“Hale,” said Linnea. “Miss Hale.”
“Miss Hale.” He inclined his head, and it was the real inclination, the one a swordsman gives across the floor when he has been touched. “It seems my Latin is very good for an Englishman.” He had taken her unspoken point, for an Englishman, and turned it on himself before she could. It was the first generous thing she had seen him do, and it was generous in his own currency, which was wit.
Linnea understood that he had just paid her the highest compliment he knew how to give. He had treated her as a worthy opponent. “Your Latin is excellent, my lord,” she said. “I take issue only with its application.”
“Yes,” said the Earl of Strathmore, and the laughter left his face and something quieter replaced it. “Increasingly, so do I.”
He did not sleep well that night. He lay awake in the best guest room and conducted the kind of merciless self-examination clever people inflict on themselves at three in the morning. What he arrived at after a long time was this: he had been bested cleanly and completely in the one arena where he had believed himself unbeatable. The person who had bested him was a nobody, a penniless companion whom he had not troubled to look at until he wanted something to aim at. And the dominant emotion he felt about it was not, as it ought to have been, humiliation.
It was relief. He turned that over for a long time in the dark because it made no sense, and he did not care for things that made no sense. Why should a man feel relief at being defeated? Slowly, in the small hours, he found his way to the answer. He felt relief because for fifteen years he had been the most learned person in every room he entered, and the loneliness of that had become so familiar that he had stopped recognizing it as loneliness.
He had called it preference. He had called it standards. Tonight, in three languages, something had looked back at him from across a room for the first time in longer than he cared to calculate. The next morning, he went to the library, the one room at Linfield Park the other guests reliably avoided, books being the kind of thing one approved of in principle and declined in practice. He had not expected to find it occupied.
She was in the window seat with a volume open in her lap and the gray October light on her face, so entirely absorbed in the reading that she did not hear him enter. He stood in the doorway for a moment and did something he had not done in years. He looked at someone without calculating the cost of it.
“It is rude,” she said without looking up, “to watch a person read.”
He came into the room. “What are you reading?”
She turned the book so he could see. It was Galen in the original Greek.
“Of course it is,” said the Earl of Strathmore. “Naturally, it is a Greek medical text at half past seven in the morning. Why would it be anything so ordinary as a novel?” He sat down across from her, not too near. He was not entirely without social intelligence. “May I ask you something, Miss Hale?”
“You may ask. I make no promises about answering.”
“How does a lady's companion come to read Galen in the original before breakfast?”
Linnea Hale looked at him and made a decision. She had kept the door of herself locked for five years. The safe thing, the trained thing, the thing five years of dependence had made into a reflex, was to keep it locked now. She could say something modest and forgettable and let the cold Earl lose interest and leave. But there was something in the way he had said, “Naturally, it is a Greek medical text,” something that was not mockery but recognition, the sound of one creature who has lived inside a language encountering another.