He took a moment just to do nothing more than enjoy that smile.
He leaned back in his chair. Drummed his fingers once.
“If it helps at all . . . given that I’ve beensohelpful thus far... life is cheap and fragile, but ultimately it’s all we’ve got, isn’t it, when we have nothing else? And that makes it such an outrageously precious thing that we’ll do anything to preserve it. It’s quite the paradox. It’s a wonder we’re entrusted with it at all, given how easy it is to lose. And fate can make ridiculous rag dolls of us at any time, even the wisest of us. Even kings and dukes. But when you realize no one is exempt from the caprices of fate, well, that’s the greatest gift of all, I think. A good humbling early on is marvelous for building character.”
It was a rare pleasure to speak this way to anyone, let alone a woman, and to know that she listened because she was actually interested.
“That was a little better,” she said.
He smiled slowly.
At once her face went still and rapt, as if that smile had surrounded her and held her fast.
They were quiet.
He grew more serious. “The last thing on earth your father saw was your smile, Miss Wylde. And as I’m sure you’ve surmised by now, there are far, far worse ways a man can go.”
He literally saw her breath hitch.
Once again his words made her luminous. He watched it, restless with the kind of hunger one watched any lovely thing—a sunrise, a sunset—destined to vanish quickly.
He did have a sense of the potency of his ownpresence and his own gaze. He was not surprised when she ducked her head.
He also did not think she’d remain overwhelmed for more than a second.
“Do you suppose someone on a ship somewhere found him?” she asked, quietly.
In all likelihood, her poor father had fed hungry eels, or a shark. Perhaps the eels had been made into a pie sold by a monger out on the street. He could no longer be sentimental about bodies themselves; it was so clear in death that they’d just been vessels of transport through life, like a ship.
She must have read his expression. “Don’t answer that,” she said hurriedly. “I’m not delusional. But sometimes I lie awake at night and I imagine him, oh, in China, cobbling shoes so he can make enough money to finally sail home. Or perhaps he’s in Egypt, and making sandals, and he has a lot of friends because he always did.”
“It’s very difficult not to know for certain what became of him,” he said gently.
He tapped his quill. There was something he, for some reason, very much wanted her to know.
“Losing men never became rote, for me, Miss Wylde. Every one of them, I think, is scored somewhere on my soul. Assuming I still possess one.” He tipped the corner of his mouth.
It was yet another thing he’d never said aloud to anyone.
Her face suffused with that ache again, which she quickly disguised.
“Just as some women are made to hold an audience captive with their voices, some men are built to withstand war. The more you endure, the more you can endure. Until one can easily bear weights—troubles, responsibilities, grievances, deaths, triumphs—that look to someone on the outside inconceivable. It happens over time. I was the one able to do it.” He paused. And said, quietly, “So I did it.”
He had not ended that sentence with,until all you’re doing is enduring.
But with a sudden violent clarity, Mariana knew that it was true.
His calling had been consuming. And it was such that now it isolated him. He was unique among men—all men—in the world, and had seen and done things most other men would never see.
That was the source of his gravity. That presence one felt when one was in the room with him.
Who had ever borne weight for him? It stole her breath to think he’d done it alone.
Somehow she knew it hadn’t been his wife. She was certain he’d married the right person, of course. What a funny word that was, when one thought about it. “Right.” It ought not have shades of meaning. It ought to be like day or night.
Perhaps that was why his memoirs were going badly. Perhaps he just couldn’t see beyond the horizon now. Perhaps with less weight on his shoulders, he felt unmoored. His hand, heavy with that signet ring that represented all he now was, lay flat on the table.
“Your Grace . . .”
