“There is no one else who knows Holdridge well enough to escape detection,” Henry said, doubts prickling in the back of his mind.
Tutting under his breath, Walter shook his head. “As much as it warms me to see how greatly you care for your wife, how you seem to adore her… I cannot help you in this regard. If I had the documents with me right now, I would show you. I was either still in Tangier or sailing home when this happened. Four years ago, I was certainly in Tangier.”
“That does not mean you did not order it,” Henry countered. “Perhaps, you asked a member of staff to execute your instructions.”
Walter narrowed his eyes at his brother. “Why would I do such a thing? What would I gain?”
“Remove my wife, you remove my ability to have an heir. Perhaps, I was to be next. Youare the heir after me, after all,” Henry replied.
“But I am not!” Walter retorted, a great sigh surging out of him, as if he had been holding his breath for a very long time. “Brother, I am not. I am heir to no one and nothing, and I am content with that. Glad of it, in truth!”
“Of course, you would not admit it outright,” Henry said, his certainty threadbare.
“You are not listening,” Walter urged. “I am not the heir after you. I am not the spare Father tricked everyone into thinking I was. I am the son of the old gamekeeper’s daughter, whom Father decided he wanted. I am illegitimate. My mother died in childbirth, her father paid and threatened into silence.Yourmother was forced to raise me, until she passed.”
Henry stopped dead in his pacing, his heart feeling as if it were about to explode from his chest as he slowly turned to face his brother. “What?”
“I have always known. James told me when we were boys; it was something he had heard his father say, and something I confirmed when I went to the gamekeeper and he burst into tears.” Walter’s throat bobbed. “I had never seen a man cry until then. He left Father’s service shortly afterward, and when he did, I found this on the writing desk in my room, wrapped in a handkerchief.”
He held up his hand to show a thin, simple silver ring that looked out of place among his other, more ornate jewelry.
“I despised it for years, but now I wear it as a reminder,” Walter continued. “I belong to no one. I answer to no one. I need never be part of the society that was so vicious to me.”
Henry rested a hand against the back of the nearest settee, suddenly unsteady. “I… do not understand.”
“Did you never wonder why I behaved like such a beast toward you, out of nowhere? It is because I discovered what I was:illegitimate. I hated you for beingmorethan I was, somehow. I never spoke to Father about it, not then, but I took my anger out on you,” Walter explained. “I wanted to punish you for something you had no control over.”
Moving around to the front of the settee, Henry sat down. “But my mother… cherished you.Fatheradored you.”
“He ‘adored’ me because it upset your mother to see me so favored, a reminder of his infidelities,” Walter replied, his brow creased as if in pain. “And when she died, I suppose he continued to favor me because I was the only child he had created from his conquests. You would think he would have hundreds of illegitimate children, but I am the only one.”
Dumbstruck, Henry stared down at a hole in the rug below, as if he might find some answers in the torn weaving. “I always thought it was odd that we were so close in age. Not impossible, but… unusual.”
“The night I left Holdridge, I… discovered Father in his study with one of the new maids,” Walter said, though Henry did not know how much more he wished to hear. “She was terrified, pleading for help. Nothing had happened yet, but Father meant to get what he wanted. I sent her out of there and… I lost my temper. I raged at Father and told him what I knew at last, told him that I no longer wished to have anything to do with such a monster. I said I would not keep his secret if it meant protecting other young women from him.
“He tried to plead with me, then he threatened me, then he offered me money. I took it, but I told him that if I heard of him ruining any other woman’s life, I would reveal everything. Then, I left, and I never went back.” He leaned forward in his seat. “I did not harm Thalia. I have no reason to. I am not anyone’s heir and never wish to be.”
Sitting back, Henry swept a stressed hand through his hair, his mind awash with wave upon wave of confusion. He had not been certain of Walter’s involvement, but he had not expected this! Yet, it explained so much of his brother’s sudden aversion to him, the years of sly remarks and being the bane of Henry’s existence.
“I am sorry I cannot help solve this mystery,” Walter said softly. “But, if I may, I think you should go home to your wife,bewith your wife, and do not hold back. If you love each other, as I suspect you do, then concentrate on that. Be the very opposite of our father and love your wife with everything you possess! You do not know how rare a thing that is, or how some would give anything for the opportunity to have what you have.”
Henry raised his gaze to his brother. “But… if it is not you, then who?”
“I do not know,” Walter said apologetically. “The butler, perhaps?”
Henry shook his head. “Not him. I cannot believe it would be?—”
Just then, he noticed something behind Walter’s head: a worn, yellowed tapestry that he must have seen a thousand times. Where time and damage had warped the threads, the shape of the image had altered, the details becoming blurrier. Indeed, Henry himself had the same tapestry on the wall in his study, though the edges of the picture were sharper, better maintained.
It was a tapestry of the family crest: three escallops on a shield, a beaver at the top, and the motto beneath, translated to ‘By Persevering.’
The barely decipherable drawing that Alan Fry had shown to them splintered back into his head like a lightning bolt. Now that he thought about it, the three splotcheshadhad slightly scalloped edges, like a shell. As for the strange creature drawn at the top of the wobbly shield: it looked very like the distorted animal that Henry was staring right at.
The Brooks coat of arms.
“Where is James?” Henry rasped.
Walter frowned. “I told you, he left with Frances a few hours ago.”
