But that, he knew even as he arranged it, was a fiction, a decent excuse, a way to have her near without frightening her with the truth. The truth was simpler and had struck him somewhere in the middle of a slow waltz played for a dead soldier named Thomas. The truth was that he had been dying by inches for eighteen months in a world that saw only his wound. And a girl with a tray had looked at him and seen a man, and had staked everything she had on the strength of that seeing. And he was not going to let her walk back out of his life into the crowd.
She lived at Deverell through the spring, and Nathaniel, who had shut himself away for a year and a half, found reasons to be wherever she was. He learned that she read everything she could reach and had taught herself Latin from her dead brother's old schoolbooks. He learned that she was not afraid of his scar and did not look away from it, and that when he was in pain, for the leg was often bad, on cold days worst of all, she did not fuss or pity, but simply arranged quietly that the fire in whatever room he used was built up higher and said nothing about it, and let him keep his dignity. He learned that she laughed easily once she was not afraid, and that her laugh did something to the shut, cold place inside him that eighteen months of solitude had not touched.
Not everyone at Deverell was glad of her. There was an understeward, a pinch-superior man named Grig, who had served the old duke and thought he knew the natural order of things, and who made it his quiet business to remind Eleanor Shaw at every turn that she was a jumped-up housemaid who had danced her way above her station and would soon enough be found out. He gave her the meanest room in the servants' wing. He contrived that her wages were paid late. He let it be known, in the pointed way of such men, that a young woman who won a duke's notice by making a spectacle of herself in a ballroom, was not the sort a respectable household could be easy about.
Eleanor bore it without complaint and said nothing to Nathaniel because she had a horror of seeming to trade on his regard, and because she had learned in a hard life that a woman who runs to a powerful man with every grievance soon has no dignity left of her own.
But Nathaniel missed very little where she was concerned, and when he found her one gray morning scrubbing a hearth that was no part of her work—set to it, he learned, by Grig as a lesson in humility—he went very quiet in the way that had once made colonels nervous.
He did not rage. He assembled the household in the great hall that afternoon, every servant from the steward to the boot boy, and he stood before them leaning on his cane, and he said, in a voice that carried without being raised, "Miss Shaw came to this house because on a night when a room full of my equals thought it fine sport to mock a wounded man to his face, she alone of all of them, and a servant with everything to lose, set down her tray and stood at my side. There is not a soul under this roof, and I include myself, with half her courage. Any person in my employ who offers her anything but respect offers it to me and may seek a situation elsewhere by nightfall. I trust I am understood."
He looked once at Grig, who had gone the color of tallow. "I believe I am."
Grig sought a situation elsewhere by nightfall.
Eleanor, when she heard of the speech, was torn between mortification and a warmth she could not put down, and she came to find the duke in the library and told him rather severely that she had not needed rescuing, that she had been managing Grig quite well, and that he must not go about defending her honor before the entire household like something out of a bad novel.
"You did not need rescuing," Nathaniel agreed gravely. "You never do. That is rather the trouble with you, Miss Shaw. It leaves a man who would very much like to be of some use to you with almost nothing to do."
And she had laughed despite herself, and the awkwardness had melted, and it was after that, and easier after that, that he began to tell her the things he had told no one.
There was a particular evening toward the end of that spring that Nathaniel would remember all his life. A great storm had come down off the moors, the sort that rattles the old glass in its frames and sends the servants scurrying. And with the change in the weather, the pain in his leg had risen to a height he had not known since the surgeon's tent. He had shut himself in the small study, where no one might see, and set his jaw against it, and been surprised, some while later, by a soft knock.
It was Eleanor. She did not exclaim or fuss or wear the anxious, pitying face he braced himself against. She came in with a basin of hot water and cloths wrung out and steaming, and a small stoppered bottle of something her grandmother had made, she said, for a fisherman's aches. And she set them down and looked at him quite matter-of-factly and said, "You are white as the tablecloth, and you have been gripping that chair for an hour, and I will not pretend I have not noticed, because pretending would insult us both. I have nursed a man in pain before. I know how it is done, and I know how not to make a great tragedy of it. Will you let me?"
And Nathaniel Crane, who had never let anyone tend the leg since the army surgeons, who had guarded his wound like a shameful secret for eighteen months, found that he could not refuse her. Not because he was too weak, but because there was nothing in her face he needed to guard against.
So, he let her.
She worked the hot cloths and the ointment into the knotted muscle with strong sure hands and steady talk of ordinary things, the storm and the roses and a foolish letter from her mother. And slowly the fist of pain unclenched, and he lay back in the chair with his eyes shut and something in him he had held rigid for a year and a half finally, cautiously, let go.
"There," she said when it was done and her voice had gone gentle in a way she did not permit it in daylight. "It will ease now. It always eases in the end if someone is only willing to sit with it and not run away." She was quiet a moment. "That is the whole trick of it I have found. Not the ointment, the not running away."
He opened his eyes and looked at her kneeling by his chair in the lamplight, sleeves pushed back, the storm at the windows, her plain honest face soft with a tenderness she thought he could not see. And it was then, more than at the dancing, more than at any words, that Nathaniel Crane knew past all doubt that he loved her. And that he would never in his life run away from anything again, so long as she was willing to sit with him through it.
He said none of it then. He was not ready and neither, he judged, was she. But he reached down once and covered her working hand with his own and held it just for a moment, and she went still and did not pull away. And the storm rolled on over the moors, and in the small warm study, a wounded man and the girl who had never pitied him sat in a silence that said everything neither of them yet had the courage to speak.
He told her about the war, the mud, the field hospital, the friends he had carried out and the ones he had not been able to. He showed her the leg one evening plainly, without drama, so that there should be no mystery in it and no shame, the badly set bone and the long scar. And she looked at it steadily and then looked up at him and said, "It is the leg of a man who stood when he could have run. I do not see anything in it to pity, Your Grace, and I never did."