in remembrance. “I also knew Milbotham was the person who ruined it, as he ruins everything. I wanted to give you both a second chance. As far away from the marquess as I could manage, with as few barriers to trying again as possible. For Weston, that meant separating him from his father. Arriving with a license in his hand. But for you... I knew the farm was the only lure that would tempt you to try.”
Olive glared at him. Of course he was right, the manipulative scoundrel.
“The farm was always yours, no matter what. But if I could give you a lifetime with the man you love, too...” Papa’s gaze was earnest. “You deserve to have it.”
“Diabolical... yet heartwarming,” Elijah said. “I can only imagine what your partnership with my father must have been like.”
Olive slanted him a look. “You can’t possibly forgive him for shamelessly manipulating us, just because his intention was to...”
Her voice trailed off.
“Ah, yes.” Elijah winced. “I do have a questionable history of valuing good intentions over potential damage. But in your father’s defense, I had been an arse to you. My father dines on underhanded tactics at teatime, so he can hardly act pious when he discovers—”
“Slow down. You both are speaking too quickly to interpret.” But that didn’t make sense… Olive thought back over the conversation. “I was too caught up in the argument with my father to remember you couldn’t follow along...” She stopped speaking aloud, and continued only with her fingers. “But you weren’t lost at all, were you?”
“I followed the gist,” he replied with his hands, spelling out the word gist rather than use the sign. “I don’t know all of your words, so I have to extrapolate from context, which is difficult, because you two sign so quickly and messily, it’s like... finger-mumbling at high speed.”
His signs were clumsy, but comprehensible.
“We could have slowed down,” she signed back, taking care to form each word clearly and properly, like Elijah had done when he’d spoken to her father. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I was here for nefarious reasons,” he reminded her, spelling out the word nefarious between otherwise competent, if inelegant, signs. “Deceiving you was bad enough. Ingratiating myself with your father would only have compounded my sins.”
She nodded slowly. That sounded like Elijah. Even playing the villain, he would have wanted to inflict the least damage possible.
“Besides,” he continued, “it’s not just the speed. Even when I know the word, some of them are different now. You’ve modified them over the years. Or perhaps I’ve forgotten exactly how they went.”
“Papa learned to sign at Braidwood’s Academy for the Deaf,” Olive said. “How did you learn to sign?”
“Milbothom,” Papa answered. “He was my age and our estates shared a boundary. We played together from the moment we could toddle. On holidays from the Academy, I taught him everything I could. He was clever, and outpaced my parents from the first. I could speak to him almost as easily as with my Deaf friends.”
“I suppose he was like me,” Olive said. “You taught me from birth. I could use sign language before I could speak. Even when I did start talking, my signs were always more fluent than Mother’s.”
“And me,” Elijah added. “I was also taught from birth, although I did not have an Academy of Deaf friends to converse with. It was more like a private language between me and my father.”
“But if Milbotham took the time to teach you an entire language you didn’t need to know...” Papa blinked in wonder. “Then he expected we would reconcile one day.”
“Or hoped you might,” Olive agreed softly.
Elijah gave a crooked smile. “As a child, I thought he’d made me learn to use signs so that other people wouldn’t hear him being nice to me. Ordinary conversations were sign language, but all of our arguments were mortifyingly out loud.”
“Almost as if sign language was just for good memories,” Olive said. “Almost as if our fathers aren’t vengeful Machiavellian tacticians after all, but rather two stubborn old fools each waiting for the other one to wave the white flag first.”
Papa’s eyes slid away as though pretending he hadn’t seen her comment.
She waved her hand toward his face. “I’ll forgive you on one condition.”
That got his attention.
“Anything.” He quickly made the signs. “Name your terms.”
“Go and talk to him,” she said in exasperation. “He’s only up the road in the castle. All you have to do is—”
“He’s here?” Papa’s eyes widened in shock. “Milbotham