19. Chapter 19
Simon
He’s blinded. Moving quickly through those dim corridors with pompous brass fixtures, Simon cannot wait to escape. To reach fresh air and freedom.
But that is not his lot today. Footfalls sound behind him and he hurries, turning this way and that. Where’s the exit to this monstrosity? He pushes through a set of double doors but stumbles into a room of glass walls and tropical plants. A conservatory.
He turns to leave, but the doorway is blocked. The Duke of Ashbourne guards it, his shadow reaching across the room to where Simon stands, commanding himself not to cower. Or to drive his fist into the man’s jaw.
The duke’s look is dark, all pretense vanished. “Is this some sort of game to you? A chess match you’ve made of my life?”
“However unhappy you are to see me, I can promise I am even more so to see you. Do not delude yourself into believing I plotted this meeting or wished for it in any way.”
The older man’s jaw flinches, mouth tightening at the corners. “I’ll warn you, I’m not an easy target. Why, you’re as scheming and underhanded as your mother is!”
“Was.”
His grip on the rail tightens, and he sways. “She’s gone then, is she?”
Simon steels himself against the avalanche of memories—his vibrant mother wilted from starvation, her gaunt face with jutting cheekbones pleading with him from behind bars.
“Please,” she begged. “Please don’t let me die here.
” He exhales the memories that still make him ill.
“What did you think would become of her? You sentenced her to death by sending her to that prison.”
His face pales, then reddens. “Do you have any idea who I am, Mr. Balfour? Any notion of what I’ve changed in this world for people like you?”
“I cannot imagine.”
“I’ve made people care about the poor. I’ve shown them their great responsibility to shelter the widows and orphans, and I’ve set up institutions to do so. I’ve opened thousands of eyes and made them realize their moral responsibility.”
“And what is your moral responsibility?” He had the poor at his doorstep once—a woman he had claimed to love, no less. “The theater closed. We were out on our ear and she had nowhere else to turn. She went to you for my sake, out of desperation.”
He advances. “You speak as if this affects only myself. My reputation is not some cloak I can toss aside on a whim. Men heed me because they trust me. And they trust me because they believe me a man of impeachable honor.” His voice hardens.
“Do you believe they would lift a finger to do what I urge if they suspected I’ve kept an actress and her illegitimate son? ”
“Your son.”
“Everything I’ve accomplished would be decimated in scandal. Yes, I chose the lives of many over the comfort of one rather cosseted woman.”
“Her life for theirs, then.”
“She gave me no choice.” Sweat lines his brow. “It was always understood that her affairs were her concern, not mine. She changed the terms when she threatened to produce those old letters.”
Simon grinds his teeth. He could never bear to read the passionate missives his father had once written to his mother. Letters that she later threatened to take public if he did not support her again. If he did not claim Simon as his son.
“It is not only my reputation you will damage, but all the work I’ve accomplished. All that is yet to do.”
Simon crosses his arms. “What does the duchess think of your reputation?”
His eyebrows lower dangerously. “What do you want from me, Balfour? Do you wish for a house in town? A carriage with a matched pair? A studio for your art, perhaps? Let us have done with this cat-and-mouse game.”
Simon sucks in a breath. He teeters on the rare height of advantage, where at last he might ask anything of the man who has cost him so dearly.
He had imagined this moment for years—imagined a careful unraveling, a word placed here, another there, until denial failed and the lies had nowhere left to stand.
Everything he’d told Rosalyn Snow not to do lay buried in his heart, aching for release.
Oh, to feel justice roll over him in glorious waves.
Instead, there is only the steady ache of standing upright.
“What exactly would you ask of me, you scoundrel, so that I may get on with my business?”
Simon steps toward the man, meets his narrowed gaze with a matching one, and lowers his voice. “Make good use of your life.” Simon hands him the portrait of his wife, that luminous lighthouse standing against the chaos of their life, and the duke falls silent. He trembles.
He’s the cause of that chaos. He must know that.
There’s a weakness beneath his soft chin. In his hunched shoulders.
Before he can change his mind, Simon gives a tiny bow. “Tell them I’ve left, would you? I’ll not bring trouble on the Dunns.”
He pushes past his father, but the man latches on to Simon’s lapel. “Change your coat a hundred times, give every one of my men the slip, but I’ll never let a wastrel be the end of me. Never. I’ll see you put in prison properly this time.”
Shaking free, Simon strides into the cool corridor and grabs the tattered frock coat in which he’d come to this house.
He thrusts his arms into the too-large sleeves and remembers, with a whoosh of tenderness, the man who owned it before him.
The role passed on to him. Then he pulls the coat straight and the duke’s words rush over him.
Change your coat a hundred times… give them the slip…
The coat.
The switching of coats.
…Oh.
He realizes with sickening clarity exactly where Silas Snow is this minute. And why he is there.
“I’ve always fancied a coat with brass buttons,” Silas said on that summer night so long ago as he fingered Simon’s old theater coat.
“They aren’t real brass,” Simon insisted, but Silas refused to be moved.
“They’re real enough for me,” the man said, shrugging into the old theater garb. It fit him remarkably well. It suited him.
It also marked him.
Simon’s long stride eats up the distance to the front door. It’s for him to find out what has become of Silas Snow, and to do what he can to right the wrongs set in motion. And he must do it now, before Rosalyn finds out. Before she catches wind and insists on coming along.
He grabs his borrowed hat, but movement startles him and he drops it. A still figure in blue and silver watches from the shadows, haloed by the wall sconce overhead.
“Rosalyn.”
Her eyes are wide in the dim corridor. “I waited.” She steps toward him. “I thought perhaps you left. What happened?”
Every muscle in his body tenses.
“This was our chance,” she says. “Truth might have won—if only you’d have let it.”
He grips the coat. That precious, wretched coat. He cannot form the words he needs to say. Not while she stands so near.
“Simon?”
He forces himself to step back so he can think clearly. Figure out what on earth to say. The room shifts with the intoxicating temptation to stay—to kiss her again and turn this into a rescue mission without revealing the dark secret haunting the disappearance.
He hasn’t proof of this theory, has he? Any number of things might have befallen a man sleeping rough in Exeter. It might have nothing to do with him at all.
Rosalyn’s brows arch, nostrils flaring. She is so exceedingly like her father—so noble, no matter the circumstance.
So magnetic. He’d give a great deal to close the distance between himself and this lovely creature whose passion charges the air.
She’s shifted something in him—stirred him back to life, dragged him into the light…
and reminded him what purpose feels like.
Leaving will be a sort of death.
He cringes as raucous laughter erupts from the parlor. Glasses clink. Three servants hurry by with crates of even more candles.
She fixes him with an accusing glare. “What’s happened to you, Simon?
Why did you choose silence when you had opportunity to speak?
To end so many lies? Every person in this place has built a life upon a stack of lies, and they shall stand upon them until someone knocks them down.
You might have done that very thing tonight. ”
His voice roughens despite himself. “Is this about my justice… or yours?” That warm, viscous longing he’d felt earlier hardens in his soul—strong, present, and impossible to remove.
Yet it’s gone hard with hurt.
“You might have been free of him, Simon. With the truth in the open, what hold would he have over you? What reason to silence you? One word, and you might have been free to… to stay.”
The dark, ugly truth about what’s happened to her father sweeps over him again. “I don’t think you want that.”
“Please, Simon.” She steps closer in the slanted light, lifting one hand and tracing his knuckles. “Please stay.”
Then she lifts those luminous eyes and he cannot speak. Waves of unexpected pain destabilize him. Then he stiffens. “I’m sorry, Miss Snow.” He pulls his hand away. “Thank you for everything. But I must leave.”
“Now?” She looks lost. “I thought we were aligned. Our goals, our hearts—”
“I know where he is,” he bites out, and shock flickers in her countenance.
“He’s in Exeter Prison. Where I’m meant to be.”
She pales. “What do you mean?”
“The coats. He took mine, and accidentally… everything that went along with it.”
Her mouth stays open, frozen in surprise.
“It was a remarkable coat—an easy way to find me. Tall, dark hair, blue coat with brass buttons.” The duke’s men would have been sent out to look for a man who fit just such a description… and they left with Silas Snow.
Her eyes are wide, chin trembling. “He… they took him instead. Took him—”
“Yes.” His voice is curt. “I must go now. I’ll do what I can to—”
Crash!
Screams pierce the air. A flash of light in the corridor, and a whoosh. "Fire!"
The candles.
The lamps.
“Get outside,” he commands, shoving her toward the door. Then he sprints into the parlor, coattails flapping.
The room glows orange and gold as flames swell around broken glass and oil on the rug. Patio doors are thrown open with a rush of cold air, and the light intensifies.
“Out!” shouts Dunn. “Everyone outside!”
Servants rush in with blankets. The crowd presses frantically toward the patio doors, shoulders colliding, silk tearing.
Flames lick the horsehair sofa, greedy and hot.
More jostling and the giant Christmas tree in the corner wobbles and groans, its many candles flickering as one side of it catches fire and is quickly engulfed in flames.
Cries sound as little alcohol-dipped ornaments burst, spraying glittering pieces across the guests.
Simon kicks open the window as the butler shoves people out, one eye always on that looming monstrosity of a tree.
Just as the last of the bejeweled and bare-shouldered guests are thrust into the cold, that giant holiday menace lists sideways, groaning under the weight of one hundred lit candles as those ornaments continue to burst, one by one.
Flames engulf the tree and someone screams. Then tinsel shimmers in one last flash of glory, and the monster crashes into the drapes, igniting them. Flames whoosh from floor to ceiling, framing the escape in fire.
“This way,” he yells to the servants. He yanks the useless blankets and shoves the staff out the parlor doors.
The corridor will soon be impassible. “It isn’t worth it—get on with you.
” He turns back for one final look at the grand showpiece as smoke billows and flames curl the plaster ceiling.
A groaning sounds and the second story collapses into the corridor beyond.
“Wait!” Esther cries, rushing into the room again.
A beam above them cracks loose.
Simon doesn’t think. He lays hold and swings her away, then the beam crashes where she had stood.
He practically tosses the maid out the patio door.
He glances back, sees nothing moving in the room, and shoves them all outside.
The smoke is thick now, burning his throat.
The servants are coughing. A distant voice sounds, and Simon strains to see.
They stumble out the doors together, Simon propelling anyone remaining out into the frigid night. He slows, glancing over his shoulder at the doorway again. He’s leaving someone behind—that voice. It’s somewhere.
Outside, he urges the servants further away, then covers his face and charges back in.
A quick survey, then he’ll be out. He makes his way around the house’s interior, yelling for people, but no one answers.
Heart pounding, a silent nagging pulling at him, he forces his way toward the side door and stops short at a face outside.
The duke.
Simon stands framed in that doorway, grim and soot-stained, heat pulsing against his back.
He senses what the man will do before he does it, yet Simon is frozen.
In that brief hesitation, he memorizes his father’s face.
Creased with tension, eyes flashing and resolute, it is not angry or evil or even arrogant, but…
afraid. Deathly so. The man’s jaw sets and he slams the door, closing Simon inside.
Panic bursts in Simon’s chest. A twisting pain.
He sprints toward a dining hall window and kicks.
It holds fast. Grabbing a ladder-back chair, he swings in one powerful arc, shattering glass.
With a leap, he lands in the powdery snow and ash outside.
Then he rises to watch black smoke billow out every window on the first floor.
Smearing a hand across his face, he forces his mind to focus. Not on his father, but the others.
He scans the windows for faces—anyone left behind. There’s no one—he’s overthinking the matter. Being paranoid. Creaks and groans rend the night, and a thundering crash somewhere inside shakes the winter stillness. Flames arch through the windows, consuming the house.
He scrambles around back through snow and spewed timber, where the guests are huddled in small groups, some clinging in pairs.
Just beyond them, the great house collapses in on itself, the roof falling into the topmost story.
They stand in silence, watching the spectacle as the fire burns away what was never meant to last.
And whoever is not already out is lost.
Simon stands back in humble awe to watch the great display of Elias Dunn’s wealth crumble and fall, piece by piece.
Simon glances at the man. He’s yelling at a servant in livery, face beet-red from the heat, or perhaps his anger.
He’s screaming like a madman, jumping up and down, pointing at the house.
Then he pivots and those marble-green eyes focus on Simon through the mussed gray hair blowing across his face.
His wild, half-crazed look stands in sharp contrast to the enormous, snow-laced cliffs looming behind him.
He isn’t evil. Not truly. He’s a broken man who has scrambled to hold together the pieces of his existence… and who is now watching it all collapse in flames.
Life has broken him.
Then, before anyone can stop him, Elias Dunn sprints toward the fire, charging with one final yell into his crumbling empire.