Chapter 10
This is Personal
IVY
There is something deeply, almost comically British about the fact that we have landed back in England under the shadow of a Russian death threat and Brumilde’s first instinct is to make a roast.
Not just any roast. A full production—three courses, candles on the table, the good napkins, as if she had been given six hours' notice rather than a terse phone call from Henderson saying everyone to the manor, tonight, don't ask questions. The woman is a genius and I love her unreservedly.
What is less comforting is the welcome we receive before we even reach the front door.
There are men stationed at the entrance—big, quiet, still, each one holding a weapon with casual competence. The night air carries the faint cold smell of gun oil and damp English grass. They acknowledge us as we pass. Alistair squeezes my hand.
Alex is in Henderson's arms when we find everyone in the sitting room, and the moment I see my baby—round-faced and bright-eyed and absolutely enormous compared to the infant I left a week ago—something in my chest bursts.
“Hello, you,” I say, and reach for him, and he comes to me immediately, grabbing a fistful of my hair.
I hold him and breathe him in—that specific irreplaceable smell of warm baby and mild shampoo—and he pulls back and looks at me, very seriously, with those dark solemn eyes, as if conducting an assessment.
I'm home, I think. Whatever comes next, whatever is waiting beyond those gates—I'm home.
“He's been pulling himself up on everything,” Brumilde says from the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron. “The bookcase, the coffee table, my legs. Everything is a climbing frame.”
“He's going to walk any day,” Henderson says, watching Alex with an expression of pure unguarded fondness that seems at odds with his considerable dimensions.
Alex, apparently bored of me already, makes a determined lunge toward Reacher, who has appeared at my feet with his tail going like a helicopter blade. Bijou is behind him, spinning in tight circles, both of them vibrating with the ecstasy of dogs whose people have come home.
“Hello, babies,” I say, and crouch down, and for approximately thirty seconds everything is chaos and warmth and wet noses.
The sitting room is warm and fire lit, the grate crackling steadily, the smell of woodsmoke and Brumilde’s roast drifting through from the kitchen.
Gregory is by the fireplace, a glass of red in hand, wearing a mustard-yellow waistcoat that I am fairly certain he has owned since approximately 1987 and which nobody has ever successfully persuaded him to retire. He catches my eye and raises his glass.
“Ivy, my dear,” he says. “Welcome back. I trust Spain was sufficiently dramatic?”
“Moderately,” I say.
“Good. We wouldn't want you getting bored.”
He beams at me with the specific warmth of a man who is genuinely delighted to see you and has absolutely no idea what day it is, and I feel the familiar complicated fondness that Alistair’s father Ravenscroft reliably produces in me.
Christopher is on the sofa, one hand in a bowl of olives, his phone face-down on the cushion beside him in the slightly too-deliberate way. He looks up when I come in and grins.
“My favorite gold digger,” he says. “You're back. How was the honeymoon? Actually, don't answer that, I can tell by looking at you both. Tanned, happy, absolutely disgusting. Some of us are trying to eat.”
Ariana is in the armchair nearest the window, her feet tucked beneath her, one hand resting on the small but unmistakable curve of her stomach. She has not been blessed by the pregnancy glow that some women get.
And then Isobel walks in with a cane.
I didn’t know about the cane. Neither, I can tell from the almost imperceptible stillness that moves through him, did Alistair.
It is not a concession. It is not the cane of a woman who has reluctantly admitted defeat to her own body.
It is an objet d’art— dark polished wood, almost black, with an elegant handle of heavy silver wrought into the shape of a raven in flight, its wings folded back along the shaft.
It is extraordinary. She moves with it the way she moves with everything—as if it were her idea, as if she had chosen it rather than required it.
She crosses the room to kiss my cheek. “You look so well, my darling.”
“You look wonderful,” I reply. Which is true. Which is always true.
Dinner is magnificent and chaotic in equal measure.
Brumilde has produced a rack of lamb with roasted vegetables, and we are barely seated before Alistair sets his glass down and looks around the table.
“I need to tell you all something,” he says.
“Before the lamb?” says Christopher. “It must be serious.”
“Christopher,” says Ariana.
“It's serious,” Alistair confirms.
Christopher puts his fork down with the expression of a man making a significant personal sacrifice.
Alistair keeps it short but tells them everything. Elena, the cocktail, what it means. He does it in the same even, precise way he delivers every difficult piece of information—completely, clearly, and with no visible emotion whatsoever. The table receives it in various ways, and begin to eat.
Gregory listens with his head tilted, his wine glass halfway to his lips, frozen there for the duration. When Alistair finishes he sets it down and says: “The Mirror Bratva. I thought we'd seen the last of them.”
“We had,” says Alistair. “This is personal. Not organizational.”
“Ah,” says Gregory. “Worse, then.”
“Potentially.”
Isobel picks her wine up and takes a long thoughtful sip. “Well. We've survived worse.”
“We have,” says Alistair.
“Though not,” Gregory adds, “with quite so many men with guns on the lawn. Brumilde, this gravy is extraordinary.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ravenscroft,” says Brumilde, entirely unfazed.
Christopher has been very quiet throughout. He is eating steadily and looking at his plate with the focused attention of a man who is thinking about something else and using the lamb as a decoy.
“Chris,” I say.
“Mm?” He looks up with the expression of a man who has only just remembered where he is.
“You all right?”
“Absolutely,” he says, too quickly. “Fine. Yes. Completely.”
He looks back at his lamb.
“Completely,” he says again, to his plate.
Alex is in his high chair at the corner of the table, working his way through a bowl of pumpkin mush with the focused intensity.
Reacher is stationed directly beneath him, correctly identifying the high chair as the highest-probability food source in the room.
Bijou is on Christopher's lap, which she is not supposed to be, and everyone is pretending not to notice.
It is Henderson who breaks it, quietly, when Brumilde brings the sticky toffee pudding—which is, as Brumilde’s puddings always are, the kind of thing that makes you briefly forget whatever was troubling you.
“Eight tomorrow?” he says to Alistair.
Alistair nods.
Ariana's hand moves to her stomach. She doesn't seem to notice she's done it. She looks at Henderson and he looks back at her and the conversation they are not having is the loudest thing in the room.
“Mildew,” says Christopher, reaching for the pudding. “You are the only good thing about this family.”
“For children who behave themselves,” Brumilde says, with a look, “there is more.”
“I thought I behaved impeccably,” he replies.
They leave together—coats, keys, a round of goodnights at the door, the cold night air rushing in.
Gregory with his coat on inside-out which nobody mentions.
Christopher already on his phone. Ariana lifting Alex from his high chair and passing him to Brumilde, not quite looking at Henderson. Henderson not quite looking at her.
Isobel is last.
At the door she pauses and turns back. She looks at me—just me—and for a single moment her expression is something other than composed. Something warmer and more complicated and harder to look at directly. She wants to tell me something.
“Good night, Ivy,” she finally says.
“Good night, Isobel,” I reply.
The door closes softly behind them all.
Alistair comes to stand beside me and we look at the empty room together—the disordered dinner table, the fire dying in the grate, Alex's abandoned bowl of orange mush, the good napkins crumpled and wine-stained and thoroughly used. The house smells of woodsmoke and roast lamb and candle wax.
I lean into him.
“It's good to be home,” I say. And mean it, despite everything.
He puts his arm around me and we stand there for a moment in the warm wreckage of the evening.
Outside, the men keep their watch in the dark. Inside, the dogs are snoring. It’s time for us to play.