He reached for the decanter, his hand trembling slightly. “Another, Your Grace?” he mocked himself in a rasping whisper. “To toast the silence? To toast the empty nursery? To toast your bloody failure?”
The heavy oak doors creaked open, but Ambrose didn’t look up. He assumed it was Mr. Jones coming to plead with him to eat,or Mrs. Higgins with more dire reports of the twins’ own hunger strike.
“She’s leaving, Ambrose.”
He froze, the decanter mid-air as his eyes slowly looked up. He recognized Morgan’s voice, but the tone was markedly different. It was devoid of the usual swagger, replaced by a grim finality, as he noticed his mouth was set in a thin line.
“I bloody know she’s left, Kirkhammer,” Ambrose said, finally pouring the liquid into his glass as he shook his head from side to side, his golden curls framing his sullen face. “She left days ago, man. You’re late to the wake.”
“Not just the house,” Morgan said, stepping into the circle of candlelight. Ambrose noticed that he looked weary, his boots dusty from the London streets. “Not just Mayfair, or London. She’s leaving England altogether. She’s at the Blue Bell, packing for Liverpool. She’s booked passage…
“Passage?”
“To America.”
Time slowed to a suffocating crawl as the heirloom crystal slipped right out of Ambrose’s numb fingers. For a heartbeat, it seemed to hang suspended in the air, another fragile, glinting star, before gravity claimed it.
When it hit the floor, it didn’t just break. It detonated, the violentcrackechoing through the room like a pistol shot. Silver-edged shards skittered across the floorboards in a chaotic spray of light.
“Damn it!” Ambrose roared as he slammed his fist onto the desk.
As the brandy ran along the floor and bled into the nearby Persian rug, Ambrose felt himself untether from the world, his very identity spilling away with the liquid that stained the floor.
He was no longer a man of substance, but a ghost hovering over a ruin. The only remnants of his former life lay in the jagged splinters at his feet, each shard reflecting a different angle of his own hollow expression.
“America?” he breathed out. The word felt like a death toll. “That’s… that’s three thousand miles of ocean. She couldn’t get much farther away than that. It may as well be the Orient. She’ll never come back.”
“She knows about Lady Presholm,” Morgan said, crossing his arms.
“What do you mean? What does Lady Presholm have to do with anything?”
“Had you not heard? The gracious Lady Presholm has spent the week ensuring Miss Lewis will never work in this country again. My sources tell me that she even visited her, Ambrose.”
“What?” He rasped.
“Presholm tore Miss Lewis to pieces. The woman was ruthless. She made Miss Lewis think she’s a poison to your name. She thinks if she stays on this side of the Atlantic, she’ll eventually succumb and come back to you, and in doing so, ruin your nephews’ lives.”
Ambrose surged to his feet, the chair clattering backward as it fell to the floor with a clank. The lethargy of the alcohol vanished with this new revelation and was replaced by a cold, searing panic that froze his veins. His mind snapped into sharp focus.
To leave my household is painful enough, but this? I cannot allow it.
“She cannot. The storms… the voyage… she’ll be alone. In a land where no one knows her.”
“From what I know, I think Miss Lewis has spent most of her life alone.”
“She will not be safe in the unknowns of America. I have heard stories of what happens to unattached young ladies like her,” he rasped.
“I believe Miss Lewis prefers the unknown, even with all at stake, to the destruction she thinks she brings to you,” Morgan said. “She told me she wanted to go somewhere the name Welton couldn’t hurt her.”
Ambrose walked to the window, staring out at the dark London skyline. Living without her this past week had been a slow-motion torture, an empty existence. He had told himself he was being noble by letting her go. He had convinced himself that his silence was a shield for Arthur and Philip.
But America?
The finality of crossing the ocean was a different thing entirely. It wasn’t a temporary separation. It would be an erasure of everything they had shared. The thought of strangers taking in the rare beauty of her dark brown hair and emerald eyes, of her never again reading to the boys in her animated voices, of her never again looking at him with that fierce, quiet intelligence made his vision blur.
“I thought I could be the Duke,” Ambrose whispered, his forehead pressing against the cold glass of the windowpane. “I thought I could put the title and the boys before my own heart. I have only ever tried to do what is right and good, to not be my father, to be a man?—”
“And how is that working for you?” Morgan asked quietly as he walked closer to Ambrose.
