Chapter 22 #2
“My mother’s work.” His thumb traced the stitching with absent familiarity.
“She put this star on everything I owned, ever since I was a boy. Said it was her way of keeping me safe when she couldn’t be there herself.
Shirts, handkerchiefs, even the lining of my coat once.
” A ghost of a smile. “Drove me mad when I was young. What lad wants flowers and stars on his clothes? But now she’s gone, I.
..” He trailed off, his jaw tightening. “I keep the ones that still have her mark. Can’t quite bring myself to replace them. ”
Alastair’s throat closed. He swallowed against it and reached for his water, though his mouth had gone dry for reasons that had nothing to do with exertion.
He forced himself to breathe. Forced himself to hide the sick, thundering certainty that was consuming him from the inside out.
“Thomas.” He set down the water and turned to face his friend fully. “I need to ask you something. And I need you to answer honestly.”
Thomas looked up. The shift in Alastair’s tone had not gone unnoticed—his friend’s posture changed, his shoulders squaring as though bracing for a blow that would not come from fists.
“Since when do I answer you any other way?”
Fair point. Alastair’s mouth twitched despite the gravity pressing down on him. “The woman you told me about. Months ago, in this very place. You said you’d met someone.”
The change was instantaneous. Thomas’s face closed like a door slamming shut—every trace of warmth, of openness, of that fragile almost-smile vanishing behind a wall of rigid composure.
“That’s done,” he said. Flat. Final. The voice of a man who had rehearsed those two words until they no longer drew blood. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“I think there is.”
“Alastair—”
“How did it end?”
Thomas stared at him. The boxing hall continued its raucous symphony around them—men shouting, canvas bags swinging, the world carrying on as though nothing of consequence were unfolding on this battered bench in the corner.
“It ended,” Thomas said at last, “because it was always going to end. I told you—she was above my station. I knew that. She knew that. We both knew what we were walking into.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Thomas’s jaw clenched. He looked away—toward the ring, toward the door, toward anywhere that was not Alastair’s too-perceptive gaze.
“Her parents found out.” The words came slowly, each one extracted like a splinter from beneath skin.
“I don’t know how. Servants, perhaps. Or maybe we weren’t as careful as we believed.
It doesn’t matter now. They found out, and they.
..” His hands curled into fists against his thighs—not sharp, not striking, but slow.
The kind of grip a man uses when he is holding himself together.
“They took her away. To their country estate. I tried to find her—wrote letters, asked anyone who might know where they’d gone.
Nothing. She vanished as though she’d never existed. ”
Alastair sat very still.
“She was from a noble family,” he said quietly. Not a question.
“Yes.” Thomas’s voice had gone rough. “I know what you’re thinking.
I know how it sounds—a working man, reaching above himself, playing at something he had no right to touch.
Believe me, I’ve told myself the same thing a thousand times over.
But it wasn’t like that. What we had... it was real, Alastair.
She loved me. I know she did. And I loved her more than I’ve ever loved anything in my life, and none of it mattered because the world decided long before either of us were born that people like me don’t get to have people like her. ”
The rawness of it carved through Alastair’s composure.
He thought of Penelope—of the way she looked at him sometimes when she thought he wasn’t watching, as though she were trying to solve a puzzle she hadn’t asked for.
He thought of Rose, warm and impossibly small against his chest. He thought of the letter in his study drawer and the single, worrisome initial that had haunted him for weeks.
“What was her name?” he asked.
Thomas went rigid.
For a long, terrible moment, Alastair thought he wouldn’t answer. The silence between them felt like the space between a match being struck and the flame catching—charged, suspended, irreversible.
“Marianne,” Thomas said.
The name fell between them like a stone into deep water.
Alastair closed his eyes. The sound of the boxing hall—the shouts, the thuds, the crude laughter—faded to a distant roar beneath the rushing in his ears. Every suspicion, every half-formed theory, every sleepless night spent turning fragments of evidence over in his mind collapsed into certainty.
Marianne Whitcombe.
Rose’s mother. Thomas’s great love. The woman whose parents had stood in his drawing room yesterday and threatened to take his ward, to dismantle his household, to destroy the fragile, precious life he and Penelope had built around a child who was never supposed to be theirs.
Thomas was watching him. His eyes were dark with worry.
“Why are you asking me this?” His voice had hardened. “You’ve never pressed me about her before. Not once in all these months. Why now, Alastair? What’s happened?”
Alastair opened his eyes.
He looked at his oldest friend—at the grief carved into the lines around his mouth, at the rigid set of his shoulders, at the embroidered star sitting just below his collar like a talisman against a world that had taken everything from him—and he knew, with a certainty that felt like iron in his bones, that what he was about to set in motion could not be undone.
Thomas deserved the truth. All of it. But not here, not in a boxing hall surrounded by strangers, not in fragments and half-explanations shouted over the noise of other men’s fights.
“I cannot explain everything now,” Alastair said. He stood, reaching for his coat, and his hands were steadier than they had any right to be. “But I need you to trust me. Can you do that?”
“That depends entirely on what you’re not telling me.”
“I know.” He pulled on his coat, fastening it with movements that felt mechanical, automatic—his body performing the motions of normality while his mind raced ahead to everything that would follow. “Come to my estate. Tomorrow. There is something you need to see.”
Thomas rose as well, his expression caught between frustration and the instinctive trust of a decade’s friendship. “Alastair. Whatever this is—”
“Tomorrow.” Alastair clasped his friend’s shoulder—gripped it, hard, the way he had on the night Thomas had first spoken of falling in love. “You will understand everything tomorrow. I give you my word.”
He left before Thomas could argue. Crossed the boxing hall in long strides, shouldered through the door, and stepped into the fading London light.
The city pressed in around him—the clatter of carriages, the shouts of street vendors, the thousand small collisions of lives being lived without the faintest awareness of what had just shifted beneath the surface of the world.
Alastair stood on the pavement and breathed.
He thought of Rose—her small fist curled against Penelope’s shoulder, the way her dark eyes tracked movement with solemn, watchful intelligence. Thomas’s eyes, he realised now. The shape of them, the steadiness. He’d been looking at Thomas’s daughter for weeks without seeing it.
He thought of Penelope, waiting at the estate, her hand gripping his sleeve as though she could anchor him through sheer force of will. Come back with answers.
He thought of Whitcombe—cold, calculating, already marshalling his resources for the fight to come. A man who saw his own grandchild as a problem to be disposed of rather than a life to be cherished.
And he thought of Thomas, standing in a boxing hall with his dead mother’s star stitched over his heart, grieving a woman he believed lost forever—not knowing that a part of her slept in a nursery in the countryside, wrapped in a blanket that bore the same small star in its hem.
The carriage was waiting where he’d left it. Alastair climbed in and rapped twice on the roof.
He had his answers. Now he needed a plan.
Because Lord Whitcombe had promised war—and Alastair intended to win it.