She saw every word, as if she really could hear and could not stop hearing.
Luke, as was to be expected, was in command of himself, though only just, Emily guessed as her eyes widened and turned to him.
“Emily,” he said, “stay here with Anna, my dear. She has need of you for a while. I must find my poor Ashley. He has offended my mother bylaughingas he told us about it, the foolish man. He is deeply, deeply hurt. You will stay?”
There was a faintness in Emily’s head, but she nodded as Luke transferred Anna from his arms to hers and then hurried from the room.
Ashley, she thought. Ah, Ashley. Why had he not told her? Had he thought her arms not strong enough, her heart not big enough? Seven years was an eternity after all. The distance between them had grown vast. He had not told her.
Ah, Ashley.
As she sat down on the sofa with Anna, their hands clasped tightly together, she forgot why she had come to the sitting room.
“Emmy,” Anna said, her reddened face a mask of grief, “we are going to have to be very gentle with him and very kind to him. Poor Ashley.”
Emily raised her sister’s hands and set them against her cheeks.
•••
Lukehad come to stand beside him on the bridge. He said nothing, as he rested his arms on the stone parapet and gazed down into the water of the river flowing beneath. Ashley was throwing stones into it, trying to skip them, but the angle was too sharp. They all sank quite decisively.
“I suppose,” he said, breaking the silence at last, “you left Anna and Doris in tears, and Mothernotin tears?”
“Theo and Lady Sterne bore our mother off between them,” Luke said, “and I left Doris to Weims’s care. Anna was in tears, yes.”
“For something that happened more than a year ago,” Ashley said, throwing the next stone farther than the others. It still sank. “To people she did not even know. ’Tis foolish. Ah, well. I noticed that Powell had Emmy almost in an embrace in the garden a short while ago. Anna must be in high hopes of having a summer wedding to plan.”
“Ash,” Luke said, “you need to talk about it, my dear.”
Ashley laughed. “Zounds,” he said, “I remember how disconcerted and indignant I was when you first called me that, Luke. You have still not abandoned all your Parisian ways, I see. I noted your fan last evening. ’Twas a glittering occasion, by the way. I am thankful I came in time for it.”
“You are as brittle as glass,” his brother said quietly. “And I believe you could shatter into as many pieces.”
Ashley tossed his last stone over the parapet into the water and turned to rest one elbow on the wall. He looked at Luke with some amusement in his eyes.
“No longer,” he said. “Look at me, Luke. I am quite relaxed. ’Twas merely the ghastly prospect of having to break the news to you all, you see. I was sorry in my heart I had not written to you before dashing off home. I knew very well that Anna and Doris would dissolve into tenderhearted grief, that Mother would stiffen her upper lip and accompany it with a face of stone, and that you would square your shoulders and attempt to take my burdens upon them. You play the part of head of the family exceedingly well.”
“I did not come down here as head of the family, Ash,” Luke said. “I came as your brother. Who loves you. You are in pain.”
“Am I?” Ashley smiled. “It was a long and a tedious voyage. I ate poorly and slept worse. Both will be rectified now that I have my feet on firm earth.”
“You came home,” Luke said. “Not just to England, Ash. You came to Bowden. You might have stayed in London. You might have gone to Penshurst—’tis yours, I assume? But you chose to come home. Why? Just so that you might hold us at arm’s length? So that you might spurn help?”
“Help.” Ashley laughed.
Luke turned his head and looked assessingly at him before directing his gaze back at the water. “I have been trying to imagine,” he said, “how I would feel if ’twere Anna and one or all of my children. You are right: There could be no help, no comfort. Not immediately. Perhaps never. But I believe that after a year I might turn to my family. Yet I can see that even then I might be afraid to allow them inside the shell I would have constructed about myself.”
“Damn you,” Ashley said.
“I would be bitter and brittle. I might laugh from behind my shell.”
“You know nothing,” Ashley said. “You knownothing.”
“No, I do not,” Luke admitted. “Tell me, Ash. Tell me what happened.”
“I told you,” Ashley said. “They died. They burned with the house. I did not know until a friend came to fetch me. I came home to smoking ashes. I had been away—at a business meeting.”
“How did the fire start?” Luke asked. “Was the cause ever determined?”
