Chapter 2 #2
If Ezra felt like taking a step back and looking at things objectively (which he did not), he might say that Xander had stepped up admirably when he’d been unceremoniously thrust into the role of head of the family after the fire that took their fathers.
But that success was part of the problem. Xander had done well for himself. Hugh had done well for himself. Even Aaron, Ezra’s cousin and the last Lightholder-affiliated duke, had managed it eventually, after Peter had gone off and gotten himself killed, like the idiot he was.
They had all thrived. Ezra’s father had survived, but he had not accomplished more than that.
Jeremy had never quite recovered from that night in the fire. He’d been brutally scarred, and those scars caused him pain. And Ezra’s cousins had never given their uncle the respect he deserved, even though he was their elder.
No, Jeremy Swifton had not been a real Lightholder. He’d only been in the family by marriage. And that meant, as far as the rest of them were concerned, that he was nothing.
Even Ezra’s mother had hardly ever acknowledged him. She had mostly lived with her sisters before she died. The last time Ezra saw his mother was at his father’s funeral the year before. They had not spoken, and a few months later, Peace was gone too.
And Ezra was left with a dukedom and the knowledge that he could not forgive any of them.
“And does His Majesty demand my presence?” Ezra asked Hugh sardonically, rolling his eyes. “Does he need me to bend the knee?”
“Christ, who pissed in your whiskey?” Hugh demanded. Ezra almost smiled at that. “No, it’s none of that, as you perfectly well know. But Xander is taking his family abroad for a year. And… they’re family, Ez. Your family.”
Ezra fought a wince, in part due to the familiar nickname, in part because he was so bloody sick of being told that he had obligations to these people who had never once looked at his father as a member of their family.
Especially now, given Tilford’s confirmation of what Ezra had suspected for years—that there was more to the fire than he had been told.
But he didn’t want to argue with Hugh, who was the least intolerable of the lot. So, he kept his tone neutral.
“I didn’t know Xander was going abroad. Being important in England wasn’t enough for him?”
Well, he had tried to be neutral. It wasn’t his fault that Xander was so annoying.
Hugh gave him a combative sort of smile. “You didn’t know because you only show up when you absolutely cannot avoid it,” he said tightly. Well, Ezra had walked right into that one, he supposed. “Maybe if you let the rest of us in a little, you might find that we aren’t as awful as you think.”
This was surprisingly sharp, coming from Hugh, who was usually too busy either scowling or making eyes at his wife to notice others. He was wrong on one key point, however.
They were definitely at least as awful as Ezra thought. Probably worse. He could only assume he had blocked some of it out of sheer self-preservation.
Ezra didn’t want to argue with his cousin, however.
He was exhausted. He’d been traveling back and forth across London all day, pursuing Tilford, who had apparently never found a gambling den that he disliked.
It was just Ezra’s bloody luck that, tonight, the lord had ended up at Hugh’s club.
He wanted to go home, take a long, hot bath to soak off the day’s grime, and then collapse into bed, so that he would be fresh and ready in the morning to plot and scheme.
It really isn’t too much to ask for.
“I will consider it,” he told Hugh, in the spirit of getting the hell out.
They both knew it was a lie. Ezra wasn’t about to do something as utterly pointless—or even downright destructive—as letting his family into his life.
It was frankly egregious of Hugh to ask.
Until his blissfully happy marriage had made him into this absurdly cheerful version of his former self, Hugh had been as cantankerous as the rest of them.
And now he wanted…what? For Ezra to come into the blissful domestic fold? Ha. No.
“Fine,” Hugh sighed. “But don’t come whining to me when the girls start showing up and badgering you.”
The girls could mean so very many people, and so many different levels of badgering. It had been bad enough when the list only included his female cousins, but the male ones kept getting married, too.
And all of them were perfectly obsessed with the importance of family.
“Your involvement is duly noted,” Ezra called over his shoulder, relieved when Hugh finally stopped following him and let him leave.
Even though it was late, and the neighborhood was not precisely the well-maintained streets of Mayfair, Ezra walked for a while before attempting to hire a hack.
He needed to burn off some of his irritation, both at Hugh’s attempts to cajole him and at his increasing certainty that something was amiss with the fire.
None of the rest of them had ever seemed to embrace the possibility. From the beginning, they had all treated it as a terrible accident. At first, Ezra thought his cousins were just shocked by the loss. But as the years went by, not one of them—not a single one—had said a word of suspicion.
Well, it had made Ezra even more suspicious. One of them had to know something. Somebody had to know something.
Eventually, his weariness won out over his rage, and he hired a carriage to take him the rest of the way home. When he approached his door, he was surprised to see not the usual night footman standing there, but his butler, looking worn and harried.
God above. Whatever this was, Ezra did not have the patience for it.
“Your Grace,” the man said, a tremor of stress in his voice as Ezra brushed past him. “Thank goodness you’re here.”
This was sounding worse and worse. Ezra had put a great deal of effort into his inheritance, into hiring the kind of people who made him almost useless to the household’s functioning. Really, he paid them well to handle everything so he could focus on his research into the fire.
“What is it, Marling?” he asked shortly, handing over his hat, coat, and walking stick. The butler paused as he accepted the items, his mouth moving as though he didn’t know quite what to say.
Ezra had a very bad feeling.
“I think it’s best if you just see for yourself, Your Grace,” the butler said after a pregnant pause. “In the parlor.”
Ezra steadied himself for… Hell, he didn’t even know what for. This could be bloody anything, really. But he braced himself anyway as he turned into the parlor and faced—
A child.
A girl, he was fairly certain, though it wasn’t exactly easy to tell apart the disheveled cloud of dark hair and the large blanket—his blanket, he noted—wrapped around her shoulders, turning her into no more than a pile of cloth and a pout.
“Marling,” he asked carefully, turning slightly to where his butler hovered anxiously behind him without quite removing his gaze from the child. “Why is there a small child in my parlor?”
“Someone left her on the doorstep, Your Grace,” the butler replied.
Ezra pondered this. His butler wasn’t an idiot—Ezra didn’t hire fools—and there were plenty of scruffy children in London. There had to be a reason why this particular scruffy child managed to get inside.
“She had this with her,” Marling went on.
He placed a medallion in Ezra’s hand. Ezra turned it over and froze.
He would recognize this sigil anywhere. He’d recognize it even in his sleep. He grew up seeing it stamped on almost everything his grandfather touched, and he learned to resent it because it was the symbol that made his mother feel so superior to his father.
The Lightholder family emblem.
“Where did you get this?” he asked the little girl, too startled to modulate his tone. He should not be speaking so sharply to a child, some distant part of him realized. Not a child who was so clearly distressed. He forced himself to lower his voice. “Who gave this to you?”
The girl said nothing.
“How did you come to my house?” he tried.
Nothing.
Maybe an easier question.
“What is your name?” he asked.
Still nothing.
Frustration swamped him. He clenched the medallion in his hand hard enough that he could feel the grooves of the engraving.
Damn this family! He made the tiniest step forward on a mystery that had haunted him for years, and so they dumped a new mystery in his lap the very same day?
Only this new question needed to be fed, housed, and definitely bathed!
The little girl’s eyes watched his expression warily. Her lower lip began to tremble. Her eyes glistened with tears, but she blinked them away, hunching her shoulders closer in toward her face. Her intention was clear. She refused to cry.
Something inside Ezra cracked.
God, he was an utter shite. This little girl was a person, not a mystery for him to solve. And she had clearly been through some kind of ordeal. Children didn’t appear out of nowhere because they had cheerful, comfortable homes to return to.
No, someone had left this girl here with this medallion for a reason. They had not taken her to Xander or anyone else in the family. They had brought her to Ezra.
He didn’t know who or why, but he would honor it anyway.
“Right,” he said with a sigh. “Well, you look as though you can use a bath and a hot meal. Does that sound all right?”
The little girl hesitated, but she gave him the tiniest nod. That felt like progress over the blinking.
“Good,” Ezra said. He was trying to sound warm and welcoming, but he feared he wasn’t very good at it. “I will have one of the maids help you, hm? And then tomorrow, we’ll see about getting you settled and finding someone who can take care of you.”
The girl nodded again, this one the tiniest bit more confident.
“Good,” Ezra repeated. He turned and nodded to his butler, who had already signaled for a maid. The servant who arrived was round-cheeked and smiling and looked undoubtedly more qualified to care for a scared little girl than Ezra was. “Good.”
He spun around and went upstairs to his bed, feeling as if someone had come up behind him and hit him right on the head.
Now the only question that remained was how in the hell was he meant to go about finding a governess?