Chapter 2
The correspondence filled a japanned box, and it took Colin four hours to get to the bottom of it.
He had expected to feel nothing. He had trained himself, over fifteen years of settling his brother’s accounts, to handle the evidence of William’s life the way a clerk handled a ledger, and for the first hour it worked.
Bills from a tailor on Jermyn Street. A note from a man in Newmarket concerning a horse. Three letters from a woman who signed them with only V., growing shorter and colder in succession, and a fourth from her husband, which Colin read twice and set aside to be burned.
By the second hour, it had stopped working.
There were forty-one letters in that box from women, and he could not have said, sitting there with the light going gray at the windows, whether that number appalled him or whether he had simply expected worse.
He knew his brother. He had made his brother.
Every debt paid, every scrape smoothed over, every furious father shown quietly out the front door with a bank draft in his coat, and at the end of all that care stood a young man who had gone to Italy and left a six-month-old child in a wicker basket on a step in January.
Colin laid the letters out across the desk in rows and looked at the handwriting.
That was the whole of it. He did not need names. Names could be false and often were. A woman with a husband would sign a letter with a V. or nothing at all. But he caught a familiar hand.
Whoever had folded that blanket around the baby and written Katherine in the middle of a blank sheet had written to William before, because women always wrote to William before, and Colin had every one of those letters in front of him.
He worked through them by the shape of the K.
It was full dark by the time he found it.
The letter was near the bottom, folded small, on paper that was better than most of what lay on the desk. The hand slanted the wrong way. It pressed too hard on the downstrokes, and the gs looped over instead of under.
For a moment, he thought he had it. Then he read the letter and knew that he did not.
My dear,
I have watched you across three rooms this Season and never once spoken to you, and I find that I have written you a letter regardless, which tells you more about me than I would like you to know.
He read it standing up.
He read all of it, which he had not intended to do. At the end, he stood holding it for longer than was reasonable, because those were not the words of a woman who had a child by his brother. Those were not the words of a woman who had been in a room alone with his brother.
The letter had been written by somebody frightened and clever who had wanted, quite badly, for one honest sentence of hers to exist somewhere in the world, and who had been careful to make certain it could never be traced.
Careful, but not careful enough.
Colin turned the page over. The seal had been broken in the middle when William opened it, the way William opened everything—with a thumb and no patience—and the wax had split so that half the impression remained.
Half a wheel. The wing of a bird. Three letters of a Latin motto that ran off the tear.
He went very still.
Six years ago, he had sat in the second row at Westminster and watched a wool merchant kneel and stand up a marquess because the man had grown too rich to be left outside the fence and the Crown had preferred him in.
Colin had gone because his father’s ghost had left him a seat there and because he was twenty-four and had not yet learned that he could simply refuse.
He remembered almost nothing about the day, but he remembered the crest: the wing of a bird and half a wheel.
“Got you,” he breathed.
The house had gone quiet around him. Somewhere upstairs, a door opened, and there was the thin, distant sound of a child who did not want to be put down, and then Mrs. Pike’s voice, and then nothing.
Colin sat down at the desk and drew a fresh sheet toward him. He was aware, as he trimmed the pen, that he was not thinking clearly, and that writing this letter was the sort of act a man committed at nine o’clock at night after four hours with a box of his brother’s letters.
He did it anyway. He had a child upstairs with his father’s eyes and no mother, a house nobody had entered willingly in six years, and one name.
The Duke of Thorton requests the pleasure of the company of the Marquess and Marchioness of Huntington, and of their daughters, at dinner.
He eyed the word daughters for a while.
“Get dressed.”
Leonora did not raise her head. “I am dressed.”
“Get dressed properly. Both of you. Where is your sister?”
“Under the window,” Marina said from under the window, where she was lying full length on the floor with her boots crossed at the ankles and a bruised apple in one hand. “Good morning, Mama.”
Their mother had arrived in the doorway pink and slightly out of breath, with her cap askew and a letter held out in front of her like a lit taper.
Olivia Belmont, the Marchioness of Huntington, had raised five children and buried none of them and considered every day that she was not planning a wedding to be a day partially wasted. Leonora could tell from three feet away that the day had come off its hinges.
“We are going out to dinner on Thursday,” her mother announced.
“That’s lovely, Mama.”
“To Thorton Manor.”
The book slid off Leonora’s lap.
“The Beast?” Marina squeaked, sitting up.
“Do not call him that.”
“Everyone calls him that.”
“Everyone is very vulgar, and he is a duke.” Their mother pressed the letter to her bosom. “And he has asked to meet my daughters.”
“Nobody has seen the man in years,” Marina said. “Nobody has seen so much as his hat. He could be anything by now. He could be dangerous. He could be bald.”
“Marina.”
“I only mean that six years is a long while for a man to go without being looked at, and things happen.”
“He is a duke,” their mother repeated. “And he has invited us. I daresay he wishes one of you to marry that charming brother of his, which is a great deal better than the alternative. Anyway, we are going.” She turned in a circle in the middle of the room, spotted a movement behind the chests by the wall, and said in a different voice, “Augusta Belmont.”
The chests moved, and a small dark head appeared over the top of them. “May I come, Mama?”
“You may not.”
“But I’m nearly a lady.”
“You are twelve.”
“Nearly thirteen, and I have a very good gown. I would sit perfectly still and say nothing at all and only listen.”
“That,” their mother said, “is precisely what I am afraid of.”
She took Augusta by the shoulders and steered her out of the room, still talking. The door clicked shut behind them, and their voices faded down the corridor.
The room was very quiet.
Leonora had not moved. Her book was on the floor by her foot, and she was looking at it. Her hands had gone cold exactly the way they had gone cold in the sitting room at Huxley House with sleet at the windows.
“Marina.”
“Don’t.”
“Marina, do you think they…”
“No,” Marina replied. “No, I don’t.”
“Because if his brother had ever…”
“Nora.” Marina rose from the floor and went to sit on the edge of the bed.
She took both of Leonora’s hands in her own, which were warm and calloused from the reins.
“It has been six months. Six. If a man like William Walford were going to make trouble about a letter, he’d have made it in a fortnight, because that’s the longest he’s ever thought about anything.
It’s a dinner. Dukes host dinners. That’s very nearly all they do. ”
“He doesn’t.”
“Then he’s out of practice, and it’ll be a dreadful dinner, and we shall laugh about it for years.”
“And if you’re wrong,” Leonora said, “Mama will kill me. You understand that, right? I could escape the Beast of Thorton with my life and my reputation intact, but then I would walk into this house and be murdered in the hall by my own mother for having written a love letter to a rake. In front of witnesses.”
“She’d do it in front of the vicar.”
She let out a breath. “You’re certain?”
“I am absolutely certain.” Marina nodded. “And if I turn out to be wrong, I shall throw myself in front of you and confess to writing it myself. And then, when it’s my turn at the list, I’ll do something so appalling that you’ll look like a saint by comparison.”
“That isn’t a comfort.”
“It’s meant to be a plan.”
Leonora laughed, and it came out shakier than she liked.
She got up and went to the window, where the plane trees along the square were coming into leaf, and she thought about a folded sheet of paper with red wax on it, and a bird with its wing raised, and how very sure of herself she had been at three o’clock in the morning.
It was a joke. It was a joke, and nobody knows. In a week, we will have forgotten it.
“Nora.”
“Yes?”
“What did you write in it?”
Leonora watched a sparrow drop out of the plane tree onto the railings.
“Nothing that could be traced,” she replied.