2. In Which a Prodigal Returns and Everything Changes – Ashford House, London
IN WHICH A PRODIGAL RETURNS AND EVERYTHING CHANGES
EDWARD
ASHFORD HOUSE, LONDON
Ihad spent eighteen months learning how to disappear.
In Geneva, I'd been merely another young Englishman on the Grand Tour, inconsequential among the scholars and artists.
In Rome, I'd been a figure in the background of other people's adventures, notable only for my ability to blend into antiquities galleries.
In Paris, I'd perfected the art of being present without being seen—a useful skill when one's title demanded attention one did not wish to give.
I'd become quite good at it.
And now, rattling through London in a hired carriage with my trunks strapped to the back, I was discovering that returning home required the opposite skill entirely: the ability to be seen when one would vastly prefer to remain invisible.
The city had not changed. The same soot-stained buildings, the same impossible traffic, the same vendors hawking everything from hot pies to salvation. I watched it all through the carriage window and felt the familiar weight settling back onto my shoulders.
London meant family. Family meant expectations. Expectations meant confronting the fact that I was twenty-three years old, an earl with an estate I barely visited, and still carrying guilt that had shaped itself into the architecture of my bones.
The carriage turned onto the square where Ashford House stood, and my chest tightened.
Home.
I paid the driver, hefted one of my smaller trunks, and climbed the steps to the door. It opened before I could knock—Simmons, the butler, looking not a day older despite the years.
"Lord Retford," Simmons said, with the particular warmth reserved for children of the family, even when those children were now adults with titles of their own. "Welcome home, my lord."
"Simmons." I stepped inside and stopped.
Ashford House had changed.
Not the bones of it—the same entrance hall, the same staircase curving upward—but something fundamental had shifted.
There were flowers on the hall table, bright and deliberately arranged.
The drawing room door stood open, revealing new curtains in a warm gold that caught the afternoon light.
The house felt lived in, warm, shaped by a woman's touch.
This was Marguerite's doing. My stepmother—though the word felt inadequate for a woman who had married my father when I was already at Oxford—had transformed the house into something that felt, impossibly, like a home.
"Lord Ashford is in his study," Simmons said. "Shall I announce you?"
"No need." I set down my trunk. "I'll find him."
I walked down the familiar corridor, past the library where I'd spent countless hours hiding from social obligations.
The study door was ajar. I knocked once and entered.
Papa looked up from his desk, and for a moment, I saw him as a stranger might: sixty years old, silver-haired, still straight-backed and handsome in the way that made people forget he'd clawed his way back from devastating loss. Then he smiled, and he was simply Papa.
"Edward." He stood, came around the desk, and pulled me into an embrace that I felt in my chest. "Welcome home, my boy."
"Papa." I returned the embrace, then stepped back, suddenly aware of how much I'd grown in eighteen months. I was taller than him now, broader through the shoulders from months of walking through European cities. "I hope I'm not interrupting."
"Estate business. Nothing that can't wait." He gestured to the chairs by the fire. "Sit. Tell me about the Continent. Your letters were admirably detailed about architecture and insufficiently detailed about everything else."
I sat, and for the first time in eighteen months, felt some of the weight ease. This was Papa’s particular gift: the ability to make a person feel seen without being examined, understood without being interrogated.
We talked. I described Geneva's scholars, Rome's ruins, and Paris's salons. I did not describe the nights I'd spent walking alone, trying to outpace thoughts that followed me across borders. Father, perceptive as always, heard what I didn't say.
"And you're home now," he said quietly. "For good?"
"For the Season, at least. I thought..." I hesitated. "I thought it was time."
"Past time." His voice was gentle. "Running is exhausting, Edward. I should know."
Before I could formulate a response—because what did one say to a father who had somehow survived the unsurvivable and come out whole on the other side—there was a soft knock at the door.
Marguerite entered, and I stood immediately.
She looked well. Marriage to Father suited her—there was a contentment in her face that I remembered from the wedding, a settledness that came from being loved and choosing to love in return.
At fifty-two, she was still beautiful in that particular way some women had—not the delicate beauty of youth, but something deeper. More real.
"Edward." She crossed the room and took both my hands in hers, studying me with the kind of attention that made me feel both seen and safe. "Welcome home. You look well. Taller. And you've finally grown into your shoulders."
I felt myself smile despite everything. "Thank you, I think?"
"It's a compliment. You left as a boy. You've come back a man." She released my hands. "I hope you're staying for dinner. I've already informed Cook you'll be here, so if you say no, you'll be disappointing her terribly, and she's been planning your favourite dishes for a week."
"I wouldn't dare disappoint Cook."
"Wise." Marguerite turned to Papa. "Richard, don't keep him too long. He'll want to see Juliet and the children before dinner."
"Marguerite is planning a dinner next week," Father added, with the careful neutrality of a man conveying information that was both innocent and not. "Family and a few friends. Your sister and Lucas will be there, of course, and the rest of the family. Just intimate."
I, who had survived eighteen months of European society, recognised a tactical manoeuvre when I heard one. "How intimate?"
"Twenty people at most." Father's eyes gleamed with amusement. "Marguerite has it all in hand."
Which meant I would be strategically seated next to someone's marriageable daughter and expected to make conversation. I'd escaped continental matchmaking mamas only to return to British ones.
Still. It was one dinner. I could endure one dinner.
"I should go to Ashbourne House," I said. "Pay my respects to Juliet and Lucas. And Charlotte—it's her debut this Season, isn't it?"
"It is." Father stood. "She's very excited. Has a notebook, apparently."
"She had a notebook when she was eight."
"This one has different coloured ribbons threaded through the pages."
I smiled despite myself. Charlotte with her notebooks and her systems and her absolute certainty about how the world should be organised.
She'd been an entertaining child, bossy and brilliant in equal measure, always trying to manage everyone.
I'd spent half my adolescence hiding from her in various trees.
She would be seventeen now. Practically grown.
I wondered if she still bossed people around.
"Give Juliet my love," Father said. "And Edward?"
"Yes?"
"I'm glad you're home."
The words settled somewhere in my chest, warm and heavy.
Ashbourne House, Grosvenor Square, London
I left Ashford House and made the short journey to Ashbourne House in Grosvenor Square.
The Ashbourne residence was larger, grander—a duke's London seat—but it had the same warm chaos I remembered.
Carriages in the drive. Voices from the drawing room.
The sense of a house filled with people who actually loved each other.
Simmons's counterpart—an imperious butler named Hartwell—showed me into the entrance hall just as a door opened somewhere above and Eleanor's voice rang out: "He's here!"
Thunder on the stairs. Eleanor appeared, eleven years old and all sharp angles and sharper intelligence, flying down the steps with complete disregard for decorum.
"Uncle Edward!"
She crashed into me with enough force to make me step back. I caught her, laughing, and was immediately transported to every family gathering where Eleanor had demanded stories and Charlotte had demanded I stop encouraging her.
"Eleanor. You've grown."
"You've been gone forever." She pulled back to examine me. "You look different. More... earled."
"More earled?"
"Like a proper earl. Instead of someone who hides in the library."
"I still hide in the library."
"Good." Eleanor grinned. "Charlotte's been organising you. She has a list."
I, who knew Charlotte's lists, felt a flicker of alarm. "A list of what?"
"Ladies. She's going to find you a wife."
"She's going to—what?"
"Six candidates," Eleanor said cheerfully. "All very suitable. I've seen the notes."
Before I could formulate a response to this horror, Juliet appeared at the top of the stairs.
My sister.
She looked beautiful, happy, more settled than I'd ever seen her. Marriage to Lucas suited her—motherhood suited her—and I felt the old tangle of emotions I always felt when looking at Juliet: love, gratitude, and the faint guilt that came from knowing she'd raised me as much as Father had.
"Edward." Juliet descended with considerably more grace than Eleanor had. "Welcome home."
We embraced. Juliet smelled like roses and felt impossibly small in my arms. Had she always been this small? Or had I simply grown?
"You look well," I said.
"I am well. And you look..." She studied me, seeing too much as she always did. "Taller. And older. And like you need a good meal and a full night's sleep."
"The Continent was educational."
"I'm sure it was." Juliet linked her arm through mine. "Come. Everyone's here. Lucas is in his study pretending to work. The aunts have taken over the drawing room. And Charlotte?—"
The door at the end of the corridor opened.