Epilogue
Blaise stood alone in the narrow vestry, where vestments hung like pale ghosts along the wall, and a single small window admitted a square of uncertain light.
His waistcoat had already been fussed over, his cravat threatened twice by Skelton’s meddling fingers, his hair smoothed so ruthlessly by the valet that it almost behaved. Almost.
He should have felt tightly wound, like other men said they did on their wedding mornings. Instead, there was a strange calmness in him. A feeling that he had been walking, out of breath, and finally reached the top of the hill.
The door creaked. Marcus ducked through it, too tall for such modest spaces, shoulders only half-tamed by his brand-new coat. His nephew wore a Knoxford black better than Blaise ever had. It fit him as if the wool itself recognized the rightful owner.
“You are supposed to be with the vicar,” he said coyly. “Practicing how not to bolt.”
Blaise snorted. “The poor man explained a million times that I must say ‘I will’ rather than ‘if I must.’”
“That seems fair,” Marcus conceded. “We must not terrify Aunt Iris before she has signed the register.”
Marcus leaned back against the paneled wall, the movement careless in the way young men were careless when they believed their bodies were immortal. Once, the sight would have struck through Blaise with anxiety. Now he only watched, standing easily with his hands behind his back.
For a moment, they said nothing. The muffled swell of the organ bled through thick stone. Outside the door, footsteps passed, and hushed voices traded last-minute instructions. In the close air of the vestry, the ticking of a small brass clock sounded indecently loud.
“Uncle,” Marcus said finally.
That single word had shifted in tone over the years. From worshipful to rebellious to weary. And today it was raw with emotion.
Blaise cocked a brow. “Yes, Your Grace?”
Marcus grimaced. “Do not start. It is bad enough everyone else insists upon it.”
“You are their duke now. They must insist. I am merely enjoying the novelty of being outranked.”
“That is a lie,” Marcus said quietly.
Blaise’s mouth quirked. “It is. But it was said gallantly, which is what counts.”
Marcus’s hands resembled his father’s; they had long fingers with tendons protruding when emotion surged through him. His hands now flexed, then curled into fists, and finally spread again on his thighs as if uncertain.
“I never properly thanked you,” Marcus said nervously.
“For what? Inflicting responsibility upon you? You may write your complaints to me after I am wed. We will file them in the appropriate wastebasket.”
“Thank you for everything.” Marcus swallowed. His Adam’s apple bobbed, and the tight collar pressed against his throat. “For raising me. For telling me the truth. For proving…” His voice grew hoarse. “Proving I am my father’s true son.”
Blaise felt the words land heavily on his heart. He had imagined this conversation a dozen ways, and not once had he found language that did not seem either pompous or inadequate. Now, with Marcus’s gaze on him, he discovered that words were not, in fact, required.
He put a hand on his nephew’s shoulder, the familiar weight grounding them both.
“You have always been your father’s true son,” he said. “Whether anyone proved it to you or not.”
Marcus shook his head sharply. “I know what the world thinks of bastards. Do you know what they said at school when they discovered I had no mother in society columns, no appearance in any ridiculous directory? I pretended not to care. I told them all it was none of their business, that they were fools to worship titles. But I did care.”
His mouth twisted into something that tried and failed to be a smile.
“And you kept saying I was legitimate,” he continued, “that my parents had been married. I thought it was you trying to be kind in that maddening way you have, even when no one asked for it.”
“Aggressive intervention is my vice,” Blaise said proudly. “Leave a man alone, and he might start making his own mistakes. Society could not bear the chaos of another Vale man not taking his duties seriously.”
Marcus huffed out a breath that might have been a laugh. It did not disguise the dampness gathering in his eyes.
“And then you climbed into Daniel’s house like a common burglar. You risked your life and your reputation and everything you had built in twenty years of business, just to bring me that damned piece of paper.” His jaw clenched.
“Yes,” Blaise said simply. “And I would do it again. For you and Iris.”
An emotional silence stretched between them.
“There is something I must tell you in return,” Blaise said.
Marcus’s gaze, already bright, sharpened further. “If you say you are actually a viscount in disguise, and that I have been tricked into taking your dukedom, I will leave.”
“Tempting,” Blaise admitted. “But I am afraid this is a less agreeable confession.”
He had not meant to speak of it. The past six months had been a litany of necessary revelations, each one striking its own bruise. Blaise had thought he could carry the last part of that night alone.
What good would it do to hand Marcus another burden?
But he remembered Iris, sitting across from him in the library, telling him in her clear, steady voice that not everything belonged on his shoulders. That he could, now and then, let others choose what they wished to carry.
“On the day of the accident,” Blaise said, and the words, once loosed, could not be called back, “your father and I were hunting. I had dragged him into the country in the hope that fresh air and violent sport might shake him out of his melancholy.”
Marcus’s mouth thinned. “You thought hunting would do what years of fatherhood had not.”
“An error in judgment,” Blaise said dryly. “We both made those.”
He felt the familiar flare of heat along his scar, phantom pain and memory married together.
“I told him that day that you had fallen ill. It was not untrue; you had been feverish. Your father had been absent for so long after losing your mother. But news of your illness truly frightened him like no other.”
He saw it again now: the way Benjamin had gone suddenly sharp, as if someone had struck flint against stone within him.
“He wanted to leave at once,” Blaise said. “To return to London without delay. He was no longer thinking about the hunt. I tried to calm him. To talk sense into him, but he would not listen. And then the beast showed up.”
Marcus had closed his eyes. Tears stood on his lashes, catching the faint light from the window and making him look, for a heartbeat, absurdly young again.
“We were careless,” Blaise said quietly.
“I had shaken him. Because I had told him you were unwell and that he had failed you. That is when…” His hand tightened unconsciously on Marcus’s shoulder.
“That is when he wanted to return to his son, but the boar attacked. And I tried to reach him. I thought if I could pull him clear, if I could get between him and the—”
“That is how you got the scar?” Marcus cut him off. “You tried to save him?”
“Yes,” Blaise said, and the admission surprised him with its own rawness. “Had I held my tongue that morning, he might have cursed the weather instead of fate, and we would both have returned, damp, sullen, unscarred and alive.”
Marcus cried quietly as he listened.
“Your father,” Blaise continued, the words coming faster now, “lost himself when your mother died. But I saw him return when he wanted to come home to you.”
Blaise’s throat worked as Marcus’s hands lifted, hesitantly, and closed around his upper arms. It was an odd reversal; Blaise had been the one to steady him after every scraped knee and every drunken schoolboy fight. Now the boy was anchoring the man.
“Uncle,” Marcus said, and the word wavered only once. “His death is not your fault.”
The pain that licked along Blaise’s scar then was different. It had no edge. It was a sweet reminder of his brother and the love he had left behind.
He had thought forgiveness, if it ever came, would come from some outside source: the law, absolving him of legal guilt; society, praising his bravery; God, if Blaise had been the kind of man who asked such things of heaven.
It had not occurred to him that the forgiveness that would matter most would come from the son of the man he had failed.
Marcus’s grip tightened once, then eased. He blinked hard, fighting the tears on his lashes.
“And as for me, I never asked you to take me in, or to argue with headmasters on my behalf, or to attend prize-givings like an overproud mother hen. I certainly never asked you to risk your damned life stealing my parents’ marriage lines.
But you did all of it. So if you are determined to claim responsibility for every wretched thing that happens in this family, you may bloody well accept credit where it is due. ”
Blaise’s laugh came out on a breath that was half-sob, which affronted his dignity so thoroughly that he had to cover it with a cough.
“You speak to your uncle like that?” he managed.
Marcus’s mouth curved. “I am your duke. Remember? You made certain of that.”
“Ah.” Blaise let his hands fall to his sides; the air between them felt oddly new, as if some invisible structure had shifted. “Yes. About that.” He drew himself up, attempting solemnity and not quite managing it. “Have you forgiven me?”
“For which particular sin?” Marcus asked, wariness giving way to something like mischief. “There are so many.”
“For making you a duke,” Blaise said. “A terrible fate. All those estates. All that power. All those simpering mothers throwing their daughters at you.”
Marcus sniffed. “It is not as bad as I thought it would be.”
Blaise scoffed and glanced toward the closed door, where the faint stir of the congregation rose and fell like an impatient tide.
“I might forgive you,” Marcus said. “Under certain conditions.”
“Name them,” Blaise said. “I am in a generous mood. It is my wedding day after all.”