And now, she thought as the sound of the receding curricle grew faint and then disappeared altogether, it was too late to call him back. To tell him she had not meant a word of what had just come pouring out of her. To tell him, as he had told her, that she loved him with all her heart and always would.
Though she would never see him again.
—
It must have been close to noon when they made their first stop to change the horses and have something to eat, though Devlin ate less than half of his meat pasty and noticed that Ben ate verylittle more of his own. They had been back on the road for half an hour or so, Ben at the ribbons now, before Devlin spoke—the first to break the silence between them since they had left Cartref.
“So, what are you going to do, Ben?” he asked. “After we have reached London, that is.”
“Hang about there for a few days at least,” Ben said. “Then go with you.”
Devlin turned his head sharply and looked at him. “I’ll probably get sent out to the Peninsula sooner rather than later,” he said. “You know I am planning to purchase a commission. In a foot regiment. Perhaps the Ninety-Fifth—the Rifles.”
“I will go there with you,” Ben said.
“As a fellow officer?” Devlin asked.
“Not as a military man at all,” Ben said. “I have money. I suppose you are aware that our... father settled a tidy sum on me right after my mother died. It was in trust until I turned twenty-five, which I did earlier this year. It has grown into something of a fortune over the years. And then there has been my salary, which has been largely unspent. I will not spend any of what I have on a commission, though. I do not believe in killing people against whom I have no grudge. I could do it in self-defense perhaps if there was no alternative, or in defense of someone dear to me. But not just because I was ordered to do it in some senseless battle.”
“Then why would you come with me?” Devlin asked.
His brother did not answer for a while. Finally he said, “Because I think you might need me, Dev. You are a bit of a dangerous innocent. You see everything in terms of good and evil. Right and wrong. Truth and lies. With nothing in between. Yet in this world we live in almost everyone fits somewhere between those extremes.”
“We all have to compromise?” Devlin asked. “I suppose you agreed with everyone last night and saw me as the big villain, theone who would not condone the Big Lie. Why the devil did you come with me today, then?”
“I told you why,” Ben said. “My mother may be dead, but she was and is and always will bemy mother.And you were the only one of all of us who was right, Dev. That does not necessarily make what you did right. But you made me see the truth that I suppose I have always known and have pretended not to know—that my mother was no more to my father than a cheap whore. Or maybe not so cheap. I will never know, but I hope for her sake she demanded and got an exorbitant price. She meant so little to him that he went and married your mother even though there was me. And then he kept on whoring while keeping up that pretty image of devoted husband and father and friend and neighbor. The perfect aristocratic family in the perfect setting. Even I was somehow folded into the image without tarnishing it. You were the only one who ultimately could not be folded in. You need looking after, Dev. I don’t know how you will manage otherwise.”
“The army probably does not allow brothers to accompany its officers to war,” Devlin said.
“Then I will go as your servant,” Ben said, shrugging. “As your valet.”
“I believe they are called batmen in the military,” Devlin said. “You really want to go with me to play nursemaid and polish my boots and clean my weapons, do you?”
“I’ll probably tell you to do them yourself and mine too while you are at it,” Ben said. “But yes, I am going with you.”
Another half hour or so passed before they spoke again.
“Ben,” Devlin said. “I always knew your story. I knew that though you were older than me you could never inherit the title or Ravenswood. I knew you were sent to a different school from the one Nick and I attended and now Owen. And all because you arenot a Ware, though your father is. But I can honestly say, for what it is worth, that I have never thought of you as somehow inferior to the rest of us. You have always been my brother, as important to me as the others. I swear this is true.”
“Yes,” Ben said after drawing the curricle farther to the side of the road as they passed a stagecoach coming in the opposite direction. “Yes, I know.”
“You did not come with mejustbecause you thought I would need you, did you?” Devlin asked him. “You came at least partly because what happened last night made you feel very alone. It made you feel you did not belong at Ravenswood after all. You need me as much as I need you.”
“You talk too much,” his brother said, which was a funny thing to say when they had been traveling side by side for hours in almost complete silence.
“Well, that makes two of us,” Devlin said. “Not talking too much, I mean. All alone. Not belonging.”
“The difference being that you are still the heir,” Ben told him. “You cannotnotbelong, Dev. Sooner or later you will have to go back whether you want to or not.”
“Would to God it were not so,” Devlin said. “I envy you your freedom from all that nonsense, Ben. But you will never be entirely alone, you know. Not as long as I am alive.”
PART TWO
1814
SIX YEARSLATER
Chapter Eleven
