For a Year She Read Aloud to a Blind Stranger in the Park — He Was the Duke Who'd Refused Her
Chapter 2
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He died on the Thursday. A door slammed below stairs, and the study was gone.Rain struck the window. A cart ground over wet cobbles. The air held horse and soaked wool, and the Duke's letter was still in her hand.Lady Danforth's card had arrived that very afternoon.With sympathy, it said in a fine engraved hand. Verity had never known sympathy to be so well printed.Ten weeks later, she was still being looked at. Ladies lowered their voices when she passed. Gentlemen lowered their eyes, which was worse. So, she took to walking in the park at 6:00 before anyone with a reputation was awake. She carried a book and read aloud as she went. It was a habit from the study. It kept the silence off.On the first Monday of March, the park smelled of rain on gravel and wet wool. Mist lay on the grass like spilled milk. She was halfway through a sentence when she passed the bench by the water. She stopped at a comma to turn the page."Do not stop there."The voice came from the bench. It was low, hoarse, and entirely without manners. A man sat at the far end with an enormous gray deerhound leaning on his knee. He was compact and solid, one and thirty perhaps, in a greatcoat too plain for its cut. His hair was chestnut and untrimmed at the collar. His eyes were hazel and fixed on a point a hand's breadth above her head. A weathered servant stood behind the bench, scowling at her like a customs officer."I beg your pardon," said Verity."The sentence," said the man. "You stopped in the middle of it. A man will lie awake over half a sentence. Finish it."It was not a request. She might have walked on. Instead, she lifted the book and read to the end of the clause, then the rest of the page, then the next.It took her until the third page to understand that his eyes were not following her. It took her until the fourth to understand that nothing in the park was following his. The deerhound sighed against her skirts as if a long argument had been settled.When she closed the book, the church clocks were striking seven."You read like a clerk," said the man. "I mean it as the highest praise. Nothing left out.""Thank you," said Verity, who could think of nothing else."Tomorrow," he said. "6:00. I shall pay a guinea a week.""I think not.""Two?""No," said Verity. "I have been priced quite enough this winter. I will not be paid, and I will not be bought."He turned his face toward her voice. She braced for anger."Good," he said.She had sat down on the dry end of the bench without thinking. It was only now that she noticed why one end was dry: he had put the dog on the wet boards and himself beside the dog. He had said nothing about it at all."Then we shall need terms," he said. "Mine first. You will not describe things to me. Not the weather, not the faces, not the park. I have had a great many people tell me what is there. I should like one hour a day in which I am told only what is written."