“No!I mean what is he trying to accomplish?He’s been making up to my brother and sister-in-law for years, apparently, insinuating himself into their good graces, and I cannot make out his purpose.It must be something dastardly, but what?”
“Must it?”Fitz said.“I mean to say, mightn’t Thorne simply be trying to be friends with your family?”
“But why, is the question,” Lucy fumed, watching as Kitty wiped jam in Thornecliff’s hair.He affected not to notice.
“Hmm.I can think of one possible explanation.”Fitz smiled at Lucy, who reared back.
“What?No, it has nothing to do with me!He started this long before I came back to England.”
“Is that so?Well, perhaps it’s something else, then.Thorne has always been a deep one.Wheels within wheels, if that is the expression I’m thinking of.”
“How long have you known him?”
“Oh, a donkey’s age,” Fitz said, settling his long body comfortably along the edge of the blanket.He propped himself up on his elbows and continued, “Thorne and I have been friends since we were little sprogs.”
Lucy struggled to make the many, varied pieces of Thornecliff fit together in her mind.“How could someone as nice as you be friends with a man like that?”she burst out.
“Well, we were at school together,” Fitz explained.“Creates a bond, you know.And Thorne wasn’t always…what he became, when we left school and went to London, after all that rotten business with his uncle.”
Despite herself, Lucy felt the deep burn of curiosity.“His uncle?”
“Raised him after Thorne’s parents died,” Fitz said, uncharacteristically brief, his habitually sunny expression clouding over.“They had a falling out.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know the particulars,” Fitz hedged.“Thorne never liked to talk about it, and one doesn’t want to pry.”
Sensing she wouldn’t get more out of him on that topic, Lucy asked, “What was Thornecliff like as a boy?”
“Intense,” Fitz remembered.“He and his cousin, Dominic, always had to be the best at everything.They fought all the time, in constant competition, but they were inseparable.Do you know, I wasn’t terribly happy at school, at the start, away from home for the first time and all that, and Thorne always knew how to buck me up.We’d sneak out and go for a ramble in the woods, or a punt on the river.He was…kind, in his own way.Huh.I hadn’t thought of that in a long time.”
Lucy shook her head, bewildered.How had that competitive, driven boy who’d taken a homesick friend under his wing turned into the selfish, useless, spiteful, preening creature who’d nearly destroyed her sister’s life on a whim?
Was it possible that version of Thornecliff was the mask…and there was a whole other man underneath?
She wondered if Fitz knew about what Thornecliff had done to Gemma, or about him saving Nathaniel from a burning building.Lucy had followed the gossip rags embarrassingly closely as a girl, and she couldn’t recall seeing Fitz’s name mentioned alongside Thornecliff’s in the tales of his scandalous exploits.
“When did you first meet Caroline and leave England?”she asked.
Unfazed by the abrupt change of subject, Fitz laced his fingers behind his head and lay back on the blanket to blink dreamily up at the puffy, white clouds.“Almost eight years ago now.”
Lucy bit her lip.Fitz had already been abroad before Thornecliff ever made his ill-fated stop at Five Mile House.A part of her wanted to lay it all out for Fitz, but when she glanced back at Thornecliff, the corner of his lips curled in a sly half smile at whatever he’d just said to make Bess laugh, she found it hard to say anything.
There were times when Lucy felt as if the whole world wanted her to simply forget everything that had happened.To move on, as though it was enough to simply say Thorne was a changed man because he’d done one or two not-horrendous things.
When she wasn’t sure any of them truly knew Thorne at all.
“When we met in Paris, Fitz,” Lucy said slowly, “you were so kind as to inquire after my sister, Gemma, and our mother.You had kept in touch with people back home enough to have heard the bare bones of what happened when my father died.But did you never chance to hear anything of the circumstances surrounding Gemma’s engagement?”
Frowning, Fitz sat up and hooked his arms around his bent knees.“I can’t say that I did.”
“Well, it almost didn’t happen,” Lucy said, her heart squeezing at the memory of her sister’s shocked, humiliated face.“Because of that man sitting over there, playing with my niece.”
Instead of looking surprised, Fitz blew out a resigned sigh.“What did he do?”
“When he came to Five Mile House, the coaching inn we inherited, he recognized that the barman pulling pints, whom my sister only knew as Hal, was actually the Duke of Havilocke.Thornecliff must have told every gossipmonger and satirist in London, making Gemma out to be a bumbling fool slavering after a wealthy husband when there was a duke under her nose all the time.It nearly tore Gemma and Hal apart!”
Fitz cocked his head like a quizzical spaniel.“Forgive me, but it sounds as if what nearly tore them apart was Hal’s deception.”
