When Justin made no reply, Cordelia held out the stack to him. The shift in her mood was palpable. Where she’d been warm and cheerful, she was now withdrawn and cool. Gathering the blankets tightly around herself, she turned her gaze to the fire.
The red wax seals had all been broken. Examining the address on the front of one, he recognized Charles Nichols’s elegant scrawl immediately. His heart surged in his chest. Did Alice know that Charles and the former duke had kept up a correspondence?
Picking one of the letters out of the stack, he unfolded the paper.Dear father, it began.
Thank you for sending money for our Justin’s schooling at Eton. He has expressed an interest in geometry and the natural sciences. Alice and I are hoping this to turn into a passionate scholarship at Cambridge, where I completed my studies…
Justin rubbed his jaw as he scanned the rest of its contents. It was dated 1805. He would have been twelve years old.
Grabbing another letter from the back of the pile, he unfolded that one.
Dear father,
Alice and I would like to thank you for buying the commission for our Justin…
The late duke had paid for his officer’s commission as well. A rising tide of confusion welled in his gut. Justin always thought his father hated the duke. He assumed it was because of his disinheritance. But that could not have been true, could it? Not if they had been taking the time to correspond with one another.
Butwhy?
“Justin?” Cordelia murmured, cocking her head. “Is everything… all right? You have the look of a man a million miles away.”
Justin cleared his throat, drawing his eyebrows together. He shook his head in consternation, but then to his own surprise, he began to laugh.
“I fail to find the humor in this situation,” Cordelia spat.
“I find it bloody hilarious,” Justin responded, running a hand through his damp hair. “My entire life, here I am thinking that Charles was hated by the duke for marrying mother, and yet…” He shook his head again, as if that would help him make sense of it all. “And yet, these letters clearly show how wrong I was. How wrong we all were.”
Cordelia narrowed her eyes. “I’m not sure I understand.”
Instead of replying, Justin opened another letter at random. It was Charles thanking the late duke for tuition costs, for a sum of money to help fix up their London townhouse, for settling the outstanding bill at a dressmaker’s shop. Standing, Cordelia dragged a chair over to where he was sitting. Justin let the letters fall to the ground after he read each one.
Tentatively, Cordelia picked one up off the floor. Then she picked up a second.
“Well,” she began. “This is unexpected.”
“Quite,” Justin murmured. He turned his expression back to the fire, unsure of what his feelings were.
“I did not know my half-brother well at all,” Cordelia said. “I have a distinct memory of him picking me up and swinging me around whenever he would walk through the door. I used to crouch behind the big railing in the foyer, waiting for him to arrive home.”
Justin hummed, “I remember him doing that to my little sister.”
“You have a sister?” Cordelia asked.
“Adoptive. Penelope. She was the result of the runaway marriage.”
At that, Cordelia was silent. The fire crackled between them, filling the silence along with the soft tip tapping of rain drops in the buckets. The subdued light outside was beginning to fade even more.
“How is your ankle?” Justin asked, desperate to change the subject.
“Oh,” Cordelia replied, taken aback. “Swollen… still sore.”
“Shall I have a look?”
“At your leisure,” she replied, untucking her legs from the chair. “I apologize for its appearance. Ladies are not supposed to have thick ankles.”
Justin scoffed as he knelt in front of her chair. “Being a lady seems to be quite tedious,” he said, doing his best to draw back some humor in the room and to temper their shared disappointments.
Swallowing, Justin took her small foot in his hand, turning it to the right and the left. It was certainly puffy, but luckily nothing appeared broken. The flesh was starting to bruise, and she grimaced as Justin pressed into the delicate bones. He was doing his best to maintain composure, trying to ignore the long, slender leg that extended up into the mass of her blankets. Cordelia leaned forward, watching him inspect it. Her wet hair had come undone from its coif and was spilling in thick curls around her shoulders.
