Chapter 18 #2
“An honourable man does not abandon a woman and a child to spare himself embarrassment,” Ronan said slowly, as though testing whether the words could possibly be true of the father he had loved so completely.
It couldn’t be true.
“I understand why you would wish to defend him regardless. You knew a different man than I did, brother.” There was a strange sympathy in Jonathan’s voice, but one that was not appreciated in the least by Ronan.
“I do not believe you.” But even as Ronan said it, he heard the hollowness in his own voice because the cane was identical.
“Then believe this instead.” Jonathan reached into his coat and drew out a folded paper.
When Ronan did not immediately take it, he simply let it drop at his feet, unwilling, it seemed, to come close enough to press it into his hand.
“My father’s last letter was written not long before your mother discovered his other family existed and made him choose between us once and for all. ”
Ronan bent, with some difficulty, his bad leg protesting the movement, and picked up the letter. His hands were not quite steady as he unfolded it.
He knew the handwriting at once, would have known it anywhere, in any light, on any page in the world.
My dear boy, it began, and something in Ronan’s chest went cold and small at the tenderness of those three words, a tenderness he recognised, because his father had used nearly that same phrase in a hundred letters written to him.
I have thought long on what your mother asks of me, and I find I have not the courage to give her the answer I know is right.
I cannot make you my heir. I cannot give you my name while my wife lives, nor even, I fear, while I live, for the scandal would fall not upon me but upon a son I have not yet had the honour to raise, and I could not forgive myself for that.
I know this is no comfort to either of you, and I know it changes nothing of what I owe you.
Know only that not a day passes that I do not think of you, and grieve the life I was too great a coward to give you.
Your father, always.
“He never told me,” Ronan said, and his voice had lost all its former hardness. It came out instead like something torn.
“He never told either of us the whole truth, did he. Only enough to keep us both loyal to him. That was rather his particular talent.”
“If this is true…” Ronan’s jaw worked. “If this is true, you are still not entitled to what you are asking of me. A letter does not make you legitimate.”
“No,” Jonathan agreed, and the coldness returned to him all at once.
“But the documents do, as does my mother’s testimony, sworn before witnesses before she died, God rest her, still weeping over him at the end, the foolish woman.
A solicitor in London who has spent the better part of two years, at considerable expense to me, establishing beyond any reasonable doubt that I am precisely who I say I am, the natural son of the late Duke of Ravenhill, born before his marriage, acknowledged in private if never in law. ” He folded his arms.
“I have spent my whole life being told what I could not have because a woman I never met happened to marry my father first. I am rather tired of it, Ronan. I expect you can understand that, being a man so very devoted to what he believes he is owed.”
For a long moment neither of them spoke.
“You said Sarah is safe,” he said at last, forcing his voice back into some semblance of order. “Where is she? I will not go on with this conversation until I have seen her.”
“You will go on with this conversation for precisely as long as I require you to,” Jonathan said.
“Besides, she is closer than you think. Enough that I need only raise my voice to have her brought to us, and I promise you, brother, you do not wish me to do that until we have finished here. Let us not waste what patience I have left on threats neither of us means to act upon yet.”
Ronan forced himself to breathe. All he could think of was Augusta now, and the cane she had seen. There was no doubt now that what she had seen was correct.
“You killed a woman.” His voice had gone flat now. “The maid.”
Something like genuine irritation crossed Jonathan’s face, the first entirely unrehearsed expression Ronan had seen from him.
“That was regrettable; I will not pretend otherwise. She recognised me and saw me in the grounds that night and called out my name. I could not have her repeating it to anyone.” He said it so plainly, without apparent horror at his own words.
“It was not her I went there for, you understand. It was Phillipa.”
The name struck Ronan like another blow entirely. “Why?”
“Because you were to marry her,” Jonathan said it as though it should have been obvious.
“You would have been a far more difficult man to unseat once you had an heir of your own coming, and a wife’s family besides to defend you.
I could not allow that marriage to proceed if I could help it.
And if, in preventing it, suspicion happened to fall upon you instead of me…
” he gestured, almost lazily, toward Ronan’s cane, then his own, “...well. I confess I thought that rather elegant. Two birds, if you will permit the expression.”
“You meant for me to hang for it?”
“I meant for you to be sufficiently distracted and disgraced that the dukedom would come within reach a good deal sooner than it has.” Jonathan’s mouth curved.
“It did not work out entirely as I planned. Your little troublemaker of a wife saw to that, standing up in the middle of the ceremony like some avenging angel. I confess I did not anticipate her. She has been rather inconvenient to me ever since.”
Ronan’s hand had found the head of his cane again, gripping it as though it were the only solid thing left in a world that had, in the space of a quarter of an hour, come entirely unmoored. “You will not speak of my wife.”
“As you like.” Jonathan inclined his head, unbothered.
“It changes nothing of why we are here. I have spent years, Ronan, gathering what I need to take back what was always more mine than yours by right of birth, if not by the law’s cruel accounting.
I have the documents, and all that remains is you. ”
“Say what you mean to say.” Ronan’s voice had gone very quiet.
“I mean for you to abdicate,” Jonathan said it simply, as though he were asking Ronan to pass the salt.
“Sign the dukedom over to me, quietly, with whatever face-saving story you like attached to it, ill health, a desire to retire from public life, whatever suits your pride best. I will see that you and your family are provided for. Generously, even. I am not without sentiment, whatever you may think of me by now. I do not wish you dead, Ronan.”
“You are asking for something I have no power to give you, even if I wished to. The title does not simply pass at my whim to a man with no legal claim to it, whatever papers you carry. You are mad if you believe otherwise.”
“Mad?” Jonathan repeated the word. “Grief does that to a man, I find.” He straightened from the wall, and Ronan saw, for the first time, the outline of a blade beneath his coat, and understood precisely how far this man was prepared to go.
“Very well. If you will not sign, I expect I shall simply have to kill you instead, and let the title fall to your daughter’s guardians until some more convenient arrangement can be made. ”
“You will not touch her.” The words tore out of Ronan before he had entirely decided to speak them.
“I would rather not have to,” Jonathan said, and there was, God, help him, something that sounded almost like sincerity in it.
“I am not a monster, Ronan, whatever tonight may suggest to you. But I have come too far to walk away with nothing, and I find I am no longer entirely certain what I am capable of, when it comes to it.” He tilted his head, and the last vestige of warmth left his face entirely, leaving only a terrible, patient calm behind.
“So, you may choose to sign and end this quietly, as brothers. Or you may refuse, and I will kill you where you stand, and I promise you I will not hesitate half so long over the girl.”
Somewhere beyond the ruined walls Ronan thought he heard, or perhaps only imagined, the faint, muffled sound of a child crying. Every instinct in him strained toward that sound.
He looked at his brother and searched that familiar-unfamiliar face for some sign of the boy his father must once have loved but found no comfort in the search.
Only a terrible, mirrored certainty that under different circumstances, raised in a different house, he might have become something very like this himself.
“You do not want to kill me,” Ronan said quietly. “Whatever else is true. You said yourself you did not wish me dead.”
“I said a great many things,” Jonathan replied, and for just a moment something almost like regret passed over his features.
“Wanting has very little to do with what I am prepared to do, brother. I have spent five and thirty years wanting things I was never permitted to have. I find, in the end, it changes nothing at all.”
“It is your choice, little brother,” he said softly, and held out his hand, palm up, waiting, the silver raven on the cane at his side catching the thin morning light like a blade. “I have not got all morning to spend on sentiment. Choose.”