"He learned that emotion was dangerous. That love was a weapon. That the safest way to survive was to feel nothing at all." She met Lillian's eyes. "He was twelve when our mother threw a vase at our father's head. Fifteen when they had an argument so vicious that half the servants gave notice rather than remain in the house. Eighteen when they both died within a month of each other; our mother first, of a fever that she refused to treat because she could not bear to be bedridden while our father was away, and then our father, of what the physicians called heart failure but what we all knew was simply grief."
"They died of loving each other."
"In a manner of speaking." Rosanne's laugh was hollow. "And Daniel….Daniel decided he would never let that happen to him. He built walls so high and so thick that nothing could penetrate them. No emotion, no passion, no feeling at all. He would be safe, even if safety meant being utterly alone."
Lillian absorbed this information in silence. It explained so much; the rigid control, the clipped sentences, the way he looked at her sometimes as though she were a threat he did not know how to counter.
Shewasa threat, she realized. Not to his safety or his position, but to his carefully constructed walls. Every conversation they had, every moment of connection, was a crack in his armor.
No wonder he avoided her.
"I should not have told you all that," Rosanne said, her voice returning to something like its normal register. "Daniel would be furious if he knew. He does not speak of our parents. Ever."
"I will not mention it to him."
"I know you will not. That is why I told you." Rosanne reached out and took Lillian's hand, squeezing gently. "You see him, Lillian. You see the person beneath all that ice and stone. I do not know if you can reach him, I am not certain anyone can, but you see him. And that matters."
Lillian squeezed back, her throat tight with an emotion she could not quite name.
"I am not trying to reach him," she said. "I am simply.... I am here."
"Sometimes that is enough." Rosanne smiled; a small, hopeful expression. "Sometimes simply being here is exactly what someone needs."
***
That evening, Daniel sat alone in his study and did not think about Miss Lillian Whitcombe.
He reviewed the estate accounts, making notations in his precise, angular hand. He drafted a letter to his solicitor regarding the property in Sussex. He read, or attempted to read, the drainage report that had occupied so much of his afternoon.
He did not think about the way she had looked at him when he acknowledged her reasoning.
He did not think about the calm certainty in her voice when she had asked her question, or the way the two farmers had listened to her, or the small curve of her mouth that might or might not have been a smile.
He certainly did not think about what Rosanne might be telling her, right now, in the morning room where they had retreated after leaving his study. Rosanne talked too much, she always had, and there were things about their family that Daniel preferred to keep private.
She will have told her about our parents.
The thought surfaced unbidden, and he pushed it away with practised efficiency. It did not matter what Miss Whitcombe knew or did not know about his family history. She was Rosanne's friend, nothing more. Her opinion of him was irrelevant.
And yet.
The question she had asked, about the planting of the tree, kept circling back through his mind. It had been so simple. So obvious, once voiced. And he had not thought of it.
He, who had managed this estate for nearly a decade. He, who prided himself on his thorough, methodical approach to problem-solving. He had spent half an hour listening to Garrett and Hobbs argue, and the most sophisticated solution he had conceived was to split the land between them; a compromise that would have satisfied no one and resolved nothing.
Miss Whitcombe had asked one question and ended the dispute in seconds.
She is clever, he thought reluctantly.Genuinely clever. Not merely possessed of a quick wit, but capable of the sort of clear, practical thinking that most people, most men, never achieve.
It was an uncomfortable realization. Daniel was accustomed to being the most capable person in any room. He did not know what to do with a woman who might, in certain respects, be his equal.
Not his equal, he corrected himself.She is a gentleman's daughter with no formal education, no estate experience, no training in management or negotiation. That she happened to ask the right question does not make her his equal.
But even as he formed the thought, he knew it was not quite honest. Education and training could be acquired; the kind of mind that saw what others missed, that cut through confusion to the heart of a problem, was something rarer.
He had known men with every advantage of birth and education, who could not think their way out of a paper sack. And here was Miss Lillian Whitcombe, with her practical gown and her paint-stained fingers, demonstrating a clarity of thought that half the gentlemen of his acquaintance would envy.
It was maddening.
