TWENTY-ONE
Cecily paced before the hearth of her wee sitting room, wrestling with herself.
Rawkin and the other servants had already turned in for the night. She had undressed down to her shift and braided her hair, preparing for bed as well.
However, Matthias had arrived home, summoned Hansen to assist him in changing out of his evening attire, and then disappeared into the library. Hansen reported that the urgent missive from Grayburn had remained clutched in his lordship’s hand.
To Cecily’s knowledge, Matthias hadn’t reappeared.
It was none of her business what the master of the house did. He could sleep on the library floor for all she should care.
And yet . . .
Their stations blurred more and more with each passing day.
Matthias had become her dear friend. More than a friend, truthfully. All she had to do was recall the feel of his tender arms around her, the steady thump of his heart . . .
No. He was decidedly more than a friend, now.
And she knew that an urgent letter bearing a ducal seal usually wasn’t an omen of happy tidings. At least the sealing wax hadn’t been black—a sign of death and mourning. But that didn’t mean the news wasn’t dreadful. Had something befallen Lady Isla and her new babe?
As his particular friend, it pained Cecily to imagine Matthias suffering. However, joining him alone in his study in the dead of night was rather beyond the pale. Her reputation would be shattered if they were discovered.
She debated the matter at length, but eventually, concern won out over propriety. She tugged on her dressing gown, wrapped a heavy shawl around her shoulders, and climbed the stairs on slippered feet. Candlelight flickered from beneath the library door. On a deep breath, she knocked softly.
“Come,” he called just as quietly.
Matthias was seated on the sofa before a low-burning fire, a candelabra flickering on the mantel.
An open bottle of whisky sat on the table at his elbow, a finger of amber liquid in a tumbler.
Like herself, he was in a state of dishabille.
A silk banyan draped his shoulders but remained untied, revealing trousers and braces, a partially unbuttoned shirt, and at least five inches of bared chest. Her eyes snagged on that swath of skin before she forcefully jerked them away.
Grayburn’s letter rested beside Matthias on the sofa.
He lifted his head and met her gaze. She expected to see devastation or sorrow . . .
Instead, he appeared resigned, perhaps even frustrated, but not grief-stricken.
So the news hadn’t been so dreadful, at least.
A chill hung in the room. Saying nothing, Cecily quietly shut the door and crossed to the fire, stirring the flames to life and adding peat from a nearby basket.
She stood to find him studying her, eyes drifting down her worn dressing gown and pausing on the scrap of fabric that tied off her night braid . . . surveying her just as she had him.
He hiccupped. “I’m a wee bit drunk.”
“Aye. The smell of whisky already told me that. Have you had much?”
“A finger or two.”
She cocked her head.
“I can’t hold my liquor. It annoys Gray no end. Yet one more way I am a Disappointment.” He raised his stump and his hand, as though framing the word. Cecily could hear the capital D.
Truthfully, she wanted to scold Grayburn. Whatever he had written had not been kind. Did His Grace not understand that Matthias’s heart should be treated with care?
She sat in a wingback chair perpendicular to the sofa, pulling her shawl around her shoulders.
“Did you have an enjoyable evening?” she asked, choosing to warm up to the topic of Grayburn’s letter. “How do you feel you acquitted yourself?”
“Well enough.” He shrugged and heaved a deep sigh. “The evening was unremarkable.”
“Unremarkable? Damned by faint praise, I see.”
That earned her a ghost of a smile. “Mrs. Liston served a lovely dinner, and Miss Liston, I am sure, wore her finest silk gown. Conversation flowed, and I wasn’t the cause of too many stunned silences. So all in all . . . a fine evening.”
“You don’t sound as if you enjoyed yourself.”
“No. I can’t say that I did.”
Silence.
His eyes found hers and held. “You weren’t there, you see.”
Cecily swallowed, pulse tingling in her fingertips. They never spoke of this—the tentative affection blossoming between them.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, because she was. She would have loved nothing more than arriving at the Listons on his arm.
“Is it terrible news then?” She glanced at the open letter. “I live in dread of receiving such letters.”
“No one has died or been harmed, if that is what you mean.”
It wasn’t. “Would you like to speak of it . . . with a friend?”
He stared at her for a long moment.
“We are friends, you and I,” she continued.
“Friends,” he repeated, his mouth warping around the word as if he found it distasteful.
She lacked the courage to ask why.
On a sigh, he picked up the letter. “My ducal brother has sent a lengthy and scathing diatribe cataloging my deficiencies as a sibling. I neglected to inform him of a matter, and he has discovered my recalcitrance. As you can imagine, he was not pleased.”
“Can you rectify the lapse?”
“No.” A sharp slice of his head.
More silence.
The fire popped in the hearth, swelling around the peat and brightening the room.
He tossed the letter back onto the sofa. “Moreover, Gray would be furious if I disclosed the problem, even to a friend.” There was that acidic lingering on the word again.
Cecily nodded. “I shall not ask then.”
“You should ask.” Lord Matthias was not a belligerent drunk—not that he appeared too deep in his cups—but the whisky clearly loosened the tight strictures he placed on himself. “Gray would not approve, but as you are my particular friend”—that word again—“I should like you to know.”
“Thank you.”
“But you must swear on your life that you shan’t t-tell anyone,” he hiccupped.
Maybe he was more in his cups than she, or even he, supposed.
“Perhaps we should wait until morning, when you have had time to think—”
“My mother is not dead.”
The room reverberated with his words.
Cecily sucked in a sharp breath. “Pardon?”
“My mother,” he repeated. “Not dead. And yes, to answer your next question, the grand mausoleum erected to her in the Pettercairn kirkyard states, quite definitively, that she died in 1805.”
Words failed Cecily. The sheer scope of this secret . . .
“Matthias.” His name emerged in a horror-stricken gasp.
He laughed, sharp and caustic, and ran a hand through his hair, sending it poking up at angles.
“I returned from a ball during that terrible Season in London—the one where I saw you at every turn—and found Mamma standing with Gray in his study. She had learned of our father’s death a few months before and had immediately resurfaced, begging for funds. ”
Cecily blinked, trying to work her head around the mind-boggling implications of this confession. “But your father—”
“He knew. My parents hatched the scheme together without informing Gray or myself. As I told you, my mother refused to share my father’s bed after my birth.” He raised his stump with a bitter twist of his lips. “Isla was born, and my mother was deeply in love with Isla’s father.”
“Do you know the identity of the gentleman?”
“I’ve never asked. I suspect Gray knows.”
“But Isla would have been past childhood in 1805.”
“Yes. My sister was twelve at the time of our mother’s supposed demise. In actuality, Mother requested a formal separation—one that would permit her to set up her own household with her lover and not be obligated to my father any longer. He refused, as he wished to avoid shame and scandal.”
“But pretending she had died was infinitely worse!”
“My thoughts precisely,” he snorted. “But only if their deception were discovered. To that end, Father settled a sum on her, and Mamma agreed to leave and never return. Gray was away at school. Isla and I were visiting family with our grandmother. We learned of our mother’s death, but by the time we returned home, she was already buried, none of us the wiser. ”
Cecily pinched the bridge of her nose. “Honestly, this sounds like the plot of a penny dreadful novel.”
“Dreadful is right.”
Matt stared at Cecily, contemplating the firelight bathing her skin in golden light and catching in the coppery highlights in her braid.
He wasn’t precisely drunk. More like intoxicated just enough for the world to lose its hard edge.
Just enough to loosen his tongue. And, perhaps most disquieting, just enough to wonder what would happen if he tugged her braid free of its ribbon tie.
The image of her hair unbound, tumbling long and loose down her back, rendered him light-headed.
Or perhaps it was simply the magnitude of his love for her, thrumming like a living thing.
Maybe he was more like his father than he supposed. They had both fallen madly in love with one woman and one woman only. His father’s love story had ended in tragedy—one that Matt’s birth had precipitated.
And then there was Gray. Matt recalled how his brother stared at Lady Mariah Balfour—intent, hungry, dark—when he supposed himself unobserved.
Would Matt’s own story end differently? Or were all Kinsey men doomed to wallow in unrequited love? Perhaps there was some truth to his family line being cursed.
“And you and Grayburn learned of your mother’s rebirth, as it were, much later?” Cecily asked.
“Yes. Our father confessed the whole to Gray on his deathbed. I didn’t discover it until that night in London, many months after my father’s passing.
Walking into the study and seeing her standing before Gray at his desk, bright and alive and merry .
. . I was torn between hugging her in relief and shouting in fury. ”
It had been one of those moments that transformed one’s life into a before and an after.
Before he had known his mother lived.
After he realized he would have to carry the secret of his parents’ deception to the grave.
His mother’s smile had been brittle that night. Her brightness, he realized, was actually desperation.