She never stopped you?”

“She told my mother, years later, that any child willing to eat gooseberry jam with such commitment deserved to finish the jar.”

Oliver laughed. The sound was open, unguarded, free of the careful modulation she had come to recognize in his public manner. It carried across the water. Two ladies on a nearby blanket glanced over.

“Your turn,” Louisa said. “What were you like?”

The laughter faded slowly from his face.

“I climbed things,” he said with an edge of melancholy in his voice. “Constantly. Trees, walls, the stable roof. I drove my nanny to the edge of her sanity. She once found me on the roof of the east wing because I wanted to see whether Hampshire looked different from above.”

“Did it?”

“It looked exactly the same, except farther away. I was deeply disappointed.” He traced a line through the condensation on his glass. “I collected tin soldiers. I had dozens. I arranged them on the windowsill of my bedroom in precise formations. I knew each of their names.”

“You named them?”

“Every single one. The general was called Horatio. His second-in-command was called Biscuit, because I was seven years old.”

She turned on the bench to face him. “Biscuit.”

“He was the bravest soldier in the regiment. Despite the name.”

“Because of the name, surely. Any soldier called Biscuit has already survived the worst humiliation war can offer. He has nowhere to go but up.”

Oliver’s eyes met hers.

“That,” he said, “is the finest military analysis I have ever heard.”

“I have hidden depths. You told me so yourself.”

“I am beginning to suspect I underestimated the depths considerably.”

She looked away first. She drank her lemonade. She watched the croquet game, where Frederick was now advising Lady Ashton on her stance with absolute authority, as though his opinion on all matters was both welcome and correct.

“What else?” she asked.

“What else what?”

“What else did you do? As a child. Besides climbing rooftops.”