“Are you suggesting this is my fault?”
“I am suggesting that people respond to the signals they receive. If you enter a conversation with suspicion, your interlocutor will feel that suspicion and adjust accordingly. They become guarded because you are guarded. They perform because they sense you expect performance.”
It was, Sebastian realised with irritation, yet another rational argument. Today appeared to be a day for uncomfortable truths.
“And how would you have me approach these conversations instead?”
“I am hardly qualified to advise a duke on matrimonial strategy.”
“You are qualified to advise me on most things. Why should this be different?”
Daniel was silent for a moment, his gaze dropping to his hands—capable hands, roughened by work in a way no gentleman’s hands ever were. He had been born the son of a tenant farmer, educated through the late duke’s patronage, raised to his present position by nothing but his own ability. He occupied a curious middle ground—neither servant nor equal—and Sebastian had often wondered whether that position was as isolating as his own.
“I would suggest,” Daniel said at last, “that you approach these conversations with curiosity rather than suspicion. Assume, at least at the outset, that the person before you may surprise you. Ask questions to which you genuinely wish to know the answers, rather than questions designed to test for insincerity. Be willing to reveal something of yourself in exchange for what you hope to receive from them. Connection requires vulnerability, Your Grace. It cannot be achieved from behind armour.”
Sebastian absorbed this in silence. It was good counsel, he acknowledged privately. Whether he could act upon it was another matter entirely.
“You speak as though you have experience in these matters.”
A flicker crossed Daniel’s face—pain, perhaps, or embarrassment—before his expression smoothed into professional composure. “I observe, Your Grace. It is part of my position.”
“Observation and experience are not the same thing.”
“No,” Daniel agreed quietly. “They are not.”
He did not elaborate, and Sebastian did not press. Their relationship rested upon mutual respect and carefully maintained boundaries; prying into Daniel’s private affairs would violate both.
Still, Sebastian filed the exchange away—alongside the detail of the Ashwood poor relation, alongside countless other small observations that accumulated in his mind without conscious effort.
He was, it seemed, incapable of stopping himself from observing. Even when observation revealed things he would rather not see.
***
That evening, Sebastian dined alone.
His mother had pled fatigue—a diplomatic fiction that allowed them both to avoid resuming their earlier conversation—and Evan had vanished to some entertainment in the village. Sebastian sat at the long dining table, surrounded by empty chairs and attended by more servants than any one man could reasonably require, and contemplated the particular loneliness of wealth.
His father had dined in this room. His grandfather before him. Generations of Harcourts stretching back centuries—sitting at this same table, eating from these same dishes, served by the descendants of those who had served their forebears. There was continuity in it, he supposed. A sense of belonging to something larger than oneself.
But there was constraint as well. The weight of expectation. The knowledge that he existed not as himself, but as a link in a chain—a vessel for a legacy that would endure long after he was gone.
He thought about Daniel’s advice.Be willing to reveal something of yourself.It sounded simple enough. Surely, he could manage to reveal some small thing, some authentic piece of his inner life, without compromising his position or inviting exploitation.
And yet, when he tried to imagine it—tried to picture himself confessing to some young lady at Lady Marchmont’s house party that he was tired, that he was lonely, that he sometimes wondered whether anyone would notice if the Duke of Ashworth simply disappeared and a competent impostor took his place—he could not complete the image. In his mind, the young lady regarded him with polite incomprehension—or worse, with the calculating gleam of someone who had just discovered a weakness to exploit.
He had been alone too long. Had built his walls too high. He no longer knew how to take them down, even if he wished to.
The meal concluded. The servants cleared the table with silent efficiency. Sebastian withdrew to his study and its reassuring piles of correspondence on drainage and crop rotation and all the practical matters that required no feeling at all.
Tomorrow, he would begin preparations for the journey to Kent. He would review the list of eligible young ladies. He would steel himself for a fortnight of performance and artifice—and therelentless pursuit of a connection he was no longer certain he was capable of forming.
But tonight, alone with his thoughts, his responsibilities, and the crushing weight of his position, Sebastian Harcourt allowed himself to acknowledge something he rarely admitted.
He was afraid.
Not of marriage itself—marriage was a contract, and contracts could be managed—but of the possibility that Daniel was wrong. That there was no one who might see past the title to the man beneath. That he would spend the rest of his life surrounded by people—and utterly alone.
He poured himself a glass of brandy and drank it by the fire, watching the flames dance and trying not to think of the future that awaited him.
