Chapter 12 #2
It was Jack who broke it, his voice low and even.
"It was not murder, lad, we did what was necessary to survive.
Out there it was the sea, and the sea does not care for a man's good intentions.
It was them or us, every time it came to it — and your cousin never raised his hand to a soul who was not already trying to put him in the water.
" He paused. "I will not pretend it was clean.
There is no clean, out there. But Alexander never once lost sight of the difference between us and the men we fought. Not once."
Anthony was quiet a moment. Then the fear came—and Alexander saw that it was not for himself, but for him.
"Alex—if anyone were to learn of this. There would be warrants.
A trial." His voice tightened. "You could hang, or rot in a cell, and what would that do to your mother?
She buried you once already. I do not think she would survive doing it twice.
And I am not certain I would either, after—" He could not finish it.
"No one knows," Alexander said gently. "I sailed under another name those four years. The man who did those things does not share my face on any document in the world. Jack can vouch for it. I would not have brought this to your door if it could put a rope around my neck—or yours."
Some of the rigidity went out of Anthony's shoulders, though not all of it. He took a breath, and then asked the question beneath all the others.
"But why, Alex? You were alive. You could have come home—to your mother, to your name, to all of this." He gestured at the room around them. "Why stay out there, in such danger, for years, and let us go on grieving you?"
Alexander was quiet. Across the room, Jack had gone still.
"At first it was the debt," Alexander said at last. "These men had saved my life.
I meant to repay it by working as hard as I can to help them—to see them safe, and then come home.
That was the whole of my intention." His jaw set.
"But somewhere in those years I saw what certain British ships were carrying.
A cargo I could not believe with my own eyes.
And once I had seen it, I could not ignore it either. "
"What kind of cargo?" Anthony asked, though something in his tone suggested he was beginning to dread the answer.
Alexander held his gaze for a long moment. Then, instead of answering, he rose, crossed to the locked drawer of his writing desk, and drew out a worn leather portfolio. He returned and placed it in his cousin's hands without a word.
Anthony opened it.
Alexander did not watch the pages. He watched his cousin's face—the way the easy intelligence drained out of it, the way his thumb stilled against the paper, the way the color left him by degrees as he turned from one sheet to the next.
Anthony said nothing. He read, and the fire burned, and whatever he found there rearranged something behind his eyes that Alexander knew would never sit quite the same way again.
When he finally looked up, his voice was not steady.
"This is..." He swallowed. "Alex, this is too much. For one evening." He closed the portfolio with great care, as though it might break in his hands. "I need to walk. I need air, and I need to think about what I have just read, because I do not yet have anywhere to put it."
"I understand," Alexander said. "I expected nothing else."
Anthony rose and held out the portfolio; Alexander took it back. At the door his cousin paused, and when he turned, the shock was still raw on his face—but beneath it was something settled and certain.
"I do not yet know what I can do," Anthony said.
"I do not know that I am brave enough for whatever this is.
But hear me on one thing, Alex." His voice held.
"You are my family. Whatever I decide once I can think clearly again—I will never breathe a word of this to a living soul.
Your trust is safe with me. That much I can promise you tonight. "
And then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the corridor.
For a moment after they had faded, neither man spoke.
"It does not feel right," Alexander said at last, his eyes on the fire. "Burdening him with all of it, in one evening. Perhaps I should have given him half the truth."
"Then you would be deceiving the only man you trust," Jack said. "Except me, of course." He took up his glass. "And if it is any comfort—hard decisions rarely feel right. Trust me on that."
"I only hope it does not break him." Alexander's jaw tightened. "He is stronger than he knows. But this nearly broke me, and I had the sea and four years to grow used to it."
"He did not look broken to me," Jack said. "He looked lost. He does not yet know how he is meant to feel about any of it, or where he fits." He drank. "He will come aboard, Alex. He only needs time to find his place in all this chaos."
"I pray you are right."
◆◆◆
A few days later, the carriage deposited Alexander at the address Catherine had specified — a quiet residential street lined with modest but respectable townhouses.
Gas lamps cast pools of amber light along the pavement, and the evening fog was just beginning to roll in from the Thames, lending an atmosphere of secrecy that seemed appropriate to whatever lay ahead.
Alexander stood a moment, adjusting his dark coat, checking his pocket watch. Seven o'clock precisely, as Catherine had instructed. The street appeared deserted but for a single figure in a dark cloak beneath one of the lamps.
As he approached, the figure turned, and even with her hood drawn up he knew her at once — something in the way she held herself, the familiar tilt of her head.
"Catherine," he said quietly.
"Alexander. Thank you for coming." Her voice carried nervousness and determination in equal measure. She scanned the street once more, then gestured toward a narrow path between two houses. "This way. The back entrance."
They walked in tense silence, their footsteps muffled by the fog, and she led him around a small garden to the rear of a townhouse and knocked softly — three short taps, then two longer.
The door opened to reveal a woman Alexander recognized from society gatherings, though they had never been introduced.
Lady Beatrice Ashworth stood in the doorway, silver hair gleaming in the lamplight, her grey eyes moving over him with the unhurried thoroughness of someone who had learned to take a man's measure before he had finished crossing a threshold.
"Your Grace," she said, with a curtsy that held more assessment than deference. "Come in."
The hallway was warm, and unlike any aristocratic house he knew — worn Persian rugs, walls lined with books rather than ancestors. She led them to a small sitting room where a fire burned and a plain tea service waited, and gestured him to a chair.
"Catherine has spoken of you," Beatrice said, settling opposite. "Though she has been rather circumspect about the particulars. She is not, as a rule, circumspect about anything. I found that interesting."
"Lady Beatrice." Alexander did not sit back. "I will be direct, as I suspect you prefer it. I am not yet certain why I am here. Catherine tells me you do important work. So I will ask you plainly — what is it, exactly, that you do?"
Beatrice regarded him for a long moment, and did not answer the question.
"Do you know," she said instead, "I have never once described this work to a soul outside my circle.
Not in fifteen years. There are women who have sat in that chair a dozen times before I told them the whole of it.
" She folded her hands. "I am considering telling you — a Duke I met ninety seconds ago — a very great deal more than that. Do you know why?"
"Because Catherine vouches for me."
"Because Catherine vouches for you. Her instincts brought her to me, and they have not yet been wrong about a single person.
" Her eyes did not leave his face. "So I am extending you her trust, Your Grace.
Not mine. Mine, you have not earned, and I do not give it on a handsome face and a famous name. We are clear on that, I hope."
"Entirely," Alexander said, and found, to his mild surprise, that he meant it. "I would think less of you otherwise."
The faintest flicker crossed her face — not quite approval. She inclined her head and began to speak: of the soup kitchens, the clinics, the women taught to read, the families pulled out of the workhouse machinery one at a time. Alexander listened, and as he listened, he tested her.
"It is admirable," he said, when she had finished. "And I will tell you that I share the impulse behind it. I believe we are obliged to help the powerless. It is the moral thing. The virtuous thing. Surely you would agree."
It was bait, and he watched to see whether she would take the flattering, comfortable shape of it.
She did not.
"No, Your Grace, I would not." Beatrice's voice was perfectly level.
"I am not running a charity, and I am certainly not running a morality play for the comfort of people who wish to feel virtuous.
I do not help a man because helping him polishes my soul.
I help him because he is owed it — because the world has been arranged, very deliberately, by people like you and the man I married, so that his suffering pays for our comfort.
" She let that sit. "I am not trying to be good.
I am trying to balance an account that was rigged long before either of us was born.
Virtue is what idle women embroider onto it afterward.
" A thin, dry pause. "I was married to a marquess.
I know your world from the inside as well as you do.
I suspect you understand me perfectly well. "