When Estelle was called away from tea in the drawing room to the library, Maria had been talking with Mrs.Sharpe, her son Ernest, and her elder daughter, Doris Haig. Mr.Sharpe had just joined them too. Maria reported on what Estelle had missed of the conversation before the two of them went down for dinner that evening.
“I asked them straight-out if they had resented my mother,” she said. “I even told them it would be perfectly understandable if they had. Mrs.Sharpe told me Papa had always been very good to her sister while she lived, but that she had thought him entitled to find happiness with someone else after she was gone. They did not blame him for marrying Mama. Though Mrs.Sharpe did add that it gave her a pang of sadness anyway since she had worshiped the ground her sister walked upon, to use her words.”
“I am glad you brought the subject up with them,” Estelle said. “They are very pleasant people. And honest too.”
“Mrs.Sharpe explained that losing her sister was thegreatest, most painful loss she has suffered in her life,” Maria said. “Greater even than the loss of her parents. They were very close. But she had never expected that Papa would mourn her for the rest of his life. She told me some things about her sister after I asked, and Mrs.Haig and Mr.Ernest Sharpe added a few memories of their own. I think she must have been a warm and charming lady. When I asked why none of them had ever come here after Mama and Papa’s wedding, they told me they had considered it more tactful to stay away than to make Mama uncomfortable with the reminder of Papa’s first wife. I think... Maybe there was no actual quarrel? Maybe they did not hate Mama. Maybe it was a mere misunderstanding and she simplythoughtthey did.”
“I am very glad you had a frank talk with them, then,” Estelle said. She was not so sure there had been any such misunderstanding—or that any of the fault lay with the Sharpes. But she had not known the late countess personally, and it would be unfair to judge.
“I asked Mrs.Sharpe if she resentedme.” Maria sounded breathless. “I asked if she hated the fact that I am the daughter of the house but not her sister’s daughter. She simply said,“Maria!”in a shocked voice, while Mr.Sharpe called me a goose, and then they allhuggedme.”
“Well.” Estelle hugged her too when she saw tears brighten her friend’s eyes. “I believe this family gathering is turning out to be a very good thing for you, Maria. It is helping you discover that youdo havefamily and that they are all disposed to love you.”
“Mrs.Sharpe told me,” Maria added, “that Papa always adored me and that Jus— She told me that Brandon did too. They both talked about me a great deal whenever they went to the Sharpes’ house to visit. She told metheyhad alwaysloved me too even though they had never met me. She begged me again to call her Aunt Betty, and I am going to do it.”
This gathering was also enabling Maria to separate her own identity from that of her mother and become her own person, Estelle thought as they made their way to the dining room together. Maria sat between Mr.Dickson and Mrs.Chandler, her maternal uncle and aunt, at the foot of the table, and she conversed with each of them in turn with some animation and a becoming flush of color in her cheeks. Estelle wondered if she had admitted to herself yet that she owed all this self-discovery and reconciliation with her family to her stepbrother, the Earl of Brandon.
Even as she thought it he began to speak from his position at the head of the table. He was addressing everyone. Estelle turned her eyes his way. She had avoided looking at him throughout the meal, lest he catch her at it.Justin.She had called him that in the library earlier, quite inadvertently. She hoped he had not noticed. Bertrand certainly had, of course. He did not miss much. Sometimes she wished he were anyone’s twin but her own.
“Justin?”Bertrand had murmured as they made their way up to their rooms in the east wing after making a list in the library and assuring the earl, without any evidence to support their confidence, that all would be well and Ricky would be found safe and sound and restored to his brother.
She had not misunderstood her brother for a moment. “Well,” she had said, very much on her dignity. “Thatishis name, is it not?”
The conversation had ended there.
“I am spreading word of a missing person as far and as wide as I possibly can,” he said now—Justin, that was. The Earl of Brandon. The man who had warned her thisafternoon that he was going to harass her for the rest of her stay here, though, to be fair, he had not actually used the wordharass.
His words drew everyone’s attention. And he told them about Ricky and his own connection with the man and with his brother and... sister-in-law. There was always a pause before he indicated Hilda that way, for of course she was not married to Ricky’s brother. Inevitably he told part of his own story, something he had not done with anyone before he had told her, Estelle, today out at the grotto. She could guess how much this telling was costing him. It must make him feel as though the armor he had built about himself with such painstaking care were being ripped away, leaving him exposed to view and to censure.
“I do not even know if he can find his way anywhere close to here,” he said at last. “I cannot even know for sure that heistrying to find me. But I must do all in my power to spread the word so that if he is seen, he will be taken home or brought here, whichever is closer. I let him down in July by not going to see him when I had promised I would. I will not let him down now. I will make every effort to find him.”
“Including letting us all know things about yourself and the missing years that you would otherwise have kept to yourself for the rest of your life,” Mr.Sidney Sharpe, his cousin, said. “I honor you, Justin.” He held up his empty wineglass.
“So do I,” Lord Crowther, his aunt Augusta’s husband, said. “Though why you did not come to us in Cornwall when you had to leave here, I do not know, Justin. Family and all that.”
“It is my hope,” Lord Brandon said, “that you will all keep your eyes open for a strange young man, though itseems too much to hope that he will find his way here on his own.”
“But why is it you had to work at a stone quarry and live in a laborer’s cottage?” Maria asked. “Had you squandered all the money from Mama’s jewels?”
There was a sudden uncomfortable silence. Estelle had the impression that several of them would have slid under the table to avoid further embarrassment if they could.
Lord Brandon looked directly at his sister, whose face had turned pale except for two spots of color high in her cheeks. “The first I heard of stolen jewels, Maria,” he said, “was when you mentioned them while I was talking with Lady Maple several days ago. I do not know what happened to them, but I do assure you I did not take them.”
“Then why did Papa banish you?” Maria cried, regardless of the appallingly public nature of this exchange. “Why did he send you away and never relent for the rest of his life?”
“It was a private matter between him and me,” Brandon said after a brief pause. “But it had nothing to do with theft or your mother’s jewelry, Maria. And absolutely nothing to do with you either. I loved you dearly, as your memories of childhood will perhaps confirm for you. How could I have done anything to hurt you? You have my word on this, if my word is good enough for you.”
“I daresay, Justin, your pa thought you were an idle young buck who stood in need of some toughening up in the real world,” Mr.Dickson said in his usual hearty Yorkshire voice, breaking what threatened to be an awkward silence no one else would have had the courage to fill. He was also patting Maria’s hand on the table beside him. “So he pushed you out the door like a bird from the nest and you found your wings and your backbone and stayed out untilafter he was gone. It was a pity he never saw you again. I daresay he regretted that at the end. He would surely have been proud of you for making your own way, even if it was at a stone quarry. Any father would.”
“Strict love,” Mr.Harold Ormsbury said. “It sometimes works, though I have never approved of it or even considered it with my own son. And we never heard that Justin was running wild as a young man, did we, Felicity? You should indeed have come to us, Justin. But forcing you out the door does not sound quite like your father. I do not know what could have—”
“Estelle and I have helped Brandon make a list of people in the vicinity who may help in the search for Ricky Mort,” Bertrand said. “Men, women, servants—they are all on it. The more the merrier. We all know how news and rumor spread. I daresay the poor young man will be spotted in no time at all once the word is out. I will fetch the list to the drawing room if I may, Brandon. Someone may be able to suggest names we missed, or other ideas altogether. Two heads are said to be better than one, and three better again. How many of us are there? I have not stopped to count. But all our heads together will be vastly better than three.”
Maria took that as her cue to get to her feet and lead the ladies from the dining room.
***
There followed a spirited discussion in the drawing room over what could be done to help find Ricky. Viscount Watley led it, the list in one hand, a pencil in the other. Almost everyone participated, as though they were playing a parlor game. It was a cause and a story that seemed to concern and animate everyone. They were all nearly enjoying themselves, Justin thought. He took himself off to the library fora while to write to a few people on the list and left everyone else to it. He felt a bit as though he were standing on his head rather than his feet. Or as if the whole of his world had been turned upside down while he had not.
