Chapter Twenty-Five
Mother had a way with words. According to his esteemed parent, Adam’s name was on the lips of every member of the ton. This time, the Upper Ten Thousand chose to entertain itself by speculating on his recent marriage.
Some are saying that Persephone has left you already.
“Thank you, Mother,” Adam muttered, tossing her letter onto his desk. Apparently, Mother thought Adam missed the spiteful gossip of society. Unlike herself, Adam preferred being as far from London as he could possibly get for as long as he could possibly manage. Only Parliament brought him to Town.
Father had devoured the first few letters Mother had sent back to Falstone after she had moved to London.
Adam had watched him read, holding his breath, hoping Father would tell him that Mother was coming back.
After six months Adam had quit hoping, and Father had begun simply burning the letters unopened.
“We are fine without her,” Father had told him. “We do not need her here.”
They hadn’t needed anyone. Adam had spent his days dogging his father’s heels, learning the Falstone lands inch by inch.
He had learned where the forests were being replanted, where the pack would be found in each season, where the tenant cottages were and who lived in each.
He had learned the servants by name, which families had served at Falstone for generations.
Father had taught him to be a duke, to do his duty.
Neither he nor his father had needed a single soul beyond each other. Then Father died.
At seven, Adam was the Duke of Kielder. Mother came to Falstone for the funeral and had seemed genuinely grieved. She’d stayed long enough to help Nurse Robbie pack Adam’s personal effects and wave her handkerchief as the Falstone traveling coach took Adam to Harrow.
Adam rubbed his eyes, leaning back in the armchair he always occupied when alone in his book room. He couldn’t seem to stop the memories he had no desire to relive.
Harrow had been nothing short of torture those first few weeks.
Father had been dead only a month. Adam wore a black armband around the sleeve of his blue Harrow jacket and, overwhelmed by his grief, had kept himself from crying by biting the insides of his cheeks until he bled.
He’d grown accustomed to the metallic taste of his blood in those early months.
What he hadn’t come to accept, what he hadn’t anticipated, was the staring and the whispers. He’d known his face was scarred, knew what the surgeons had done to him. But no one at Falstone had stared. No one at Falstone had cared, beyond Mother and her unceasing “my poor boy.”
“Do not pity him, Harriet,” Father would insist every time Mother had called Adam by her favorite moniker. “Adam will be Kielder someday. He has to learn to fight battles.”
Jeb Handly and Father had taken up his education early on, teaching him to fight in the back courtyard of Falstone.
Harrow had provided ample opportunity to use those skills.
Between his indisputable tone and air of authority—another weapon he’d learned from his father—and his ability to back up his threats, the other boys had quickly learned to take the Duke of Kielder at his word.
The boys left him alone and, in his solitude, Adam had thought of Falstone and Father and had done his best not to think of Mother. His isolation had lasted all of two terms, ending abruptly the day a group of older boys had decided to rough up a scrawny boy far younger than they were.
Adam had seen their victim before—he’d always seemed too small, too defenseless.
Despite being outnumbered and puny, the kid had been defending himself with a determination Adam couldn’t help admiring.
So Adam had stepped into the fray. He’d only been seven himself, but the dynamics of that brawl had changed the moment he’d joined.
All of Harrow knew he didn’t find it necessary to fight politely: no holds were barred, no part of the anatomy was off limits.
He was unrelenting and, at times, vicious.
By the end of his first year at Harrow, Adam had no longer needed to fight. He had become legend. And he had a shadow.
The scrawny boy hadn’t left him alone since the day Adam broke the noses of two of his assailants and very nearly broke the arm of the third. In fact, Harry, who was no longer scrawny, was in Adam’s library at that very moment. He was the only person Adam had ever known who had stayed with him.
Some are saying that Persephone has left you already.
Adam glanced uneasily at Mother’s letter where it lay discarded on his desk.
His plan had been to marry a lady who could leave, as she inevitably would, and her absence wouldn’t have bothered him in the least—a woman he would be better off without, whom he wouldn’t need.
But the thought of Persephone leaving had a far from neutral effect.
Adam rose abruptly to his feet, pacing to the fireplace.
Mother had stayed for years before moving to Town.
Before that final departure, she had been gone often.
Every time a new surgeon had arrived, Mother had left.
She would tell him to be brave, say how very sorry she was, and then she would leave.
Newcastle had been one of her favorite destinations.
About the time his new wounds had healed enough for the pain to be bearable, she would return.
“My poor boy,” had always been her words of greeting.
What difference would it make to him if Persephone decided to spend weeks, months, away from Falstone? Or when she eventually left altogether?
Adam pushed away from the mantel and crossed to the French doors overlooking her garden.
He’d begun thinking of the hedge garden as somehow belonging to Persephone.
She spent a great deal of time there, reading, sitting, walking.
Twice he’d watched her as she’d sat on the stone bench in the back corner and wept.
What difference would it make if she left?
More than he would ever have guessed when he’d first written his offer.
For one thing, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep.
And he’d found, the day before, that he liked walking with her.
They’d only gone from the stables to the castle, but he liked having her there, her arm linked in his.
She’d made him laugh. He still chuckled when he thought back on their late-night conversation. In his mind he could picture the two of them clanking about in full armor attempting to take the neighborhood by force and claim it for Kielder. Who would he laugh with if she were gone?
Adam shook his head. There was no point denying the obvious. If Persephone left, Adam would miss her. He, who never missed anyone, would miss her.
He glanced across the room at the painting hung over the mantel.
It was the last portrait ever painted of his father, less than three months before he’d died.
It was to have been a family sitting, but Mother hadn’t returned for it.
Adam knew that she and Father had exchanged heated letters over the issue.
Mother insisted that the artist paint Adam without his scars. Father had insisted otherwise.
There he stood, Adam at nearly seven, scars apparent to the world, beside his father, completely oblivious to the cruel hand fate would soon deal him. His father’s image drew Adam’s gaze. Had he missed Mother? Looking back with an adult’s perspective, Adam realized Father had.
“Adam?”
His eyes snapped to the door. Persephone stood just inside the doorway, a letter clutched in her hands. “Do you have a minute?”
Adam nodded but felt ridiculously uncomfortable. When one is thinking rather confusing thoughts about a person, it is remarkably disconcerting for that person to suddenly appear.
Persephone stepped inside, and Adam felt his pulse quicken. She’d been doing that to him lately, and he was at a loss to explain why. It was almost as if she made him nervous. No one made him nervous.
“This is a very nice room,” Persephone said, looking around. “Mrs. Smithson skipped this room when she gave me my tour. I don’t think I have ever been in here.”
“No one ever comes in here.” Adam felt inexplicably put out and decided her intrusion into his private space had unnerved him.
“Oh.” She stepped back. Adam wondered if it was an involuntary instinct, for she hardly seemed aware of her retreat. “I am intruding, then?”
It was the perfect opportunity to send her away, to reclaim his last sanctuary. She’d already invaded his bedchamber. He found, however, that he didn’t want her to go. He hadn’t seen Persephone all day, and it was well past noon.
John had told him Atlas still wasn’t rideable. What had Persephone done with her morning, having her usual ride canceled? He wondered how she spent her time, what she thought about. It was an odd feeling for him, thinking about another person as much as he did.
“Not at all,” he heard himself answer her. He even motioned her inside the room.
Persephone moved to the chairs nearest the fireplace, her eyes still wandering around the room. Why was his book room so intriguing to her?
Adam studied her as intently as she studied the room. He’d selected every piece of furniture in it. He had chosen where each painting hung. Did she approve? Approval had never mattered to him before.
A sudden flash of memory took him back twenty years.
“Very good, son. Very good.” Father had said that, eying the picture Adam had drawn of Falstone.
He’d worked for days on it, desperate to get each detail correct.
The “very good” was exactly what he’d wanted to hear, desperately wanted to hear.
Father, Adam remembered, had always been the one person he could count on to say just that.