Epilogue
The coaching inn at Kidderminster smelled of tallow candles and yesterday’s mutton, and the fire in the common room had been laid with green wood that produced more smoke than heat.
Harry Fairfax, Duke of Newbury, had spent worse nights.
He’d also spent considerably better ones, and he was aware that his mother, the Duchess, had retired to her room an hour ago with the particular expression she wore when she was making allowances for him.
He didn’t blame her. He’d been poor company since they’d left London.
It wasn’t Megan. That was the good part.
Megan, who was the thing he’d spent years not quite believing he would ever find, had given birth to a son three weeks ago at Saxton Castle, and every mile that brought them closer to Shrewsbury felt like a correction of something that had been wrong for a very long time.
A son. His nephew. Oliver’s boy. Harry intended to be insufferably proud about it.
No, it wasn’t Megan.
He was on his second glass of the inn’s indifferent claret when he heard his name.
“Newbury.”
He turned.
Douglas Algate, Baron Frasier of Norfolk, was making his way across the common room with his coat still travel-dusted and his jaw carrying two days of dark growth that he somehow made look deliberate.
He was a tall man and built like the cavalry officer he’d once been, and Harry had known him since they’d both been nineteen and doing something inadvisable near Vauxhall that neither of them had ever discussed in polite company.
“What are you doing in Kidderminster?” Harry said.
“Coming south from a visit to my sister in Crewe.” Douglas dropped into the chair across from him and signaled to the barman. “You?”
“Going north. Well. West. Shrewsbury.”
Something moved through Douglas’s expression at that. Harry had known the man long enough to catch it, which meant it was bad. Douglas didn’t allow things to move through his expression unless he was past the point of being able to stop them.
“Your sister?” Douglas said.
“She’s had a boy. We’re going to meet him.” Harry watched his friend accept a glass and turn it in his hand without drinking from it. “What’s happened?”
Douglas didn’t answer immediately. He looked at the fire, which was still producing more smoke than was warranted, and Harry waited.
He’d learned to wait with Douglas years ago.
The man thought before he spoke, which was either an admirable quality or an infuriating one depending on how urgently you needed information.
“Do you know a Miss Arabella Langton?” Douglas said.
Harry searched his memory. “Simon Langton’s sister. The younger one.”
“Yes.” Douglas took a drink, finally. “Her father died in the summer, exactly one year after Simon. Fever. Took him quickly. She didn’t take it well.”
“I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.” Harry had been preoccupied with other things in the summer, which was a considerable understatement.
“She has no living siblings now. No male relatives worth speaking of.” Douglas set his glass down on the scarred table. “The estate went to a cousin. Third cousin, something of that order. Man named Cavendish. Ralph Cavendish.”
The name meant nothing to Harry. He said so.
“No reason it should. He’s got money, a small property up in Westmorland, and no particular reputation beyond being the sort of man who gets described as capable by people who mean something else entirely and don’t want to say it.
He has never married.” Douglas’s jaw was doing the thing it did when he was choosing words carefully.
“He arrived the week of the funeral, took Arabella north with him, and I have not been able to get a letter through to her since August.”
Harry was quiet.
“I’ve tried three times,” Douglas said. “Three different routes. Nothing comes back.” He looked at the fire again.
“She wrote to me in July, the day of the funeral. I have the letter. She was frightened of him, Harry. Not frightened of the situation, not frightened of losing her home, which would be reasonable. Frightened of him. She said she’d felt it the moment he arrived, the way he looked at the house and then looked at her, and that both assessments had been exactly the same. ”
Harry thought about a girl being taken from her home. About walls and locks and fourteen years of silence. He thought about Megan and pushed the thought aside quickly because it would not help him think clearly.
“How old is she?” he said.
“Nineteen. She’s not a child. But she’s unmarried and she has no money of her own, and the law gave Cavendish everything, including whatever authority he cares to exercise over her until she reaches her majority.
” Douglas turned his glass again. “I want to go up there. I’ve been wanting to go since August. My sister’s confinement kept me in Crewe through September.
I tried to see her on my way home, but I was refused, and now there’s estate business I cannot put off, and I—”
He stopped.
“You’re fond of her,” Harry said.
It was not quite a question. Douglas looked at him with the expression of a man who has decided not to argue about the precise definition of a word.
“She’s a good woman,” Douglas said. “She’s clever and she’s kind and she doesn’t deserve to be shut up in some man’s house in Westmorland with no one to look out for her.” He picked up his glass, put it down again. “Saxton Castle is near Shrewsbury.”
“It is.”
“And Cavendish’s property is only 3 miles north of Shrewsbury at Longmere Hall.
” Douglas looked at him directly, for the first time since he’d sat down.
There was nothing in his expression except the stripped-down thing that existed underneath Douglas Frasier’s considerable composure when he’d run out of patience with himself for having feelings. “I’m asking, Harry.”
Harry looked at his friend for a moment. Then he reached across the table and picked up Douglas’s glass, which still had an inch of claret in it, and drank it.
“Tell me everything you know about Cavendish,” he said.
Saxton Castle sat above the Severn Valley in the particular way that old houses sat when they had been in one place long enough to stop appearing to occupy the landscape and begin to appear to be it.
Harry had been here once before, briefly, when a young boy with his father.
A duke visiting a duke. He had not had the presence of mind to look at it properly then.
He looked at it now as the carriage came up the drive and found that it suited Oliver entirely, which he supposed was either very fortunate or very deliberate.
When the duke died, it would go to Oliver.
His mother was already leaning forward slightly, the way she did when she was managing anticipation. She had become rather practiced at managing it, this past year. Oliver and Megan had spent time in London but had retired to Saxton Castle for her confinement.
Oliver came out to meet them before the carriage had properly stopped, which Harry noted with approval. He was coatless in the October cold and appeared entirely unbothered by this, which was consistent with everything Harry knew of him.
“Your Grace.” Oliver handed his mother down with the formality the occasion called for and then shook Harry’s hand with the firmness of a man genuinely glad to see him.
“He arrived three weeks ago. He is, in my considered opinion, the finest infant in England, and I am prepared to defend that assessment.”
“What a perfectly reasonable position,” Harry said.
“I thought so.”
His mother had already gone inside. Harry fell into step beside Oliver, and they followed through the great hall, which smelled of wood smoke and something warm from the kitchens, and up the staircase to the corridor the drawing room.
Oliver stopped him outside the door.
“She’s well,” Oliver said. Not conversationally. The way a man said something he’d been thinking about and needed to say properly. “She’s—” He paused, which was unusual enough that Harry paid attention. “She’s more herself than I’ve ever seen her. If that makes sense.”
“It does,” Harry said.
Oliver nodded. Opened the door.
His mother was already across the room, and Megan was sitting on the settee with a baby in her arms and the image was perfect.
She sat with the particular self-possessed composure that Harry had come to understand was not the absence of feeling but rather what Megan looked like when she had so many feelings that she’d organized them all very neatly to avoid being overwhelmed by them.
She was pale and had shadows under her eyes and she was smiling at their mother with an expression on her face that Harry had spent four years trying to imagine and had not quite managed to.
“Harry.” She held out her hand. “Come meet James David Sommerset.”
They’d named their son after James and his second name after Harry’s father. No wonder his mother was beaming.
He crossed the room and took it and looked down at his nephew, who was small and red-faced and ostentatiously certain of his own importance, and felt something settle in his chest that he hadn’t realized had been unsettled.
“He looks like Oliver,” Harry said.
“He has my nose,” Megan said.
“He has,” Harry agreed. “Oliver’s expression, though.”
“He’s only been in the world a short while and he already looks faintly disapproving of everything in it,” Oliver said from behind him, which was so accurate that Harry laughed.
His mother was holding James now, which she was doing with the absolute focused concentration of a woman who understood precisely what she was holding and was not going to allow herself to cry about it in company.
Harry watched her face and thought, we got this, in the end.
Whatever had been broken, whatever had been taken, they had gotten this.