For the adoration in the young men’s eyes, she might as well have handed them the moon and a sprinkling of stars to go with it.
“Thank you, ma’am,” they said in unison.
“Thank you, Lawrence and Eaves. We shall call for you when we require your assistance.”
Luke proved himself a bastard once again, for resentment burned in his belly at those shared smiles.
Luke stared after the young lads as they took themselves off. “Lawrence and Eaves,” he murmured. “You gathered that after less than a day in my household.” He’d not known their names in the years the young men had served in his employ.
Merry shrugged. “The better question is why don’t you know?” She looked squarely at him. “There’s always time to learn about the people around you. Why, you know my name,” she pointed out.
He frowned. “You’re not…” A servant.
“Just a servant?” She glanced his way.
Phrased that way, he heard the smugness in it. “I didn’t mean… What I was saying…” Only, what had he been saying?
“Yes?” she prodded.
Yes, her father was his family’s steward and her mother his family’s housekeeper, and both her siblings were employed by his family. But she wasn’t at all the same. “You played freely with my brother,” he said on a rush. And how he’d envied them both. “You had free rein of the estates.”
“And you think that somehow makes me different than Lawrence and Eaves?” she asked, amusement lacing her tone.
It did.
“It doesn’t,” she said, as if hearing his silent protestations. “It does not change that I’m still just a servant. I’m no different than Lawrence or Eaves or my mother or father or any other man, woman, or child in your employ.” She stopped and put herself in front of him, halting his forward strides. “People do not cease to be people because they are born outside your illustrious ranks, Luke,” she said with a matter-of-factness that stung more than had there been malice. She spoke so pragmatically, as if she merely recited the simplest of facts that the whole world should be in possession of but which he’d somehow failed to gather. “Just because people serve you doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be seen.”
Her earnestly delivered words brought Luke to a slow stop, and he stared off sightlessly into the distance as a long-distant memory whispered forward.
“But I like Willis, Mother.”
“There are no buts, Lucas. Willis is a servant, and you don’t play with servants.”
“He’s a boy.”
“He is a servant,” his mother insisted tersely.
Luke glared at his mother and his silent father. “Ewan plays with him.”
His father at last spoke. “Ewan will not be earl one day.”
“You are correct,” he whispered, and it was hard to say who was more shocked by that quiet admission, him or the woman beside him. Back in the moment, he looked to Merry. “My father and mother schooled me early on in my responsibilities.” A lone snowflake floated past, followed by another and another, until a soft swirl of white filled the air and dusted the ground. “Every expectation, every rule, everything from what I was to eat or not eat, on to who I was able to interact with was carefully specified.” Those born of his station would have likely received a similar elucidation. There were those who existed within the nobility… and everyone else. As such, he’d been reared on that principle. It had shaped him and his every interaction. Never before had he questioned the wrongness of it… until Merry. However, blame didn’t belong to his parents, it belonged to him for having blindly followed. “I’ve been a fool, listening and following expectations without ever thinking for myself.”
Her eyes widened into enormous pools that put him in mind of warmed chocolate.
Luke slashed his spare hand in the direction of where the footmen had stood when Merry had temporarily relieved them of their responsibilities. “They’ve been part of my household staff for two and a half years now,” he said, his words tumbling quickly over each other. “Two and a half years. Nine hundred and twelve days. And how do I know that?”
She opened her mouth, but he finished over her.
“Because I’m the one responsible for the finances and the ledgers detailing matters of business. Business, Merry. Business.” His voice crept up. “And I’ve not known their names.” He rocked back on his heels. “I’ve moved through life focused entirely on estate business and matters before Parliament, and well, there’s never been time for those details.” Even as that admission left him, he caught the conceit and self-absorption behind it, and along with that came an increasingly familiar sentiment—shame.
As she led them from the graveled path, through the grass, onward to a copse of trees, his strides grew quicker and more frantic. “And what has my devotion to rank and status gotten me?” His elevated voice carried throughout the gardens. “One brother whom I no longer speak with, the other brother whom I almost never speak to except for discussions on familial business.” It wasn’t every day that a man looked at himself, truly looked at himself, and saw that he didn’t like who he was. He didn’t like who he was, at all. And yet… closing his eyes, he tilted his head up toward the sky.
How very invigorating it was to simply own who he was and what he’d allowed himself to become.
Merry lightly squeezed his arm, bringing his eyes open. “Most noblemen will go their whole lives without changing,” she said quietly. “Without seeing servants as people or seeing any worth in those born outside their ranks, and yet you have.”
He laughed bitterly. “You heap praise where it’s undeserved.”
Her lips twitched at the corners, and she tightened her hold upon his forearm once more. “If you consider that praise, then there’s been a dearth of compliments in your life.” She softened that with a smile. Then the earlier seriousness returned to her expressive features. “I only speak the truth, Luke.”
Luke. She’d called him by his Christian name, and how very right it felt wrapped in her deep contralto.
“I daresay this is the beginning of a friendship between us.”
She laughed softly.
“You find that so very amusing?” he asked on a frown, equal parts hurt and offended. He’d not had a friend in his life, and having hung himself out there, vulnerable as he now was, left him with a strange little ache in his chest.
“Forgive me,” she said, her smile promptly dying, and he fought to keep his features immobile as she ran an astute and piercing gaze over him. “I’m not laughing at you, but rather, at the improbability of knowing one another for nearly the whole of our lives and only now choosing to begin a friendship. Why… you didn’t even know I was alive until yesterday morn,” she inaccurately pointed out before striding off toward the neat row of evergreens twenty paces ahead.
You didn’t even know I was alive.
Let her to her opinions. Luke beat the handle of the saw against his thigh and stared after her. He’d already hung himself out there, and all he’d managed to garner was a healthy degree of embarrassment. So why was it so very important that she know the truth? That he’d not been a total bastard. At least not as a young boy, he hadn’t. That aspect of his character had come later, with years of tutelage at the hands of his father and tutors.