Chapter Thirty-Eight
He’d almost lost Céleste.
And he suspected Pierre would have killed Henri too. If Henri and Nicolette hadn’t stopped at Eu Plate, asking for the location of a specific inn, Aldric wouldn’t have been with them and wouldn’t have pieced together the entirety of what was happening. They wouldn’t have arrived sufficiently armed.
He would have lost them both.
Céleste hadn’t let go of him in the two hours since he’d found her at the inn. And other than to tell Lord Grenton, who acted in the role of the local magistrate, what had occurred before their arrival, she hadn’t spoken.
Pierre and M. D’Aubert were being held, awaiting the circuit trials. The local surgeon had confirmed that, though Pierre had been shot, his life was not in danger. Both would be tried for their crimes.
Henri, Nicolette, Aldric, and Céleste were back in the carriage, making their way to Eu Plate. Their pace was slow on the dark road.
“We left Paris only two days after you did,” Nicolette told Céleste. “We hoped we could reach Norwood before you, or at least before the person who left us the letter telling us where you would be and that you would be killed if Henri didn’t offer himself as a substitute.”
Aldric had been told the details as they’d raced to the inn, praying they weren’t too late. He’d been so focused on reaching her that he’d not asked any of the myriad questions now swirling in his thoughts.
“Pierre and D’Aubert were being extorted by Jean-Francois. Why, then, was harming Henri their objective?”
“Jean-Francois threatened to reveal to the courts the evidence I have that Pierre was involved in illegal business ventures,” Henri said. “If Pierre could eliminate the evidence, or at least the one who knew where and what it was, then his difficulties with the law would come to a swift end.”
“As would his payments to Jean-Francois,” Nicolette added.
“But what reason did D’Aubert have?” Aldric could not piece together that man’s role in any of it.
“We haven’t sorted that out,” Henri said.
“Pierre’s plot aided his.” Céleste spoke quietly from within his arms. He felt her next breath shudder from her.
“Jean-Francois’s extortion of M. D’Aubert would be eliminated if .
. . I was eliminated. That was all he cared about.
Pierre’s plan was always to have me killed in order to lure Henri to the rescue and torture Aldric. ”
“Torture me?”
“You weren’t supposed to find me in time,” she whispered.
Blast those men to purgatory. He almost hadn’t. Another few minutes, and he would have been too late.
He would have lost her forever.
Aldric hardly slept. Visions of Pierre Léandre aiming a pistol at Céleste had haunted him throughout the night. He was supposed to have arrived too late. That had been Pierre’s plan from the beginning. What Aldric would have seen at the Anvil and Raven if they’d not reached her in time . . .
“I suspected I would find you somewhere in this house torturing yourself.” Of all the voices he might have heard in Eu Plate in the midmorning, Digby’s was not one he would have guessed.
“When did—? Why are—?”
“I have left you speechless, I see.” Digby sauntered into the sitting room where Aldric had been furiously pacing the past hour or more. “That is, I assure you, always the goal.”
From behind him, Lucas stepped into the room as well. Aldric breathed a sigh of relief; Julia and Lucas had made it safely out of France.
“I thought your goal, Digby, was ‘cutting a dash,’” Lucas said.
“One and the same, my friend.”
Henri entered next, trailed by Niles. He and Penelope had arrived too, apparently.
“We’ll have to thank the Beaumonts for hosting this impromptu Gents’ gathering,” Aldric said, disguising behind a gruff tone the surge of emotion he felt at having them there.
Kes stepped inside next, saying, “We already have, General.”
They were there, every Gent. Except Stanley.
“How are you all here?” Aldric asked. “I only sent word to Niles, and there wouldn’t have been time to get word to the north of England, let alone for Digby and Kes to reach here afterward.”
“They were at Lampton Park,” Lucas said.
“Why were you at the Park?” Aldric turned to Digby and Kes, who had crossed to where he stood.
“Attempting to secure the title of Best Honorary Uncle,” Digby said with a casual shrug. “The competition was stiff, but I am confident I have emerged victorious.”
Aldric turned his gaze to Kes, knowing he was far more likely to get a more direct answer from Grumpy Uncle than they ever did from the King.
“Violet and I heard rumblings of trouble in France and knew Lucas’s mother would be worried,” Kes said. “We made directly for Nottinghamshire to be with her.” He motioned to Digby. “His Majesty, here, was worried about the boys.”
“Imagine our shock when we both arrived at Lampton Park on the same day,” Digby said with a laughing smile.
“And imagine our shock,” Niles said, “when Penelope and I paused at Lampton Park on our way here to see if word had arrived of Julia and Lucas’s situation, only to find the Jester, the King, and Grumpy Uncle all there.
Once we told them of your note to us, there was no question that the whole group would rush to Derbyshire. ”
Aldric spun to face Lucas. “You should be at home with your boys, with your family. Being pulled away from them because I didn’t—” He pushed out a tense breath. “You should be with your family. I won’t be the reason you aren’t.”
Lucas’s expression grew solemn as he closed the distance between them, moving to stand directly in front of him. “Your quick thinking is the reason Julia and I were able to get safely out of France. You are the reason we can be with our boys.”
Aldric shook his head. “You should be with them now.”
“Do you truly think Julia left them at the Park after being away for weeks?” Lucas flashed him a look of amused annoyance.
“They are currently in the nursery playing with Adèle. And Julia is with Céleste under strict orders to rest, since so much traveling while in expectation of a new arrival has exhausted her. And my mother is here as well.”
“As are we,” Digby pointed out with a tug of his lace-edged cuffs.
“The King makes a good point.” Kes dropped into a chair. “You keep saying we should be with our families. The Gents are family and have been from the beginning. Stanley insisted on it.”
“Benicks ruin families,” Aldric muttered the truth he’d known all his life.
“Mine is a mess. My father’s business dealings played a role in Céleste nearly being killed last night and Adèle nearly being abducted in France.
Crofton is the reason all of you have come to visit me and are, instead, depending on the hospitality of the Beaumonts.
Henri trusted me to look after his sister and niece and”—he couldn’t even look at Henri—“we fell right into the trap being laid for them.”
Digby eyed his reflection in the window, smoothing the front of his jacket. “Let us know when you reach the part where you explain how it is that you have ruined this family of chosen brothers.”
Exhausted to his core, broken by seven years of blame and grief and sorrow, Aldric emptied his lungs as he sat on a sofa.
“Stanley told me the day he asked if I would join the Gents that this ‘family of chosen brothers,’ as Digby so aptly put it, needed a voice of reason with the ability to offer alternatives to the foolish things they too often chose to do.”
Lucas grinned, and it simply broke Aldric’s heart further. This wasn’t the happy recollection he no doubt expected it to be.
“That was always my role. The General, the master strategist. This family depends on me to do that.”
“And you do,” Niles said. “All the time.”
Aldric shook his head. “Stanley going to war was the very definition of a foolish thing. We all knew it was. We all knew he was no soldier. I didn’t—” He swallowed down the lump forming in his throat, just as he’d seen Céleste do so many times.
“I should have tried harder. I should have done more. But I didn’t.
I—I failed him, and I failed all of you.
I failed this family.” His next breath shook. “Benicks ruin families.”
Lucas’s brow pulled fiercely. “And you think you have ruined this one?” He motioned to the Gents as a whole.
“Not yet,” Aldric said. “But I promised Stanley I would get out before I did. I have pressed my luck as far as I dare. All my strategic prowess was barely enough to help get the lot of you, other than Digby, sorted out with your ladies. And I nearly lost Henri’s sister and niece.”
“Stanley was a brother to me from the time we were born,” Lucas said. “He would never have asked or accepted that promise from you. I suspect you made it yourself, hoping it would assuage this misplaced guilt.”
“It’s not misplaced. I should have done more. I should have tried so much harder to change his mind.”
“We all tried,” Henri said. “It wasn’t enough.”
“But I am—”
“Your ability to talk him out of foolish flights of fancy was of no use in this.” Digby didn’t often speak in complete earnest, but he did then. “He didn’t decide to go fight on an impulse or as a means to an adventure, and not even mostly to protect Lucas’s brother.”
Aldric had never heard Stanley’s motivations discussed in detail.
As far as he’d always known, Stanley was simply being his rather madcap self.
But Digby seemed to know something more.
Looking around at the other Gents, he could tell this was new information for them as well.
Even Lucas didn’t seem to know precisely what Digby was referencing, though he appeared to have some suspicions.
“Stanley’s reason for going ran deep,” Digby continued. “And unless you could have fixed what he was running from—and I assure you, Aldric Benick, you could not—nothing you said or did would have stopped him.”
“And if he knew you had carried this guilt with you all these years,” Lucas said, “it would shatter him. He only ever wanted us to be happy and to be family to one another.”
Aldric dropped his head into his hands. He was falling utterly to pieces. “The only family I’ve ever had actively destroys each other. I don’t know how to be part of a family in any other way.”
Someone sat on the sofa beside him. He didn’t look, but Henri’s voice identified him.
“You have been part of this family since Cambridge. And we don’t destroy each other. That, Aldric, was Stanley’s greatest gift to you and me. He let us have a family that would counter the families we were born to. He gave us a chance to learn how not to ruin families.”
“If you attempt to argue that you haven’t learned that,” Digby said, “I will insist that Puppy pummel you.”
Aldric looked up a little. “I miss him.”
“Puppy?” Digby scoffed theatrically. “He’s right here.”
He could smile at the teasing and found he was grateful for that. “Stanley. I miss Stanley.”
“He was the greatest,” Niles said, but without the crushing weight of grief. There was a lightness borne of happy memories. “There’ll never be anyone else like him.”
“And,” Kes added, “unlike the rest of us, he would already have asked you at what point during your flight from France you fell in love with Céleste.”
Aldric turned wide eyes on him.
Kes simply shrugged. “I am the intelligent Gent, you’ll remember.”
The rest of the group nodded their agreement. And they were all watching Aldric very closely. He shifted his gaze to Henri; they were discussing his sister, after all. Henri just grinned.
There would be no wriggling his way out of this.
“It started before we left Paris,” he said.
“Little things about her that—” He didn’t know how to explain what he’d been feeling.
He’d not yet taken the time to analyze it himself, something he was now very suddenly and swiftly doing.
“She was intriguing during the house party, though my father’s and brother’s mischief undermined that.
I wasn’t—she left, and I had so many other things that—I don’t know exactly when it started, but I know that nothing can come of it. ”
Five identical looks of dry doubt were tossed at him.
“You all knew my father and the source of misery he was. My mother was a wonderful, loving, happy, caring person, and he destroyed her. Crofton’s wife was at least not entirely selfish or unfeeling when they married, and she’s tiptoeing ever further in that direction.
I am doing my best, so help me, to prevent Roderick from being poisoned in the same way, but I don’t know if it’s possible.
” He rubbed at the stiffness in his neck.
“Jean-Francois has made Céleste’s life miserable.
Tying her to yet another family with such a daunting history of misery would be unfair. ”
Henri set an arm across his back. “Your mother was a wonderful, kind, loving person. You have said how hard you are working to help Roderick escape the pattern he was born into. You have seen this family”—he motioned to the Gents—“through a tremendous number of difficulties. That is not the behavior of someone who ruins families, but someone who is fighting to save a family.”
Lucas jumped in. “You worry so much about the legacy of your father that you’re discounting the power of your mother’s legacy.
You are so like her. Everything you’ve ever told me about her, I see in you.
You want to break this generations-old curse of ruined families and miserable lives?
Keep helping Roderick, but don’t think he’s the only chance the Benicks have.
You can break that pattern right now, the first person in, likely, generations who could manage it. ”
Fighting to save a family. He’d been attempting that since before he could remember. Mother leaving him an escape and enough freedom not to have to kowtow to his brother for his survival made her part of that effort. And Céleste—amazing, remarkable Céleste—had saved that means of escape.
“The clouds are lifting, I see,” Digby said.
Apparently, Aldric’s moment of realization had shone on his face.
I have loved you for seven years. He thought she still did. She’d asked for him at the inn, had remained in his arms for hours.
Kes rose. “Rehearse your no-doubt awkward declaration of love—you’re a Gent; awkward is unavoidable—and I will go see if the intended recipient of that awkwardness has ended her conversation with her requested visitor.”
“She requested a visitor?” Aldric asked.
Kes glanced back from the door with a significant look. “All the ladies threatened me on pain of torture if I told you, but I think I’ll risk it anyway. She has been having a conversation with your brother.”