Chapter 6
It was a grey fall afternoon when Tristan Marlowe arrived later that week. The sky pressed low over Ashford Manor and into the surrounding moor as the inevitable rain loomed in the distance.
Adrian watched from the window as the carriage came down the long drive. He supposed it was some old reflex from boyhood, watching for a friend’s arrival. The faintest hint of a smile crossed his face, and he went downstairs to greet him.
Tristan exited the carriage well enough, but he came up the grand steps leaning on a cane. It was a plain, wooden piece that was clearly not a fashion statement. Adrian noted instantly that it was the left leg; it held stiff in a way that poorly set bones do.
He was thinner than Adrian remembered, and there were silver threads at his temples that had no business being there on a man not yet thirty. Beneath his neatly trimmed beard was a scar high on his cheekbone that also hadn’t been there the last time Adrian had seen him.
The last time I saw this man, he was laughing across a card table with a bottle at his elbow. Some London night neither of us had remembered carefully at the time, because we had no reason to think there wouldn’t be a hundred more just like it. Oh, how things have changed.
Adrian met him at the top step and found he did not know what to do with his hands. It had been so long since he had received a visitor, let alone an old friend.
He did not know whether the old easy embrace of two men who’d been boys together still applied to whatever Tristan had come home as, or if a proper greeting was owed. Tristan settled it for him thankfully by clasping his arm hard, once, the cane braced against his other side.
“Ah yes, this,” he said as he took his cane and tapped his leg, “French ball, at Waterloo,” he joked with a raised eyebrow. He said it lightly, the way a man says he’s tripped over a rug. “Clumsy of me, really. Ought to have ducked.”
“You have never ducked from anything in your life.”
“Touche, old friend,” Tristan agreed, and something moved behind his eyes that had nothing light in it at all. “Well. There’s a first time for everything. I have grown much more careful now, reactive or proactive I suppose. And look at you, the serious Earl, lording over Cornwall.”
“You have found me out,” Adrian said as the two just stood there for a moment.
They had once been two reckless young men who made a living getting into trouble in London and no sense between them. Now, war had done to Tristan what the accident had done to Adrian. He could see it, standing there on his own front steps with the clouds peering down at them.
The careless boy had been carved out of Tristan.
It left the shape standing, walking, even smiling, but the true substance underneath entirely rearranged.
Adrian recognized it at once, the way a man recognizes his own limp in another man’s gait, that the years had been hard for him.
While not physically scarred, Adrian lived inside the same hollow form and had simply grown accustomed to its shape.
Misery loves company.
“Shall we retire to my study?”
“Only if we are to drink. I do not care what time it is. If I am being honest, long rides in the carriage are always a bit painful and a bit of spirits will be just the thing to lift mine.”
“By all means,” Adrian said as he led him into the house.
“Good day, Mr. Marlowe,” Mrs. Scott said as she gave a small curtsy. “The staff will bring your items to the guest room, which we have had prepared for several days now as we were not sure when you would arrive.”
“Mrs. Scott is most adept at these things. Thank you for your help. We will be in my study.”
“Yes, thank you,” Tristan said with a small but charming smile.
They walked slowly down the hall, Adrian careful to match Tristan’s pace.
But once they were settled in the study, in fine leather chairs and with brandy in hand, they fell into the old shorthand as easily as if no years had passed at all.
Names half-forgotten were instantly recalled, a wager over a horse race neither of them had ever settled and both still claimed to have won.
“Do you remember Bowman’s sister’s wedding breakfast?” Tristan said, nearly spitting his brandy with laughter.
“Do I ever—”
“And the duck in the pond—”
“I remember you nearly drowned retrieving your hat from it.”
“I remember you laughing so hard you were of no use to me whatsoever. ”
“You’d insulted the creature directly. I felt it only fair to let the fowl finish what it had started. I daresay it was your foul play that started the whole mess.”
Tristan laughed at Adrian’s signature dry humor. It was a deep, belly laugh that made the corners of Adrian’s lips turn up. It was the first true laugh Adrian had heard in a very long time, and for a moment the four years and the cane and the grey at his temples melted away entirely.
It was simply the two of them again, exactly as they had been. For the better part of an hour as the two continued talking about everything and nothing, Adrian grew nearer the man he used to be. He was overwhelmed by a lightness in his own chest he hadn’t gone looking for.
“I must confess something,” Tristan said, when the laughing had settled, and the brandy was half gone.
“Oh dear, what is it?”
“I did not expect to find you married.”
“Oh yes, that.”
“Your last letter to me…what was it, eight months back?”
“It couldn’t have been as long as that.
“Either way, it read like a man who’d sworn off the opposite sex out of principle.”
“My marriage, if you must know, is an arrangement,” Adrian said. “Nothing more.”
“An arrangement?”
“You know what marriages can be. It is a mutually beneficial solution.”
“I see.”
Tristan looked at him a moment over the rim of his glass, and did not argue or press. He only smiled. Adrian knew he had decided not to press the point, but it would not be the last he would be asked about this particular topic.
“And what of Cassandra?” Tristan said as he shakily rose to his feet and grabbed his cane. “I know we will do the more formal introductions with your household this afternoon, but I would very much like to see your sister.”
“Very well,” he said as he rose to his feet and joined his side. “But a bit of information.”
“Yes?” Tristan said, his expression serious. “I am all ears.”
“She remembers nothing of that night. The accident. Our parents.”
“None of it?”
“None of it. Not the carriage, not the road, none of it survived past whatever blow she took to the head. I mean for it to stay that way.”
“Adrian…I know I just arrived, but are you sure—”
“I mean it, Tristan. You were there with me for the fallout. You know better than any man alive why I’d have it stay buried, the gruesomeness of that moment. I’ll ask you plainly not to let any part of that night near her. Not a word of it. Not so much as a look that might set her wondering.”
Something passed over Tristan’s face. Adrian knew it was the old guilt, old grief resurfaced. They were two men who carried the memory and had never once spoken of it between them since.
“You have my word,” he said, quiet now, all the lightness gone out of him, as he brought a hand to his heart. “On my life, Adrian. Not a word.”
Adrian nodded, and let the matter close. He knew that he could trust Tristan to bear the secret, and so he closed the door to his own memories then. Even just speaking of it made his shoulders tight. He set them square back, and they began to walk down the hall.
“She’s better, you know,” he started. “Better than she’s been in years. Walking farther than she has since it happened. Color in her face I haven’t seen since before.” He was not quite looking at Tristan now, his eyes only fixed ahead. “It’s my wife’s doing.”
“You use the title of wife like she is allegedly so. Was it legal?”
“Legal enough, yes, although I dare say I don’t know much about her.”
“And how has she come to heal our Cassandra then? It’s hard to imagine a widowed viscountess capable of such things the finest London physicians could not.”
“It is some manner of treatment she learned nursing her first husband, or so she tells me. I don’t pretend to understand the whole of it. I only know Cassandra is better for it, and I had stopped believing that word applied to her at all…that it ever could.”
“That is very good news.”
“It is.” Adrian paused in the hall. “I’ll tell you an odd thing, while I think of it. Yesterday Cassandra nearly fell.”
“Oh, dear.”
“She tipped, coming up too fast, the way she used to before any of this began…and somehow, my wife had her by the head before I’d so much as blinked.
Not a lady’s flutter, mind, nothing fumbling in it.
A sure, strong hold. The kind a man learns from doing a thing a great many times, not the kind a lady comes by nursing one sick husband in a sickroom. ”
“I look forward to meeting this wife of yours for myself. She sounds like quite a curious creature.”
He shrugged, as if to shake the thought loose from himself. “A curiosity, nothing more. I am sure I have read too much into it.”
He said it lightly, meant it lightly, or so he told himself as they approached Cassandra’s quarters.
And yet, it stayed with him a moment longer than so small a thing ought to, sitting somewhere at the back of his mind the way he found his wife often did.
He shook his head and set his shoulders back again.
He went to open the door, when Lady Ashcroft opened it for him.
Adrian looked at her like a deer in torch light, completely caught off guard and yet entirely expecting to see her, as she had been very much on his mind.
When he came to his senses a few seconds later, he watched Tristan’s eyes move from her to Adrian and back again, and his smile changed.
He knew his friend would have more questions later.