The Duke's Perfect Wife(17)

Ian did not look up when Eleanor approached the desk. His pen went on moving, swiftly, evenly, ceaselessly. Eleanor saw as she reached him that he wrote not words, but strings of numbers in long columns. He’d already covered two sheets with these numbers, and as Eleanor watched, Ian finished a third paper and started a fourth.

“Ian,” Eleanor said. “I beg pardon for interrupting…”

Ian continued to write, his lips moving as his hand roved down the page.

“Ian?”

Curry yawned, moved his arm from over his eyes, and sat up. “Give up, yer ladyship. When ’e starts with the numbers, there’s no talking to ’im until ’e’s finished. Fibrichi’s sequences or something.”

“Fibonacci numbers,” Ian corrected him without looking up. “That is a recurrence sequence, and I do those in my head. This is not one.”

Eleanor pulled a straight-backed chair to the desk. “Ian, I very much need to ask you a favor.”

Ian wrote more numbers, pen moving steadily, without pause. “Beth isn’t here.”

“I know that. She couldn’t help me with this anyway. I need the favor from you.”

Ian glanced up, brows drawing together. “I am writing Beth a letter, because she isn’t here.” He spoke carefully, a man explaining the obvious to those too slow to keep up with him. “I’m telling her I arrived safely and that my brother is still an ass.”

Eleanor hid her smile at the last statement and touched the paper. “A letter? But this is all numbers.”

“I know.”

Ian redipped his pen, bent his head, and went back to writing. Eleanor waited, hoping he’d finish, look up again, and explain, but he did not.

Curry cleared his throat. “Beggin’ your pardon, your ladyship. When ’e’s at it like that, you’ll not get much more from ’im.”

Ian didn’t stop writing. “Shut it, Curry.”

Curry chuckled. “Except for that.”

Eleanor drew one of the finished pages to her. Ian had written the numbers in an even, careful hand, each two and five and six formed in an identical manner to all the other twos and fives and sixes, the rows marching in exactitude down the page.

“How will Beth know what the numbers mean?” Eleanor asked.

“Don’t get the pages out of order,” Ian said without looking up. “She has the key to decipher it at the other end.”

Eleanor slid the paper back where she found it. “But why are you writing to her in code? No one will read these letters but you and Beth, surely.”

Ian gave Eleanor a swift glance, his eyes a flash of gold. His lips twitched into one of his rare smiles, which vanished as he bent over the numbers again. “Beth likes it.”

The smile, the look, tugged at Eleanor’s heart. Even in the fleeting glance, she’d seen great love in Ian’s eyes, his determination to finish this letter and send it to Beth so she could enjoy decoding it. A way to tell her sweet nothings that no one else could understand. Private thoughts, shared between husband and wife.

Eleanor thought back to the day she’d first met Ian, when Hart had taken her to the asylum to see him. She’d found there a scared, lonely boy, arms and legs too large for his body, Ian enraged and frustrated because he could not make the world understand him.

Hart had been amazed that Ian had actually talked to Eleanor, had even let her slide an arm around his shoulders—briefly. Unheard of, because Ian hated to be touched.

That terrified youth was a far cry from the quiet man who sat here composing letters for his wife’s delight. This Ian could meet Eleanor’s eyes, if only for a moment, could let Eleanor in on a secret and smile about it. The change in him, the deep well of happiness he’d tapped, made her heart swell.

She also remembered the time that she and Hart had worked out a secret code between themselves. Nothing as elaborate as Ian’s number sequences, but a way for Hart to send Eleanor a message when he would be too busy to meet her that day. In whatever city they happened to be in, he’d leave a hothouse flower—usually a rose—lying in the corner of a garden where it would not be seen by the casual passerby. In London, it would be in Hyde Park at a certain crossing of paths, or in the garden in the middle of Grosvenor Square, under a tree nearest the center of it—Hart had made certain Eleanor had been given a key to the gardens very early in their courtship. In Edinburgh, he left them at their meeting spot in Holyrood Park.

Hart could have sent a note, of course, when he had to back out of an appointment with her, but he said he liked knowing she’d walk by their meeting spot and see the signal that he was thinking of her. Eleanor realized, of course, that he must have sent someone, an errand boy perhaps, to leave the rose for her, but it had never failed to melt her heart. She’d pick up the flower and take it home, keeping it to remind her of him until they met again.