Despite the early dinner, the children were late to bed.
“And very much too overexcited to settle easily,” Anna said when she came into the drawing room after helping settle her own four. “Jonah wants to do it all again tomorrow. I suspect he wants Avery to show him how to be a bit flashier with his swordplay.”
“But I cannot have my son outshining me,” Avery protested. “Not when he is only five years old.”
“Come back to the music room with me, Anna?” Harry said, getting to his feet. “I want to have a closer look at Andrew’s cat if it is still there.”
“It is,” Joel said while Anna looked at Harry in some surprise. “It is on the pianoforte. It is a lazy cat and not likely to have moved from there.”
Anna preceded Harry from the room while he held the door open, and then took his arm as they made their way back down to the music room. Fortunately it was empty. Harry took a candle in with him from one of the wall sconces outside and lit the candles on the mantel.
“I can remember the concerts we used to put on as children,” he said. “Some of them right here. We were alwayssoproud of ourselves.”
He wished he had not said it then, when he turned to look at her. She had not been there to be part of those concerts. She had been at the orphanage in Bath.
“All children love to perform,” she said. “We did too when I was growing up at the orphanage. This concert tonight was a lovely idea. I believe it was Winifred’s. She has changed so much in the ten years since I taught her in the orphanage school. In what seems like another lifetime. She has grown up, of course. But more than that—she is becoming the person she was always meant to be. And I have to givesomuch credit to Camille and Joel, who took her from the orphanage, adopted her, and just loved her.”
The door clicked open, and Harry turned his head in some annoyance to see who it was. Avery stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He looked with raised eyebrows from Harry by the fireplace to Anna closer to the pianoforte and strolled toward the chairs, which were still in rows. He sat down on one at the back.
“Do not mind me,” he said, and waved one beringed hand as though permitting them to proceed.
It was too latenotto proceed now, Harry thought.
“Anna,” he said, “I have not been kind to you in the past ten years.”
She ran one hand along the top of the pianoforte before lifting her head to look at him. “You have not been unkind, Harry,” she said. “I have tried to imagine what it must have felt like for you and Camille and Abigail and Aunt Viola when the whole family—and I—were sitting in that salon at Archer House listening to your solicitor telling us what he had discovered from the inquiries he had made in Bath about the supposedly bastard daughter our father had supported at the orphanage there. I am not sure I have ever succeeded. My life was turned upside down and inside out as a result. But yours was … shattered. It was not to be expected that any of you would welcome me with open arms.”
“I did,” Avery said.
“Oh, not at first, Avery,” she said crossly, turning her head toward him. “You were horrid.”
“Was I, my love?” he asked her. “But it was your shoes, you see. They were so …” He circled one beringed hand in the air.
“Ugly?” she suggested.
“The very word,” he said. “Thank you.”
“They were my Sunday best,” she protested.
He smiled at her. One did not often see Avery smile.
“I think,” Harry said, “you were hurt when none of us would accept your offer to share your fortune four ways.”
“Ah,” she said, returning her attention to him. “I was. But I approached the matter far too soon and without any tact at all. I was sohappyat the thought of our all sharing the great bounty our father had left that it did not occur to me that I would appear condescending, even insulting. And quite insensitive.”
“No,” Harry said. “You must not take any of the blame upon yourself, Anna. You did absolutely no wrong. Neither did we except to lash out in our pain at a living target rather than a dead one. We could no longer hurt our father. So we hurt you instead. And felt not one whit the better for it. At least I did not. And never have. Will you forgive me?”
“Harry,” she said, “there is nothing to forgive. Except that your continued stubbornness sometimes drives me to distraction.”
“Hinsford?” he said.
“It will be yours eventually,” she said. “Or your children’s, if you should happen to predecease me. Just as the one quarter of our father’s fortune will be yours—withthe interest it is gathering.”
“Will it please you if I take the money now?” he asked.
Her eyes brightened. “Willyou, Harry?” she asked. “Oh, please.Willyou?”
“I will,” he said. “And with it I will purchase Hinsford.”
