Chapter 26
Rosalind recognized the voice a moment before the man stepped fully into the light.
Algernon.
For one suspended moment, no one moved.
He emerged slowly from the darkness at the foot of the stairs, and a chill swept over Rosalind’s skin.
He looked different from the man she remembered seeing in London. More exhausted, certainly. His clothes were rumpled from travel, shadows darkened the skin beneath his eyes, and several days’ growth roughened his jaw. There was a darkness to his expression that made him seem almost unfamiliar.
Yet there was nothing uncertain in the way he moved.
Algernon crossed the cellar slowly, without once looking down to judge his footing or glancing into the shadows around him. He seemed entirely at ease with the uneven floor and narrow passage, navigating the place with a familiarity that made Rosalind’s unease deepen.
Whatever Bryn Hir was to him, this was not the house of a man who rarely visited.
William released the iron bar and turned toward his brother. “Algernon.”
Algernon’s gaze passed over him and Gabriel before coming to rest upon Edmund behind the bars. His expression tightened, though Rosalind could not tell whether it was anger or something closer to hurt.
“So,” he said quietly. “You found him.”
William stepped away from the cell. “What have you done?”
A humorless laugh escaped Algernon. “What have I done?” He glanced around the cellar, taking in the iron bars and the lock they had been trying to break.
“You all stand there looking at me as though this is some great tragedy. Poor Eastmere, locked away from his family. Poor Rosalind, searching for her father. Poor William, discovering that his brother is not the man he thought he was.”
“Algernon,” William warned.
“No. You want to know what tragedy looks like? Look upstairs.”
Rosalind’s breath caught as she thought of the rooms she had wandered through only minutes ago. The papers scattered across tables and floors. The words copied repeatedly until they had begun to lose their meaning.
Why, Father.
Algernon’s attention shifted to her, and whatever he saw in her face seemed to give him his answer.
“You saw them, didn’t you?”
“The writing?”
His mouth twisted bitterly. “My writing.”
Rosalind stared at him.
Algernon moved farther into the cellar, passing close enough that she instinctively stepped aside. He scarcely seemed to notice. His attention had drifted upward, toward rooms none of them could see from where they stood, and when he spoke again, some of the fury had left his voice.
“I was eight the first time he brought me here.”
Rosalind felt something tighten painfully in her chest.
Eight.
She had imagined someone young when she saw the exercises upstairs, but not a child of eight.
“Eight years old,” Algernon continued, looking at William now, “and I could barely finish a sentence without him looking at me as though I disgusted him.”
The pages upstairs returned to Rosalind with terrible clarity. The repeated syllables. The words copied so many times that some had nearly torn through the paper.
“He would sit me at a desk for hours. Reading. Reciting. Again and again until I could speak a passage without stumbling over it. If I stuttered, I began again. If I cried, I began again. If I told him I was tired, he reminded me that a future duke did not have the luxury of being tired.”
“Algernon,” William said quietly.
“Do you know what happened when I could not do it?”
William said nothing.
“He left.”
The simplicity of the answer hurt more than Rosalind expected.
Algernon looked around the cellar, though Rosalind suspected he was seeing something very different from the room surrounding them now.
“He would lock the door and leave me here. Sometimes for hours. Sometimes all day. He said perhaps hunger would teach me discipline where kindness had failed.”
Tears burned behind Rosalind’s eyes.
She tried to blink them away and could not.
The dark corridors above seemed to rearrange themselves in her memory.
She no longer saw merely an abandoned house or pages left behind by someone long gone.
She saw a little boy sitting alone at a desk, hungry and frightened, forcing the same sounds from his mouth until they came correctly because perhaps this time his father would be pleased with him.
Perhaps this time he would stay.
Her father had never made her wonder whether she was loved.
The realization came with an almost painful force. Her father had corrected her, scolded her, worried over her, and occasionally driven her half mad, but never once in Rosalind’s life had she been made to believe his affection depended upon how perfectly she behaved.
She could not imagine being eight years old and believing otherwise.
Algernon turned toward William.
“And then there was you.”
William’s face tightened.
Something close to anguish crossed Algernon’s. “You never had to earn it.”
“Earn what?”
“His love.”
The words came quietly, stripped of all the anger that had filled his voice only moments before.
Rosalind lowered her gaze for an instant, a tear escaping despite her effort to contain it.
“He loved you because you existed,” Algernon continued.
“You walked into a room and he smiled. You spoke and he listened. You made mistakes and they became amusing stories told over dinner.” His mouth trembled before he pressed it flat.
“I spent years trying to become a son he could bear to look at.”
William stared at him. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t.”
“I was a child too.”
“Yes.” Algernon gave a broken laugh. “His precious boy. His perfect little jewel. Why would anyone tell you that your brother was being dragged to Wales and locked in a room because he could not say his own bloody name without stumbling over it?”
Rosalind looked at William through the blur of tears she no longer bothered trying to hide.
The pain on his face was unmistakable. He had only recently discovered how different their childhoods had been, but this was something worse.
Rosalind wondered whether even the Dowager Duchess knew what had happened in this house.
Whether anyone had known there was a frightened little boy in Wales trying to force himself into becoming worthy of his father.
“I never asked for any of it,” Algernon said.
The anger had almost entirely left his voice now, and what remained was infinitely harder for Rosalind to hear.
“I did not ask to be born. I did not ask to be brought into that family. I did not ask anyone to call me his heir.” His gaze returned to William. “I was a little boy who wanted his father to love him.”
Rosalind pressed her lips together, but another tear slipped down her cheek.
“But he didn’t.”
The cellar fell silent.
Rosalind looked at Algernon and, for the first time since he had emerged from the darkness, found it impossible to see only the man who had taken her father.
She saw the child whose handwriting she had found upstairs.
A frightened boy abandoned in a strange house, filling pages with words his mouth refused to form properly. A boy who had been told there was something wrong with him before he was old enough to understand why.
Who had believed that if he worked harder, spoke more clearly, became cleverer and quieter and stronger, he might finally earn what William had been given without asking.
Love.
Her heart broke for the child he had been, and the realization frightened her almost as much as the man standing before her now.
She understood why those two words had appeared again and again upstairs.
Why, Father.
How many times had he written them before he stopped expecting an answer?
Rosalind looked past him toward the iron bars. Pity did not erase those. It did not change the fact that her father had been taken, imprisoned, and kept from everyone who loved him.
“Papa helped you,” she said.
Algernon’s gaze snapped back to her.
Rosalind forced herself to hold it. “You told William yourself that my father helped you when yours would not. He listened to you. He taught you that taking longer to speak did not mean you had less worth saying.”
“Do not.”
“He stood beside you when your father would not.”
“Do not speak to me about what Eastmere did for me.”
“But he did do those things.”
Algernon crossed toward her, and William immediately stepped between them.
Rosalind touched his arm. She understood the instinct that had put him there, but she was not afraid to face Algernon. After a moment, William seemed to understand and remained close without blocking her from him.
Algernon noticed the exchange. His gaze dropped briefly to Rosalind’s hand before returning to her face.
“My father helped you,” Rosalind continued. “And because of that help, you became the man standing here now. Educated. Respected. Married to a woman who loves you. What happened in this house was terrible, but it did not take everything from you.”
“A life built upon a lie.”
The bitterness in his voice stopped her.
Algernon looked at her with an exhaustion that seemed older than the night around them. “Do you think surviving it means it ceased to matter?
That because I learned to speak properly, I should forget being locked here until I could satisfy him? That because I married Augusta, I should stop remembering what it was to watch the man I called Father look at me and wonder whether he had chosen the wrong son?”
Rosalind had no answer for that.
After a moment, Algernon turned away.
“I will not have children.”
William stared at him. “What?”
“I used to think perhaps I would. It is expected, after all. Every duke must produce an heir.” His mouth twisted around the word. “But I have no intention of bringing a child into the world only to spend the rest of my life wondering whether I will one day look at him the way Father looked at me.”
“You are not him,” William said softly.
Algernon closed his eyes. “You cannot know that.”
The words were so quiet that Rosalind’s throat tightened again.
For a moment, all the anger seemed to leave him. Then his eyes opened, and the hardness returned.
“And then I discovered that the one man I believed had saved me was no better.”
Edmund moved closer to the bars. “Algernon.”
“You knew.”
“I kept your secret.”
“You knew what I was, and you said nothing.”
“I told no one.”
“You were going to tell William.”
“No.”
Algernon turned on him. “Do not lie to me now.”
“I am not.”
“I watched the two of you.” His voice rose as years of suspicion seemed to spill out with it.
“Dinner after dinner. Conversation after conversation. William seeking your advice, sitting together at the club, trusting you more every year while you carried the one secret that could destroy everything I had spent my entire life trying to deserve.”
Edmund gripped the bars. “And still I said nothing.”
“Because I stopped you.”
Rosalind’s stomach turned. “My father did not betray you. He protected you.”
Algernon looked at her with open contempt. “He pitied me.”
“He loved you.”
For an instant, the fury disappeared from his face, and what replaced it made Rosalind’s chest ache. He looked devastated, almost like the little boy she had been imagining only moments before.
Then a bitter laugh escaped him. “No. Augusta loves me. She has never looked at me and seen a pathetic boy who needed saving. She is the only person who has ever chosen me knowing exactly what I am.”
Something in William’s expression changed. “What does Augusta have to do with this?”
Algernon regarded him almost pityingly. “You truly have no idea.”
“Algernon.”
“She warned me you were coming.”
A chill passed through Rosalind.
Augusta.
Her thoughts returned immediately to the conversation that had troubled her ever since Nelly reported what she had learned.
Augusta had been the one to tell Rosalind that her father had supposedly been seen elsewhere in London with another woman. She had presented it as rumor, another possibility worth investigating, yet no one Nelly questioned had heard so much as a whisper of it.
It had never been a rumor at all.
Augusta had wanted Rosalind looking somewhere else.
“When?” William demanded.
“The message reached me shortly before you arrived.” Algernon glanced toward the stairs. “Barely enough time to prepare.”
Rosalind followed his gaze, and every thought of Augusta disappeared beneath a sudden rush of fear.
Isabella was still somewhere upstairs.
“Where is she?” Rosalind demanded.
Algernon frowned. “Who?”
“Isabella. She was outside the house. Where is she?”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.”
Rosalind searched his face, trying to decide whether he was lying, but there was no time to stand here questioning him while Isabella remained somewhere above them.
“Then let my father out.”
“Rosalind,” Edmund said sharply.
She barely heard him. Weeks of fear and uncertainty had brought her to this cellar, and her father was finally within reach, separated from her by nothing more than iron bars and the refusal of the man standing before them.
“You have kept him here for weeks because you were frightened he might tell William something he had already spent years refusing to reveal.” Her voice shook, but she made no effort to hide it.
“What happened to you in this house was cruel. It was unforgivable, and I am sorry anyone ever made a child suffer that way.”
Algernon’s expression faltered.
Rosalind felt the tears still damp upon her cheeks and did nothing to wipe them away. She meant every word. Some part of her would probably always ache now when she remembered those pages upstairs and imagined an eight-year-old boy writing Why, Father over and over again.
But the man who had hurt that boy was dead.
“My father did not do it to you,” she continued. “He does not deserve to be punished for the man who did.”
Algernon’s face hardened once more.
“Open the door.”
His gaze moved past her toward Edmund, and the silence stretched long enough that Rosalind found herself hoping some part of the man her father had once helped might still be reachable.
Then Algernon looked back at her. “No.”
William struck him.
Rosalind cried out as Algernon staggered backward from the force of the blow. William had moved so quickly that she had barely seen him cross the distance between them, but the fury on his face told her the refusal had broken whatever restraint remained.
“William!”
Algernon recovered before she could reach either of them. He lunged at his brother, catching William around the middle, and the two men crashed onto the stone floor together.