Chapter 18 #2
He turned to the younger guard. "I cannot make the same offer to your children — they are rather too young yet for what I have in mind. But you are welcome at the manor regardless, whenever you wish it. And if you or your wife ever have need of employment, come to me first, before anyone else."
Both men bowed, murmuring their thanks, and Damon begun gathering the last of his few belongings.
He went upstairs, opened the drawer of the writing desk.
The stack of unread correspondence he left exactly where it lay — some things belonged to the house, and could stay with it.
Beneath the letters, where it had waited out the whole of the war, lay the sketch: Elizabeth at the desk, sleeves pushed back, one curl fallen against her cheek, the smudge at her temple exactly as his carelessness had left it that night — unhidden, unhealed, and, he had long since decided, not to be corrected.
He looked at it for a moment in the grey morning light.
Then he slid it, with more care than he had ever given any document of state, between the pages of Culinary Compositions of the Modern Gentleman, and packed the book, and went down.
The carriage waited at the end of the lane, the older guard at the reins, having offered to drive him the final stretch himself.
"To the manor, Your Grace?" the guard asked, once Damon had settled inside.
"Not yet." Damon gave him an address instead — Milton's townhouse, spoken without hesitation, as though he had been carrying it ready on his tongue the entire morning.
The guard glanced back, mildly surprised. "I confess I expected you would fly straight for home, after all this."
"I will," Damon said. "But there is someone I must see first. The unsung hero of this entire story deserves to hear it from me before anyone else does."
The guard said nothing further, only nodded and turned the horses, and the carriage pulled away from the safe house at last, carrying Damon toward the one door he had not yet properly walked through as a free man.
◆◆◆
The door to Milton Chamberlain's townhouse opened with a sharp creak, and the moment the butler saw Damon standing on the threshold, his eyes lit up.
"Your Grace!" the man exclaimed, voice nearly cracking with joy. "What a sight for sore eyes."
Damon smiled. "Is he home?"
"Always, for you," the butler said, stepping aside. "Go on in."
Damon nodded his thanks and entered the familiar space — leather and oak, the faint scent of pipe smoke clinging to the air. It smelled like memories. Like safety. Like a past life.
Milton was in the library, lounging in a velvet armchair with a glass of brandy already in hand and a newspaper in the other — the same newspaper, Damon suspected, that had carried word of the morning's events across the whole of London by now.
Milton looked up, and then stood so quickly he nearly spilled his drink.
"Damon."
Damon crossed the room in three strides and pulled him into a firm embrace. No words. Just the quiet strength of two men who had faced the abyss together, though from different sides of the bars.
When they parted, Milton's voice had gone soft with something rare and unguarded. "You are free. Truly, properly free."
"I am." Damon dropped into the chair opposite, and Milton pressed a fresh glass into his hand without being asked.
"So." Milton settled back. "Tell me everything."
Damon told him — not the whole of it, but enough. The negotiation with the magistrate. The declaration on the courthouse steps, which Milton, it turned out, had already read a garbled account of in the very paper he'd been holding.
"Harwood," Milton said slowly, turning the name over. "And Alderton. You said their names, on the steps, in front of the entire city."
"I did."
"Good God, Damon." Milton looked half admiring, half faintly alarmed. "You have made yourself considerably more enemies before lunch than most men manage in a lifetime."
"I am aware." Damon turned the glass slowly in his hand. "It felt necessary. It still does."
Milton studied him a moment. "And yet you did not come here to discuss Harwood."
Damon huffed something close to a laugh. "No. I did not."
Damon leaned back and let the words flow. From the cold stone cell and the suffocating silence of prison, to the chaotic tension of the safe house, to the moment the courtroom erupted with cheers and disbelief. He didn’t hide the fear, the shame, the fury—or the gratitude.
Milton listened, quiet and still, absorbing each word like it was scripture.
When Damon finally finished, he said simply, “It is behind you now. All of it.”
Damon nodded. “It is. But it’s not gone. This experience… changed me. Humbled me. It showed me how fragile everything is—how easily it can be stripped away. And how much I depended on things I never truly earned.”
Milton raised a brow. “You have gone philosophical. You have truly suffered.”
“I mean it,” Damon said, with a rueful laugh. “And I want to show Charles and Elizabeth my gratitude. Something more than gold and courtesy.”