Lord of Secrets by Alyssa Everett

welcomed any opportunity to speak of him?
    The marquess turned to look out over the water. Leaning on the rail, he began reciting Shakespeare.

“‘Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness;...’tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd: whose common theme
Is death of fathers...”

    He had a wonderful voice, so low, resonant and well bred it gave her the shivers. With his back to her, he had an unfamiliar grace about him, too, as if he were never completely relaxed unless he felt himself unobserved.
    Rosalie turned the speech over in her head. “I don’t think I can be that philosophical.”
    He looked over his shoulder at her with a fleeting smile. “I never could be either, Miss Whitwell. But then, the words are spoken by one of the more sinister characters in the play. I believe we’re meant to take them with a grain of salt.”
    “Oh.” Now he was probably thinking her green and ignorant—and with perfect justification, too.
    He straightened. “Besides, even if the speech were meant to be taken literally, not everyone can comfort himself with thoughts of heaven. My father died by his own hand, and I have it on good authority Paradise was therefore barred to him. But at least you’ve no such cause for fear. Your father lived a good life to the end.”
    “Yes—though I have a bone to pick with whoever told you such a vicious thing about your own father. Surely God is more merciful than that.”
    The marquess studied her for a moment, then looked away and cleared his throat in what, in any other man, would have seemed a self-conscious gesture. “Allow me to apologize for my clumsiness last night. I’m unaccustomed to conversing with young ladies, and it took me by surprise when you invited me to join you and your cousin for dinner. I beg your pardon for having been so disobliging.”
    What fine eyes he had, so dark it was hard to tell where the iris ended and the pupil began. She’d hoped he hadn’t really meant to rebuff her. Now it appeared she’d been right, and poor Lord Deal suffered from the same unfortunate shortcoming she did, a tendency to become flustered and say the wrong thing.
    Perhaps he’d be more at ease if they kept to small talk. “Thank you. We’ve had smooth sailing, don’t you think? We must be making good time to England.”
    “I bow to your expertise in such matters. This is only my second ocean crossing, the first having been the voyage in the other direction.”
    “Truly? In that case, I hope the journey wasn’t too tiresome for you.”
    “Not tiresome at all. In truth, much about America intrigued me.”
    The top of her head came barely to his shoulder, which meant she had to stand several feet back if she wanted to meet his eyes without having to crane her neck. “Such as?”
    He smiled. “To quote Hamlet’s answer when Polonius asked him what he read: ‘Words, words, words.’”
    She tilted her head to one side, regarding him in bemusement. “And what is that supposed to mean?”
    “I’d wanted for some time to visit America. One could hardly have devised a more interesting linguistic experiment if one had done it by design—an entire nation, separate and now wholly independent, speaking the same language we do, but at a remove of more than three thousand miles. Think of all the differences in accent, grammar, vocabulary and even spelling it’s already produced.”
    “You’re a student of language?”
    “Only a very amateur one. While in the States, I made a pilgrimage to New Haven in Connecticut to meet the American counterpart to our Dr. Johnson, Mr. Noah Webster. He published his own dictionary some ten or eleven years ago,