Chapter 18
The place had been chosen for their meeting was a stretch of woodland some three miles from the house, where an old hunting lodge had once stood before fire had taken the roof off it decades ago.
He had left instructions with his household before he had gone. Word had already been sent for the constables, quietly, though the letter had been plain enough that any obvious show of force would see Sarah harmed before help could reach her. He was to come alone.
He had every intention of appearing to obey that instruction, and no intention whatsoever of relying upon it alone to bring his daughter home.
The pistol sat cold and solid at his hip and he found himself thinking, absurdly, of Augusta’s face when she had told him the raven on the head of the murderer’s cane matched his own precisely.
The path he followed had once been a proper carriage road, back when the hunting lodge still stood entire and his grandfather’s guests had come here for a fortnight each autumn to shoot and drink and forget, for a little while, that they owed anyone anything.
Ronan had come here as a boy himself, once or twice, before the fire, and he remembered it now only as a place full of laughter and gunsmoke and his father’s hand heavy and proud upon his shoulder.
It seemed a cruel sort of irony that it should be here, of all places, that everything his father had built for him should come apart.
He saw the man before the man saw him, or seemed to. A tall figure stood within the broken walls of the lodge. As Ronan came nearer, the man turned, and Ronan saw his face clearly for the first time.
He did not know it. That was the first, strange thing his mind fixed upon and yet something in the shape of the jaw, the set of the shoulders, struck him with an unease he could not immediately place.
The man was tall, near enough Ronan’s own height, dark of hair, dark of eye, and he smiled at him.
“You came alone,” the man said, sounding almost pleased by it, as though Ronan had passed some manner of test. “I confess I was not entirely certain you would. You have quite the reputation for caution, Your Grace. A man who barely leaves his own house, they say, who has not attended above three balls in as many years, who trusts almost no one. I have made rather a study of you, if I am honest. It is not every day one gets to meet a man one has thought about so very often.”
“Where is my daughter?”
“Safe, for the present.” The man spread his hands, palms up.
“I would not have harmed a hair on her head before we had spoken, whatever else you may think of me by the time this conversation ends. She is sleeping, or was when I left her. Children have a remarkable talent for sleeping through terror, have you noticed? I confess I found it rather humbling to watch.”
Something in Ronan’s chest twisted violently at that, at the image of his daughter asleep and frightened in some stranger’s keeping, and it took every ounce of the discipline his father had drilled into him since boyhood not to close the distance between them and put a bullet through the man’s smiling face there and then.
“You have five minutes,” he said instead, “before I stop being interested in conversation.”
“Five minutes.” The man laughed. “Do you know, I have waited a great deal longer than five minutes to stand in front of you. Years, in fact. I confess I find myself rather at a loss now that the moment has finally arrived. You are precisely as I imagined you, and yet nothing at all as I imagined you. Is that not peculiar? I built you into such a monster in my head, all these years, and here you stand looking at me as though I am the monster instead.” He tilted his head, considering. “Perhaps we are both a little right.”
“I do not know you.”
“No,” the man agreed, and something flickered behind his eyes. “That has rather been the trouble, hasn’t it?”
It was then that Ronan’s gaze, sweeping over the man in search of some weapon, some sign of Sarah, some clue as to where in this ruin his daughter might be hidden, fell upon the cane resting against the man’s leg.
For one long, suspended moment, Ronan forgot entirely how to breathe.
It was his own cane, the same dark, close-grained wood, the same length, the same silver head shaped into the outstretched wings and curved beak of a raven.
“You are staring at my cane,” the man observed, and there was something almost fond in the way he said it, the way one might speak to a child who had finally noticed something long hidden in plain sight.
Ronan’s mind, usually so disciplined, so ordered, seemed to have scattered entirely, and he could summon nothing more coherent than the thought that this could not be, that there was some trick to it.
He thought of the smith in the village who had made his own cane’s twin once, years ago, when the head had cracked after a fall, and dismissed the thought almost as soon as it arrived. That man was long dead, and would in any case have remembered so singular a commission.
“Where did you get that?” Ronan’s voice had gone very low, “Tell me now.”
“The same place you got yours, I imagine.” The man lifted it, turned it once in the grey light so the silver caught what little sun had begun to break through the mist. “Our father had it made for me the year I turned twenty.”
Our father? The words sounded too ridiculous to Ronan, who hadn’t ever thought such a possibility to exist.
His eyes widened at the admission, but the man didn’t stop. He seemed to smile at the reaction before continuing on.
“He was rather proud of the design. Said no other family in England could claim a bird so fine.” He looked up, and his smile had gone thin now. “Did he never mention me, Ronan? In all these years? Not once?”
“I do not know what you are speaking of.” Ronan was immediately defensive. Surely, whatever he was saying had little truth to it.
“No,” the man said again, softer this time. “No, I don’t imagine you would. Forgive me, I ought to introduce myself properly, oughtn’t I, before I go asking after brotherly affection I have no right to expect.” He inclined his head in a small, mocking bow.
Ronan waited for him to continue. He was running out of patience with each passing second.
“Jonathan. Jonathan Birgin, as I was raised. Jonathan Parson, as I have every legal right to be called now, though it has taken me the better part of my adult life to prove it.” His dark eyes held Ronan’s.
“Your elder brother, in point of fact, though the law has never once cared to notice the distinction.”
Elder brother? Such a thing was not possible. He began to shake his head immediately. “You are making a fool of yourself. That is not possible.”
“I assure you it is entirely possible. It is, in fact, precisely what happened.” Jonathan settled himself against the broken wall, as though they were two old friends met for an idle chat rather than two strangers.
“It is your statement against what I’ve known to be true all of my life,” Ronan said through gritted teeth. “I am sure that my mother or my father would have mentioned if such a thing was true.”
It wasn’t an ordinary thing to discover, and there was no proof, as far as Ronan was concerned.
“Our father had an affair a number of years before he married your mother with my mother,” he went on. “Does that surprise you?”
“It doesn’t because I know you are not telling the truth,” Ronan said. It had to be a lie; there was no other possibility.
“Oh, brother. I’d urge you to listen on.
Perhaps you can make some sense of the situation then,” he went on.
“She was nothing so grand as a duchess, you understand. A gentleman’s daughter, well enough bred, but not the sort of match a future duke was permitted to make when there was a title and a fortune to be considered.
So, he did what men of his sort generally do.
He loved her in secret, got a son on her, and then, when the time came for him to be sensible, he married elsewhere and paid handsomely to ensure my mother and I were never spoken of again. ”
“You are lying.” Ronan could not believe a word that he was hearing.
“I wish that I were.” For the first time, something genuine cracked through the composure, a flash of old, old bitterness that Ronan almost believed despite himself.
“I grew up three counties away in a house he paid for, with a mother who wept over his letters until the day she died, waiting for a man who never once came back to see the son he had made. Do you know what that is like, Ronan? To grow up knowing precisely who your father is, knowing he is alive and wealthy and titled, and knowing you will never in your life be permitted to say so?”
Ronan felt as though all that he knew about his father was being called into question at this moment. His discernment was something that he had prided himself on all these years, and so it wouldn’t be possible that he had a false image of his father.
A false image…or perhaps just an incomplete one.
“If this were true,” Ronan said, and his voice shook now despite every effort to hold it steady, “my father would have told me. He was an honorable man and taught me everything I know of honour.”
“Did he?” Something dangerous moved behind Jonathan’s eyes.
“Tell me, then, brother, what honour looks like from where I stood. I used to imagine you, you know. The legitimate son. I used to lie awake as a boy wondering what I had done, what sin I had been born already guilty of, that I should be denied the very same thing simply for having arrived a few years too early and to the wrong woman’s bed.
” His jaw tightened. “I do not say this to make you weep for me as I have long since given up wanting anyone’s pity.
I say it so that you will understand precisely why I am not inclined to feel a great deal of sympathy for whatever this discovery is costing you this morning. ”