Page 120 of Thief Taker

So, this evening, they’d walked to Curzon Street together through a city coming to life after a long cold winter. The streets were full, the atmosphere light, and the air as sweet as it ever got in London.

But now, Kit’s heart was aflutter and he rather wished he was anywhere else.

Nonetheless, he lifted the heavy knocker and rapped twice. Tobin answered the door. The butler’s jowly face remained as impassive as always, but something in his eyes brightened at the sight of Kit. Relief, perhaps. “Mr. Duvall. We weren’t expecting you, sir.”

“No,” Kit said. “I don’t suppose my brother is in?”

“His lordship is in the library, sir.”

“The library?”

Tobin’s expression became blanker still. “I’ll enquire—”

“Don’t trouble yourself.” Kit stepped past him into the hall, sweeping off his hat and handing it to Tobin. “I’ll announce myself.”

He crossed the hall quickly, outpacing Tobin, and pushed open the library door.

To his further surprise, James was alone. He sat not at the desk but in one of the chairs near the fire, his long legs stretched out before him, a glass of red wine held loosely in one hand. He wasn’t reading. He was just sitting, staring into the grate, and for a moment Kit saw him without the armour of his usual performance—without the wit, the recklessness, the sparkling indifference—and his throat tightened at the sight of the man beneath. His brother.

When James noticed him, his expression shifted through several emotions in quick succession before settling into wariness. “Kit.”

“James.”

Silence followed, broken only by the pop and hiss of the fire.

“I heard you’d left town,” James said at last.

“I had.” Or, at least, he’d left the part of town James frequented. Kit crossed the room and, after a hesitation, took the chair on the other side of the fireplace. The blaze warmed his face and he thought briefly, privately, of another evening in this library. “I came back.”

“Came back,” James repeated, as though testing the words. “Why?”

“Because I found I had better reasons to stay than to leave.” Kit stared into the fire. “You, among them.”

James made no response to that but rose and walked to the window. Outside, a cart rumbled past, and when the sound had faded the room felt quieter still. “I suppose,” he said at last, “that you’ve come to tell me what a fool I’ve made of myself.”

“Do I need to tell you?”

James didn’t answer as he set down his glass on the table by the window.

“What I’ve come to tell you is that I’m sorry,” Kit said. It was easier to say than he’d imagined, easier than it would have been before Elias had helped him unpick the knots of anger and guilt that bound up his heart. “I left you when you needed me,” he went on. “I know that’s not all of it—God knows you’ve made your own difficulties—but I left, and I’m sorry for it.”

James remained very still.

“I was selfish,” Kit went on. “I wanted my own life, my own freedom, and I took it.” He paused. “I told myself I had no choice, but that wasn’t true. And it wasn’t fair to you.”

For a long moment James said nothing. Then he turned around and, when he finally spoke, his voice was quieter than usual, stripped of artifice. “You had your reasons.”

“I did. They were good reasons.” Kit held his brother’s eyes. “But so did you, and for a long time, I couldn’t see that. Now I do.”

“Don’t be too charitable,” he said, with a ghost of his old humour. “I’ve been spectacularly foolish.”

“Foolish? You defrauded our father, James. You exploited his weakness.”

A muscle worked in James’s jaw. “Yes, I behaved like an arse. Marlborough saw to that.”

Kit was quiet for a moment. “You heard what happened to him, I suppose?”

“Who hasn’t? The papers have made the most of it.” He was silent for a beat. “You may be interested to learn that, following his demise, a report soon began to circulate that, not only was Marlborough a card sharper who had cheated several gentlemen, he had also been cruel to his wife and servants.”