The fourth companion left Blackmir Hall within the hour, weeping into her traveling cloak, unable to say what had been said to her in the dark. Allaric Vain, seventh Duke of Hargate, stood at the window of a room he could no longer see, listening to the carriage wheels retreat over the gravel, and felt nothing but relief. He had been blind for eleven months. The shooting accident at Harriate Chase had cost him his left eye outright, and within a fortnight, through some sympathetic cruelty, the sight in his right.
He had once been a man remarked upon for the coldness of his stare—piercing, gray, unblinking—a look that had made a marquess’s daughter burst into tears merely for asking him to dance twice. Now there was no stare left to unsettle anyone. There was only the Duke and the Dark and his refusal to be read to, dressed, or pitied by one more soul his sister sent north to manage him. It was into this refusal that Margaret Aldis arrived.
Twenty-four, the younger of two daughters, the plain one, though no one in her family used that word aloud when they might simply not mention her at all. Her sister Cecilia was celebrated—for her voice, her figure, her three seasons, and finally for the baronet she had secured in her first month out. Margaret had grown up in the particular quiet of a girl who is loved without being looked at. She had come to Northumberland not for the wage, though the wage mattered, but because the agency in London had said plainly that no one else would take the post.
She thought that a house nobody else would enter might suit a woman nobody troubled to notice. She arrived on a Tuesday in rain that had not stopped since dawn. The housekeeper, a tired woman named Mrs. Brent, had buried three companions’ contracts in as many months and looked at Margaret with the exhaustion of someone expecting disappointment a fourth time.
“He will not receive you,” Mrs. Brent said. “I did not come to be received,” said Margaret. “I came to read to him.
”
“He is in the east study. He will tell you to leave. They all do. ”
“Then I shall hear him say it,” said Margaret, “and decide for myself whether I believe him.
”
She did not weep at what she found in that room. She did not flinch at his first words, which came without preamble: “I did not ring for anyone. ” She did not retreat when he told her, accurately and without regret, that her voice was thin and her diction provincial. She stood just inside the door in a room that smelled of cold candle smoke and beeswax polish and said, “I can read Greek, Your Grace, though I imagine you have no wish to hear it.
And I can read a newspaper without stumbling, and I am not leaving until five o’clock, which is when my contracted hours end, whether you speak to me or not. ”
There was a silence in which the Duke considered having her removed by the footman waiting in the corridor. And did not. “Read then,” he said.
“And do not read to me as though I am an invalid. I have not lost my mind along with my eyes. ”
She read him the agricultural report from the Newcastle paper, dense with figures on wool prices, without softening her voice into the sick-room murmur the previous companions had favored. When she came to a sentence that made no grammatical sense, she said so plainly.
“This sentence is nonsense, Your Grace. I believe a line has been dropped by the typesetter. ”
He said nothing for a long moment, and then, unmistakably, something that was very nearly a laugh. It was the first sound Mrs.
Brent had heard from that room in eleven months that was not fury. What no one in that house understood was that the Duke’s blindness was far from the deepest wound he carried. Three years before the hunting accident, he had been engaged at twenty-eight to a woman named Louisa Fenmore, of considerable beauty and considerable debts she had concealed with considerable skill. On the night their engagement was to be announced before four hundred guests, she had instead announced her engagement to a viscount with twelve thousand a year and no entail troubling his inheritance.
She had done so within the Duke’s hearing, believing wrongly that he had already left the room. He had stood at the edge of the ballroom and heard himself discussed as a disappointing second choice, a dull duke with dull prospects. He had not moved, had not spoken, had gone home that night, and had largely kept his promise to himself not to see London again. He did not tell Margaret Aldis this.
But it explained why he treated every new arrival as though she had come to appraise him for auction and found him wanting before she had said a word. Margaret came the next day at nine, and the day after that, and she did not attempt to soften him. She read him his correspondence, sorted by his secretary but never before read aloud with any comprehension. When a letter from his cousin Edmund Vain arrived, expressing sorrow for the Duke’s affliction and a wish to visit and discuss the management of the estate, Margaret read it through once and then said, without being asked, “This is not a letter of sympathy, Your Grace.
This is a letter from a man testing whether you can still tell the difference. ”
The Duke turned his head toward her voice. “What makes you say so? ”
“He does not ask after your health until the second paragraph.
He asks about the estate first. ”
“A man who cared for you would have the order reversed. ”
Edmund Vain was the son of the Duke’s late father’s younger brother. The Duke’s unmarried state made the succession a matter of considerable interest to a great many people who had never troubled to visit Blackmir Hall before the accident.
Edmund had begun, in the months since the shooting, a quiet campaign to suggest that a duke who could not see to sign his own papers might require a guardian—a guardian who would naturally be a blood relation and who would just as naturally find the estate’s timber rights and mineral leases easier to manage without a blind duke’s inconvenient objections. The Duke had suspected it for months. He had not, until Margaret read him three letters in a row and pointed out the pattern in Edmund’s phrasing, had proof enough to act. Some three weeks into her tenure, he said, “You read documents the way a barrister reads a contract.
Where did a companion learn to do that? ”
“My father was a solicitor’s clerk before his health failed. I read his briefs to him for six years before he died, because his own eyes had gone bad from close print. I learned to hear what a document is actually saying, Your Grace, which is very often not what it appears to say on the surface.
”
It was the first time she had told him anything true about herself, and he found, turning it over that night in his sleeplessness, that he wanted to know a second thing, and resented the wanting considerably. By the time the candles had burned low in the east study most evenings, Margaret had become the only person in Blackmir Hall the Duke did not attempt to dismiss. She corrected his terseness with a dryness that more than once left him without immediate reply, as when he remarked, testing her, that a plain woman ought to be grateful for a post that kept her out of a marriage market that would not have wanted her regardless. She replied without any heat that she was grateful for the wage, and equally grateful that her employer’s blindness spared her the trouble of pretending his rudeness was charming, as she understood it had once been considered.
There was a silence long enough that Mrs. Brent, passing in the corridor with the tea tray, nearly dropped it. “You are the first person in eleven months,” the Duke said at last, “who has spoken to me as though I were still a man and not a wound with a title attached. ”
“You are still a man, Your Grace.
You have simply been permitted since November to behave as though manners were a courtesy owed only to those who could see you fail at them. ”
He did not answer. But the next morning, when she arrived at nine, he had already had the curtains opened in the east study, a room he could not see and had kept shuttered for eleven months regardless. When she remarked on the change, he said only that he had been told the light was good for wool prices, and would she please begin the correspondence before Edmund Vain’s next letter arrived to spoil his morning.
It was, she understood, as near an apology and as near a thank you as the Duke of Hargate was presently capable of offering, and she accepted it as such and did not remark on it further. The weeks settled into a rhythm neither of them named aloud. Margaret arrived at nine. She read the correspondence first, then whatever periodical had come up from Newcastle or London, and in the last hour before she left, if the Duke had not exhausted his patience for company, she read to him from whatever novel Mrs.
Brent had placed on the study shelf, though he pretended always that he tolerated this final hour only because dismissing her seemed disproportionate to the offense of a story he did not particularly wish to hear. He wished to hear it. She knew by the particular stillness that came over him during the reading, distinct from the coiled, waiting stillness of his early weeks. He began, without remarking on it, to ask her opinion of things beyond the correspondence—whether she thought the new bailiff honest, whether the tenant cottages wanted repair before winter, whether she believed a man could learn to dance again, having never once seen his partner’s face, a question he put to her with such elaborate carelessness that she understood at once it was not carelessly meant.
“I imagine a man could learn anything,” she said, “provided he had a partner willing to be patient with his missteps, and who did not mind in the early weeks treading on her slippers rather more than either of them would like. ”
“Are you volunteering your slippers for the experiment, Miss Aldis? ”
“I am merely observing that the experiment is theoretically possible. I have not yet decided which would be the more foolish answer to give my employer.
”
He laughed at that genuinely—not the near laugh of the agricultural report, but a real, low sound that seemed to surprise him as much as it surprised her. Mrs. Brent, passing in the corridor with an armful of linen, stopped dead at the sound of it and did not move again until it had finished. It was not a courtship in any sense the ton would have recognized.
There were no bouquets, no carriage rides, no calculated appearances at the opera. There was only a study smelling of beeswax polish and cold candle smoke, and a woman’s voice reading aloud through the slow turning of a Northumberland winter into an early, reluctant spring, and a man who had once been feared for the coldness of his stare, learning instead to be known for the quietness of his listening. Mrs. Brent began setting two chairs by the study fire instead of one.
The cook began sending up seedcake with the afternoon tea unasked, because the Duke had once in Margaret’s hearing mentioned that his mother used to favor it. The Duke himself began, without seeming to notice, turning his face toward the door some minutes before Margaret was due to arrive, as though some sense beyond sight had learned to anticipate her. The season was not yet finished with either of them. Edmund Vain arrived at Blackmir Hall unannounced in the first week of March, ostensibly to discuss the timber leases, and brought with him a physician of his own choosing.
The doctor examined the Duke’s eyes for perhaps four minutes before pronouncing, in a tone Margaret found immediately suspicious, that the blindness was very likely permanent, and that a man in the Duke’s condition might reasonably be considered incapable of managing complex estate affairs without assistance. Assistance that Edmund, seated by the fire with the particular comfort of a man who believes the outcome already settled, was prepared to provide as a devoted cousin. “You will forgive me, cousin,” said the Duke, in the voice Margaret had learned meant he was considerably more dangerous than his stillness suggested, “if I decline to have my affairs managed by a man who required only four minutes to determine that I am unfit to manage them myself. ”
“Allaric, be reasonable.
You cannot read your own correspondence. You cannot review a lease, a ledger, a single document without another set of eyes. It is not a failing. It is simply a fact, and facts must be managed.
”
“He does not require your eyes,” said Margaret from the corner of the room, where Edmund Vain had plainly forgotten she was present at all. “He has mine. And I would remind you, sir, that I have read every letter that has passed between this house and yours these eight weeks, and I have formed a rather precise opinion of what your assistance would actually cost this estate. ”
The doctor had the grace to look uncomfortable.
Edmund did not. “And who precisely,” said Edmund, with the particular condescension of a man addressing a servant who has forgotten her place, “asked the opinion of my cousin’s paid companion? ”
“No one,” said Margaret, rising, her voice entirely level. “But I shall give it regardless, as I am the one who has actually read the timber lease you proposed to renegotiate at four shillings below the rate your own agent quoted the estate in January.
A discrepancy I confess I found curious enough to note down, in case anyone should ever ask. ”
The silence that followed was, by every account Mrs. Brent gave below stairs afterward, the finest thing she had witnessed in eleven months of service at Blackmir Hall. Edmund left within the hour, taking his physician with him.
His opinion of Margaret had curdled from dismissal into something considerably more dangerous. “You should not have exposed yourself to him so plainly,” the Duke said once the carriage wheels had faded. “A man like Edmund does not forget being made the fool by a companion in front of witnesses. ”
“Let him try.
I have spent four and twenty years being underestimated by people with better prospects than I have, Your Grace. I find I have grown rather good at surviving it. ”
He turned his face toward her in the gesture that had become, over these weeks, as near to looking at her as he could manage, and said with something unguarded in his voice, “What no one has yet asked you, Miss Aldis, in all your four and twenty years of being underestimated. What would you have if you were not underestimated?
What would you actually want if the world troubled to look at you as I have learned to listen to you? ”
It was not a question a duke asked a paid companion, and both of them understood it as such. She did not answer him that evening. She was not yet certain the answer would not cost her the only position that had ever asked more of her mind than her face.
Edmund’s fury did not dissipate with his carriage ride south. It calcified into a plan considerably more dangerous than a mismanaged timber lease. He returned to London and spent a fortnight cultivating a rumor through the sort of drawing rooms where such things traveled fastest: that the Duke of Hargate’s companion was not a companion in any respectable sense, that a blind man alone in a remote hall with an unmarried woman of no particular family and no chaperone was a scandal waiting only for someone with sufficient reason to expose it, and that Edmund, as the Duke’s nearest male relation and heir presumptive, felt it his painful duty to raise the matter with the family solicitors. The letter announcing this painful duty arrived at Blackmir Hall on a morning in April.
The Duke insisted Margaret read it to him herself, and her voice did not once falter across four pages of studied poisonous concern. “He means to have you dismissed,” the Duke said when she had finished, “and my affairs placed under review regardless, on the grounds that I permit impropriety I cannot see to prevent. It is cleverer than I credited him for. ”
“Then dismiss me,” said Margaret, “before he can claim the credit for it.
”
“No,” said the Duke, and the word came out with a force that surprised them both. “No, I will not hand Edmund Vain the satisfaction of having engineered the one decision in this house that was never his to make. ”
He rose, navigating by memory and by the sound of her breath catching as he drew near. It was the first time she had seen him rise unassisted, and he stopped a careful distance from her, close enough that she could smell the sandalwood of his shaving soap beneath the cold candle smoke.
“I have been cruel to every person who has stood in this room since November,” he said. “I told myself it was because I could not bear to be pitied by anyone who could see my face and find it changed. But you have never once looked at me as though I were changed, because you have never had my face to judge me by at all. Only my voice and my temper and whatever was actually in me worth hearing.
I find I am considerably more afraid of what you have heard than I ever was of what a stranger might see. ”
“I have heard a man,” said Margaret, and her voice was not entirely steady, “who was humiliated once by someone who valued his fortune above the man himself, and who has spent every day since daring the world to do it again so that he might at least choose the moment of the wound. I have heard a man who opened his curtains for a woman he could not see, and had seedcake sent up because his mother once favored it, and who has never once asked me to be prettier or softer or less than exactly what I am. I do not require you to see me, Your Grace, to know that you have looked at me more honestly than anyone in four and twenty years.
”
He reached for her hand, carefully, and found it, and held it, and said, “Then let Edmund Vain say what he likes to the solicitors. Let the ton say what it likes in its drawing rooms. I find I have very little left to lose that I value above what is standing in front of me, Miss Aldis, blind or not. ”
It was not a declaration made with any of the polish London might have expected of a duke.
No poetry, no bent knee, no ring produced from a waiting valet. It was simply true, spoken plainly, by a man who had learned in eleven months of darkness that the only honesty left to him was the kind he could not dress up for an audience. She would not have traded it for all the poetry in England. The solicitors, when Edmund’s letter reached them, found rather less scandal in Blackmir Hall’s arrangements than they had been promised, and a great deal more evidence in Margaret’s careful notes of a timber lease renegotiated at a deliberate loss to the estate for Edmund’s private benefit.
The Duke’s own man of business confirmed the discrepancy within the week, once he was finally permitted to see the ledgers Margaret had flagged. Edmund’s painful duty to protect his cousin’s reputation was quietly, permanently overshadowed by his less painful duty to explain four shillings aloud to a board of trustees who did not accept his explanation with any warmth. The matter of the Duke’s guardianship died the particular death reserved for schemes whose authors are discovered to have rather more to hide than the men they accused. Edmund did not come north again.
He sent, some weeks later, a letter of careful and entirely unconvincing conciliation addressed to the Duke alone, making no mention of Margaret whatsoever. The Duke had it read to him once in full, and then instructed his secretary—a different secretary now, Edmund’s man having been quietly dismissed once the second salary was confirmed—to make no reply at all. Edmund had said everything worth answering already in a timber lease and a rumor, and did not deserve the courtesy of a further exchange. The rumor itself, once its architect was discredited, dissolved with the particular speed such things do among people who had never had any real investment in its truth to begin with.
The Duke married Margaret in June, in the small chapel at Blackmir that had not seen a wedding in two generations, with Mrs. Brent weeping openly in the second pew and no announcement made in London beforehand. When the question of a fashionable wedding at St. George’s was raised, the Duke said that he had already given the ton one performance of his private life and did not intend to give them a second.
Years later, when their eldest daughter asked her father whether it grieved him never to have seen her face, the Duke told her, as he had told each of his three children in turn, always in the same words, that he had married her mother without ever once seeing her and had never, for a single day, considered himself the poorer for it. Margaret had given him something considerably rarer than sight. She had given him the plain, unflattering, entirely undecorated truth, at a moment when every other soul in England offered him only the version of himself they thought a blind duke wished to hear. A woman who would tell you your sentence was nonsense, Your Grace, was worth immeasurably more than every companion sent to soothe him instead.
Margaret, who had once been the plain daughter in a house that loved her without troubling to look at her, spent the remainder of her life being looked at in the particular way her husband had learned to look at people—by ear, and by patience, and by the quality of what they actually said. It suited her rather better than being seen ever had. Her sister Cecilia wrote once, years into the marriage, to ask with what Margaret suspected was genuine curiosity how a companion of no particular fortune had contrived to become a duchess when women of far greater beauty had failed to secure so much as his notice. Margaret considered the question for some days before answering, and in the end wrote back that she had never once tried to secure his notice at all, having gone to Blackmir Hall expecting nothing but a wage and a house nobody else would enter, and that she had learned in eleven weeks of reading agricultural reports to a man in the dark that the surest way to be loved was very often to stop performing for the sighted and simply say what was true.
The Duke kept the east study curtains open for the rest of his life, though he never regained so much as a shadow of sight. He told his children, when they asked why, that a man ought to leave the light on for the people he loved, even when he could not benefit from it himself, since it was never truly his light to keep in the first place. Blackmir Hall, which had stood cold and shuttered and rumored of in the year of his accident, became known in the surrounding country as a house where a blind duke and his plain duchess kept the warmest hearth in Northumberland.
There, a girl thought unremarkable by everyone who had ever mattered to her proved, in the end, to be the only one who had ever truly mattered at all.
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