“I didn’t—”
“Spare me, old boy. She’s a whore, what does it matter?”
“She was under your protection, that is all that matters.” Thomas leaned forward. His brother was far drunker than he had initially realised. There was a hollow glitter to his eyes. “I can hardly believe you would do something like that. I sometimes think I don’t know who you are anymore.”
George mirrored Thomas’s pose mockingly, his empty glass hanging limply from one hand. “Then you had better take a good long look, oh my brother. Because this is who I am.”
“A man who would force himself upon a woman?”
“Why not?”
Thomas shook his head and immediately regretted it. Lightning cracked beneath his skin, new-forming bruises flaring hot. “I know you to be better than that.”
George gave a strange laugh, sat back, and poured himself another drink. “You always did have the heart of a spaniel. But don’t delude yourself on my account. Why shouldn’t I have a woman if I want her? I’ve done worse.” His gaze drifted from Thomas to the liquid sloshing in his glass and then away to nowhere. “Far worse.”
“What do you mean?” Thomas swallowed, blood and whisky acrid in his mouth.
It was a long time before George answered, and then he spoke so softly Thomas barely heard him. “‘Thou shalt not kill.’ It makes no difference what I do or don’t do. I’m already damned.”
George had a medal from Crimea. Thomas remembered, suddenly, his brother’s homecoming.Bad news, Pater, but I’m not dead yet.And then the medal, arcing through the air, spinning silver. The marquess, of course, had not flinched or moved, the bruise livid against his pale cheek for weeks. George had been thin and dark-eyed, but whole. The ladies had found him quite dashing, a hero in a scarlet coat. “Any priest would tell you that the commandment is against murder. A premeditated and wilful act. You fought for your country, for a cause, against enemy soldiers. It is a different matter entirely.”
“What the devil do you know, Thom?” George gave a weary sigh. “Everyone looks the same on a battlefield. At Balaklava the fog was so thick, you could barely recognise your closest friend. Half the time, I didn’t know who I was fighting. I don’t think anyone did, that whole bloody war. You heard they sent the cavalry straight at the Russian artillery?”
This was more than George had ever spoken of Crimea, at least to Thomas. But George had always been far closer to Edward than to hisunwanted, unlike twin. “I read of the charge. The noble six hundred. ‘When can their glory fade?’”
“Don’t quote that bilge at me.” George reached for the decanter and poured himself another measure.
“Those men were patriots. We should honour their sacrifice.”
“Patriotism is a tattered flag flying over a field of corpses. They died in a foreign land, fighting someone else’s war, because somebody couldn’t relay an order, and for what? To secure our trade routes to India. A land not ours to begin with.” He lifted his glass in a derisive toast, brought it to his lips, and swallowed without pleasure. “Nobility indeed. A glorious sacrifice, for Queen and Country.”
Thomas watched him helplessly, unsure what to say or do. Edward would have known.
“And to think,” George went on, his words slurring, “if our father had bought me that commission in the Eleventh as I wanted, it would have been me. Amusing, isn’t it, that one of His Lordship’s little games saved my life? I would have died that day with the rest of them.” He paused. “I sometimes wish I had.” He poured himself another drink with shaking hands, the liquid spilling down the sides of the glass and onto the table. “But instead, I lived. And I kept on living, while everybody else around me died. Even Edward.”
“Well,” said Thomas, unsteadily, “I, for one, do not wish you had died at Sevastopol. And given how many soldiers did, I think it shows a certain lack of respect that you would say you wish to join them.”
George dropped the glass onto the table with a dull clatter. He leaned forward again, hands clasped loosely between his knees, and stared at Thomas with a wild light burning in his eyes. “But don’t you see? It was punishment. For everything I did, for all the lives I took, for all the lives I couldn’t save.”
Thomas moved to the edge of the sofa, but the small space of floor between them seemed endless, as though it stretched all the way to Sevastopol. “What was?”
George gestured impatiently. “Edward, of course.”
Horror and pity sliced through Thomas’s heart like cold steel. “No, George, no. That was an accident. And you must not think like this. It’s madness.”
If George heard, or if the words meant anything to him, he gave no sign. Instead, he stared unseeing into a far corner of the room and kept talking. “They all said I had the devil’s luck, you know. I’ll never forget that winter. The storms, the snow, the constant rumble of the guns like we lived always the end of days. The tents were as good as rotten. Nothing could keep the cold at bay. Even the officers were crawling with vermin. No fuel, no heat, no food. My best friend died of dysentery. How glorious do you think it now?”
Thomas said nothing. He had known little of this. And it was still slightly beyond his power of imagining. How old had George been, then? Twenty? Twenty-one? Watching his country squander its youth while Thomas had laboured over dusty tomes at Cambridge, safe inside his golden cage of learning.
“I still remember it was beautiful.” George reached again for his glass. “That white city curling round the glittering turquoise bay. While we sat in our muddy trenches, shivering and starving in the dark, and died in droves.”
“George.” At his name, George’s head jerked up as though he had forgotten where he was and to whom he spoke. “That you lived while so many died is a blessing, not a curse. And God would not punish you for it.”
“You don’t understand anything, do you? Edward was the price, for my sins, for my survival. He used to write to me, you know. Not like you. ‘Dear George, the weather continues clement.’” The ghost of his old smile curled on George’s lips. “You were so boring it was a wonder I didn’t fall on my bayonet.”
Thomas coloured. “I’m so sorry. I’m a poor correspondent. I didn’t know what to tell you or even if you wished to hear from me.”
“Of course I wanted to hear from you, you bloody fool. I kept trying to write back, but what could I say? ‘Weather continues inclement, everybody dead, I remain your loving brother.’”
