“Yes. Wes,” he said. “Wesley Mort. He was and is a foreman at a stone quarry. After he had knocked me to the tavern floor and I was only semiconscious, he voiced his contempt for me and all men of my class and told me that if I wanted to be a real man I could come and work for him. Which I did two days later, much to his astonishment. I worked for him for four years, until I heard about my father’s death and came back here. He was not easy on me. Quite the contrary. He gave me all the most brutal tasks during the first year or so and kept me at them for longer hours than he kept anyone else—because I was slower and worse than useless, in his stated opinion. I earned nothing for the extra time I put in.”
“But he became your best friend?” She had set an elbow on her knee and had her chin propped on her hand. She was looking slightly amused, Justin thought.
“He kept his end of our bargain and stopped calling me Mr.La-di-da after the first week,” he said. “Ever after I was Juss. He worked as hard as I did, I must explain, andconsiderably harder until I toughened up. I lived with him and Hilda, his woman. I shared a loft with his brother, Ricky. I taught Wes to read and write, though he still gets frustrated at the slowness with which he does both. I used to tell Ricky stories, and Wes and Hilda would often listen, though Wes pretended not to. It was beneath his dignity to take delight from an imaginary world. We made a wagon between us, and both Wes and Hilda had the use of my horse to pull it.”
“Ricky was a child?” she asked.
“He is a few years younger than I am,” he said. “But his mind is that of a child. When I went to Wes’s house to get work, it was Ricky who invited me inside for a bowl of Hilda’s soup to make me feel better. Then he showed me his loft and decided it was large enough for the two of us. Hilda put up a curtain to divide the space in two.”
“And that is where you lived for four years,” she said.
“And for a couple of months each year even now,” he said. “The Earl of Brandon becomes Juss Wiley, stone hewer, twice a year and is happy again.”
He gazed at her, his eyes and his whole face deliberately blank. He had not told anyone else these things.
“You love them,” she said.
“Yes,” he said curtly. “There were no deductions from my wages, by the way, for room and board.”
“And I suppose,” she said, “you did not charge for the reading and writing lessons or for the use of your horse.”
“It did not occur to me,” he said. “Perhaps I ought to send a bill.”
She had a way of looking. It was not exactly a smile. It was a... warmth. As though she smiled inside but chose to keep most of it to herself. But some spilled over into her eyes and onto her face nonetheless. She was looking that way at him now.
“What?” he said.
“I bet his bill would be larger,” she said.
“Undoubtedly,” he said. “Wes is as hard as nails. Or as a boulder. But yes, I love him.”
“And this,” she said, “is why you are so... large?” She seemed to have taken herself by surprise with her question. Even in the shadowed light of the cave he could see that color had flooded her cheeks.
He opened his hands and looked at his palms. There were still calluses at the base of each finger. His badges of honor. And the hands themselves were larger than they had once been. No longer the hands of a gentleman. He closed his fingers into his palms.
“I am sorry,” she said. “It was not intended as an insult. You looked very... frightening the first time I saw you. It did not help, I suppose, that I was sitting on the riverbank and you were on horseback and Captain looked as though he was coming for my throat.”
Captain woofed.
“You ought not to have been there alone,” Justin said.
“Now you sound like my aunt,” she told him.
“Not your brother?” he asked her. “Did he not scold you?”
“I did not tell him,” she said. “Hewouldhave scolded, and I would have been forced to quarrel with him and accuse him of sounding like our aunt.”
“The one who raised you,” he said. “What is she like? Apart from the fact that she did not approve of dogs as pets.”
“She was very strict,” she said. “Very proper. Very pious. Very a lot of upright, moral things. She has a strong sense of what is right and how a house should be run and how all the people in it ought to behave, both family andservants. She ruled my uncle and my two cousins and Bertrand and me. Bert was brought up to be a gentleman. I was raised to be a lady. We were raised to value church and prayer and morality. We werenevertold that our father was a rake and a ne’er-do-well. We were taught to respect him. But whenever he came to visit, he felt his sister-in-law’s disapproval and agreed with her unspoken condemnation. He has told us so since then. He thought we were in the best possible place with the best possible people, and he never stayed for longer than a few days at a time. He did not want to contaminate us with his presence. It did not help that we were taught to be quiet except when spoken to. We stayed quiet when we were with him, waiting forhimto speak withus, but he never spoke except to ask a few stilted questions that could be answered with a monosyllable. Our father believed we hated him and wanted him to go away. So he went.”
“I am sorry,” he said.
“You need not be,” she told him. “We did have an excellent upbringing. And we were loved, as I believe I told you before. Strict discipline does not necessarily preclude love, you know.”
“But you longed for your father,” he said. It had shrieked through every word of her account of her childhood. Or perhaps more through the look on her face and the tone of her voice than through her actual words. She and her brother had been reconciled with him, but much damage had been done them anyway.
“I am sothankful,” she said, “that he did not die before we had a chance to get to know him properly, to understand him and why he behaved as he did, to be fully... restored to him.”
