Chapter 21 #2
“Be delicato with him.” Lucrezia’s voice softened, and the fierceness gave way to something more vulnerable.
“He carries more guilt than you know. About Charlotte. About the bambino. About you.” She held Evander’s gaze.
“He is more like you than you expect, Your Grace. He simply never learned to carry the weight the way you do.”
Evander folded the paper and placed it in his coat. He stood. Quentin stood beside him.
“Thank you, Donna Fierro.”
“Find him.” Lucrezia followed them to the door. “Bring him home. He has been away long enough.”
“I am going tonight,” Evander announced.
Quentin kept pace beside him on the pavement, his coat collar turned up against the evening chill. “Then I am coming with you.”
“This is between me and Richard.”
“And it will still be between you and Richard when you arrive. But you are not riding to Sussex alone in the dark after the day you’ve just had, and I’m not letting you.
That is the end of the discussion.” Quentin flagged Evander’s carriage.
“Sussex. Now. We can argue about boundaries in the carriage.”
Evander did not argue. The truth was that he did not want to make this journey alone, and Quentin knew it, and the fact that neither of them said so was its own form of honesty.
They rode south through the fading light. London fell away behind them, replaced by open country, hedgerows, and the long shadows of a fall evening. Evander sat with the folded directions in his hand and Lucrezia’s words turning in his mind.
Charlotte was carrying another man’s child.
Tommy. The baby sleeping in a crib in Blackholm House, gripping Mary’s collar, curling his fist around Evander’s finger.
If Lucrezia was telling the truth, Tommy was not Richard’s son.
The betrothal, the disappearance, the basket on the doorstep, all of it had been built on a lie Evander had never thought to question because the evidence seemed obvious.
Richard’s handkerchief. Charlotte’s ring. A note in Richard’s hand.
So the evidence had been staged. Charlotte and Richard had arranged the basket to look like Richard’s child precisely because the truth, that Charlotte had been carrying someone else’s baby, was worse.
Another question rose in Evander’s mind.
Who was Tommy’s father, then?
But that was an answer that could wait. For there was one priority now: go to Richard.
Then find Charlotte. She would be the one to solve this mystery.
Evander pressed his thumb against the bridge of his nose. The carriage swayed on the country road, and the questions multiplied faster than he could order them.
“You are thinking too loud,” Quentin said from the opposite seat. “I can hear the gears from here.”
“If Lucrezia is telling the truth, then everything we assumed about Tommy is wrong.”
“If she is telling the truth, then your brother is not a father but a conspirator. Which is marginally better, depending on one’s perspective.” Quentin stretched his legs. “It also means the real father is still out there.”
Evander said nothing. That was a problem for another day.
The carriage rolled on. The stars appeared one by one above the Sussex countryside, and the road narrowed, and the villages grew smaller and further apart.
They arrived after eleven. The cottage sat at the end of a dirt lane, sheltered by oaks, with a low stone wall and a light burning in the downstairs window. It was modest, clean, and well-tended.
And Richard had been hiding in it for over six months.
Evander climbed down from the carriage. His boots crunched on the gravel path. The night was cold, the sky clear, and the light in the window flickered as someone moved behind the curtain.
He knocked.
Footsteps. A bolt was drawn back, then the door opened.
“Well. It was high time, I suppose,” a familiar voice said.
Richard stood in the doorway in a linen shirt and bare feet, his hair longer than Evander had ever seen it, his face thinner.
He looked older. Six months older, or six years. The boyishness that had always defined him, the easy smile, the open warmth Mrs. Cahill had described, was gone, replaced by something more guarded. More careful.
More like Evander.
A chill went down his spine at the realization.
As the night pressed in around them, and the cottage light spilled across the threshold, Evander felt the relief and the anger arrive at the same time, tangled together so tightly he could not separate them.
Richard’s eyes moved from Evander to Quentin, standing by the carriage, then back.
“Give me a moment,” Richard said, this time lower than before. “I’ll pack my things.”
He disappeared inside. Evander stood on the doorstep and listened to the sounds of drawers opening and closing, a bag being packed, the small mechanical noises of a man dismantling a hiding place he had lived in for six months. Quentin walked up and stood beside him without speaking.
Richard emerged ten minutes later with a leather bag over his shoulder. He locked the cottage door, pocketed the key, and followed them to the carriage.
They rode in silence for the first mile. Richard sat opposite Evander, his bag on the seat beside him, his hands clasped between his knees. He looked at the floor of the carriage. Then at Evander.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t.” Evander’s voice was controlled but thin at the edges. “I am not the only person who deserves that apology, so you had better save it until we reach London. You will need everyone.”
Richard flinched. He looked down at his hands. “How did you find me?” he asked after a moment.
“Lucrezia.”
Richard’s head came up. A raw, unguarded light moved across his face at the sound of her name, the kind of emotion Evander had spent his life training himself not to show.
His brother’s eyes brightened, his voice changed, and the question that followed carried the weight of a man asking about the only thing that mattered.
“Was she well?”
Evander studied his brother’s face. The brightness in his eyes. The way his hands had stilled at the mention of her name, the restless guilt replaced by something steadier.
Whatever Lucrezia Fierro was to Richard, whatever their story held, the feeling was real. Because he knew his brother, and what Evander saw in Richard… it was all pure and very, very real.
“She was well,” Evander confirmed. “She asked me to bring you home.”
Richard pressed his lips together and nodded, and his eyes shone in the carriage lamplight, and he looked out the window at the dark countryside passing, and he did not speak again for a long time.
Quentin cleared his throat. “Well. This has been a tremendously enjoyable evening. Coffeehouses, opera singers, mysterious cottages. I feel like a character in a novel.”
Evander didn’t respond, and neither did Richard.
Quentin settled back in his seat and folded his arms. “I liked it better when you were both talking to me individually,” he muttered. “The brooding coming from both of you is oppressive.”
The carriage rolled on through the Sussex night, carrying three men back toward London, toward a baby in a crib, toward a wife who did not yet know that the story she had believed since the day she walked into Evander’s parlor was about to change entirely.
Evander looked at his brother’s face in the lamplight and saw what Lucrezia had told him to look for.
He is more like you than you expect.