Her hands were pressed flat against the cushions on either side of her. Bertrand’s hand came down to cover one ofhers, and she leaned her shoulder against his. They did not turn their heads to look at each other. They did not need to. They were feeling the same things, and they were taking comfort from each other. Or, more accurately, Bertrand was giving comfort and Estelle was taking it. She felt a bit nauseated.
“I believe you are lying,” Maria said. Her voice was shaking.
He nodded slowly without saying anything. He was gazing at her, his eyes dark and bleak.
He would have been twenty-two at the time, Estelle thought. His stepmother had been seventeen to his thirteen when she married his father. She was twenty-six by this time, then. And still very beautiful, no doubt. Perhaps more so than she had been at seventeen. Perhaps irresistibly attractive to her stepson. He must have been a handsome young man, slighter of build than he was now, more open of countenance, his nose unbroken. A cheerful and kindly young man, according to his relatives. Adored by his father and by his young half sister. Irresistibly attractive, perhaps, to his father’s young vain wife, who might have grown bored and restless with her older husband.
Who had seduced whom? Or had it been mutual?
“I do not believe you,” Maria said again. “Papa would have given you a thundering scold, even though it would have been mainlymyfault really. But he would not havebanishedyou. Or never let you come back home. That story does not even makesense.”
He continued simply to gaze at her while Bertrand clasped Estelle’s hand tightly in his own.
“I was an idle, careless young man in those days,” Lord Brandon said. “It did me good to be sent off to cool my heels, though what was intended as a brief sort ofpunishment for careless behavior stretched into six years. I was too busy exploring the country and enjoying myself to come home. Unfortunately I left it too long. I hope our father forgave me for that before he died.”
When a first lie was unconvincing, a second rarely improved upon it.
“He spent more time with me after you left,” she said. “He smiled more. He was sadder. It was strange how both those things happened. He was always so very sad, and always smiling and smiling. Everything was broken. You took those jewels, Brandon. And now you add lies to theft. Mama’s heart was broken. She loved those jewels, but I never saw them again after you went away. They were gone.”
The Earl of Brandon tipped back his head and closed his eyes. When he opened them he was looking ather, Estelle. And at Bertrand.
“I am sorry you have been exposed to the discomfort of this conversation,” he said. “At the same time, I thank you for giving my sister the comfort of your friendship. She is very young to have lost both her mother and her father and to have been left with only a half brother she does not trust.”
“I have aunts and uncles and cousins too,” Maria said.
“Yes.” He looked at her with such desperate fondness that Estelle had to turn her eyes away.
“Both of you can rest assured that what has been said here will be safe with Estelle and me,” Bertrand said. “It has been our pleasure to be here at Everleigh. Your family reminds me a bit of our own—large and diverse, blood relatives and those more loosely related by ties of marriage. But all happy to mingle with one another and to offer support and help wherever it is needed. And affection. Suchbonds never break, even when sometimes they are stretched almost to a breaking point.”
Estelle squeezed his hand and they both got to their feet.
“Shall we join your family in the drawing room, Maria?” Estelle suggested. None of them, she noticed, had touched their tea.
They led the way out, leaving the men to follow them.
“I so desperately want to believe in him,” Maria said. “I doted upon him when I was a child. I cannot remember him ever being impatient with me or unwilling to play with me. And last night and today I have seen the old Justin in him and want to believe that at heart he has never changed or been cruel or dishonest—or a liar. But the story he told when Ibeggedhim to tell me the truth was just ridiculous.”
Yes,Estelle thought. Hewaskind and caring at heart. He had loved his father and his half sister. Theftwouldhave been out of character. So would seduction of his father’s wife, of Maria’s mother. Oh, it wouldnothave been that way around. Everything she had heard about the late countess, however, had revealed a woman of vanity and ambition and little conscience. His only sin, surely, was in not telling his father the truth but taking the blame upon himself so that he would not hurt his father beyond bearing. Though perhaps he had done that after all.
“I so want to love him again,” Maria said. “If he would just tell me the truth.”
“I am very certain he loves you,” Estelle said.
***
Two days went by during which nothing of any great significance happened except that Justin received another letter from Hilda. She was at home alone. Ricky was stillmissing and now Wes had gone too, to search for him. It was madness, Hilda had written, for neither they nor anyone else had any idea where Ricky had gone—if he had gone anywhere. Perhaps he had drowned somewhere, she had written with stark frankness—and Justin could only imagine the terror behind that admission. But Wes had had to believe that Ricky was trying to find his way to Everleigh Park and that somehow he was headed in the right direction. Wes had accepted the loan of a horse from the owner of the quarry—“Everyone has been awfully kind, Juss. People are even bringing food to the house as though I had suddenly forgotten how to cook”—and a loan equivalent to a month’s wages, though the owner was insisting that Wes did not have to pay it back. And he had set off to find his brother.
It rained all of one day and the guests entertained themselves in the house in varying ways, a few in the library, several in the drawing room or the morning room, others in the billiard room, a crowd of young people in the gallery with the children playing vigorous games, blindman’s buff and three-legged races among them.
Justin had invited them all here for Maria’s sake so that she could get to know the various branches of her family and perhaps establish an ongoing relationship with them. But he was happy for his own sake too. He had hated being back at Everleigh—so large, so magnificent, so cold and silent, so lacking in soul. But now, wherever he went, with the exception of his own apartments, he came upon relatives or steprelatives, all of whom were genial, all of whom were happy to talk to him and draw him into their groups.
Even the children. Doris’s two had found him after breakfast when they had escaped from the nurseryundetected. There had been no ride that morning because of the rain. They had appropriated one of his hands each and dragged him off to the nursery to—
“Play horsey, Cousin Justin,” Edward had demanded, though he was already five and might have been expected to have outgrown such an infantile game. “Papa says he has bad knees, and Mama says we are too heavy. Grandpapa says if he gets down he will never get up again, and Grandmama is too old.”
So for half an hour Justin was a horse, bucking and neighing and plodding and occasionally galloping while four children—Cousin Bevin Ormsbury’s two as well, aged five and three—bounced and shrieked and squabbled over whose turn it was and drummed their heels against his sides and gripped his hair and urged him to “Gee-up!”
The vicar and two neighbors made brief separate calls to the house to report that several sightings had been made of men who might have been Ricky Mort but had turned out not to be. One had been a fourteen-year-old lad running an errand for a local butcher. Another had been a seventy-two-year-old former farm laborer, out for an afternoon stroll with his grandson. None of the others had been simpleminded or from the West Country or lost. All had been indignant at being mistaken for the missing man. One of them, indeed, had been out and wandering onlybecausehe was looking for the unfortunate young man himself.
