Page 63 of My Deal with the Wrong Duke

She studied him. He did look tired. His cravat was a shade less precise than usual, and there was a faint bruise of sleeplessness beneath his left eye. She found the imperfection oddly endearing, which was not a thought she intended to pursue.

“And?” she asked.

“And I believe it was written by a woman, though I cannot prove it. The ballroom scene in the first volume is too accurate. No man alive would notice which mothers are watching which gentlemen across the room.”

“A woman notices because she has spent her life being watched.” Louisa opened the first volume and read three lines. “A man walks into a ballroom and sees the room. A woman walks in and sees every pair of eyes already measuring her.”

Oliver leaned a shoulder against the bookshelf. “You say that as though you are speaking from direct experience.”

“I am speaking from twelve consecutive Thursday evenings at Almack’s, which is experience enough for a lifetime.”

He laughed. A gentleman by the fire lowered his newspaper to frown at them, reconsidered, and raised it again.

“The gentleman in it is impossible,” Oliver said. “He insults the heroine within an hour of meeting her and spends the rest of the book expecting to be forgiven.”

“Perhaps he is proud, and he confuses pride with principle. Half the men at White’s do the same, and nobody writes novels about them.”

“Because nobody at White’s is interesting enough. This fellow at least has the decency to realize he is wrong, which puts him ahead of most of the peerage.”

“A man who realizes he was wrong?” He laughed at her teasing manner. “He does have some help in realizing that,” he admitted, and she nodded.

“And I take it that it falls upon the love interest to assist him in that realization.”

“Which is precisely why he needs her.” Oliver picked up the second volume and turned it between his hands. “The entire book is built on two people who misread each other because they are too afraid to ask a direct question. She mistakes his silence for contempt. He mistakes her refusal for indifference. The whole disaster could have been avoided by a single honest conversation.”

Louisa was quiet for a moment. She placed the first volume back on the table and aligned it with the other two.

“Honest conversations are more difficult than novels make them appear,” she said simply.

He looked at her. The teasing left his face, and what replaced it was not an expression she could easily name.

“Yes,” he said. “They are.”

For a moment their eyes met. None of them spoke. It was Oliver who turned first, leading her toward the carriage wordlessly.

He handed her up before she could object, folded himself onto the opposite seat, and rapped the roof twice. The wheels turned into the crush of Piccadilly, where every carriage in London appeared to have chosen the same hour to move.

“We shall be an age,” Oliver said, peering through the glass at the blockage ahead. A coal dray had lost a wheel across half the street, and its driver was engaged in a shouting match with a hackney coachman that showed no signs of resolution.

“Good,” Louisa said, and then colored at how quickly it had come out. “I mean only that the rain is pleasant from inside a carriage.”

Oliver did not respond, though a small smile formed on his face.

Rain crawled down the glass in thin threads. The carriage rolled forward a length and stopped. Oliver stretched his legs into the narrow space between the seats, careful of her skirts.

“You said honest conversations are difficult.” He was looking at the rain, not at her. “In the shop. You said it as though you had tried and found the cost too high.”

Louisa kept her eyes on the window. A flower seller on the corner was holding a sheet of canvas over her baskets, hunched against the drizzle.

“When my father’s money went,” she said, “it did not go all at once. It went the way a tide goes out. First the carriage. Then the horses. Then the servants, one at a time, until there was a cook doing three people’s work and a girl of twelve sweeping the stairs.”

Oliver said nothing. She continued speaking, her voice small.

“My father could not bear to watch it happen. So he stopped watching. He took his dinner in the study. He left the letters unopened on the salver, because an unopened letter is not yet a debt.” A cart passed close and threw a fan of dirty water against the glass. “I opened them. I was sixteen. I wrote to the coal merchant, and to the vintner, and to Mr. Pike who collected the rent, and I asked each of them for time.”

“In your father’s name,” Oliver said. He did not make it a question.

“I practiced his hand for a fortnight. His capitals, the way he crossed his sevens. By the end I could sign it better than he did.” She turned from the window. “I have never told a living soul. He would sooner have watched the house go than know his daughter had learned his signature to save it.”