Page 107 of The Earl She Once Saved

“And does knowing improve it?”

“Not in the least.”

Rafe looked toward the empty window.

“What am I to do with that?”

“Carry it,” Ezra said. “Preferably without making everyone around you miserable.”

“That is the whole of your advice?”

“I also advised removing Roland.”

“You make murder sound remarkably respectable.”

“I did not say murder.” Ezra paused. “Though I admire your willingness to consider every solution.”

Rafe gave him a dark look. Ezra’s amusement faded.

“Do not underestimate your brother,” he cautioned.

Rafe thought of Verity’s white face. “I know.”

Darkness had begun to gather beneath the trees when he left the terrace. He went upstairs without knowing precisely what he meant to do. The house had quietened. Lamps burned in the passage, filling the air with the faint smell of oil and heated brass.

As he passed the morning room, he heard Cordelia’s voice behind the closed door. It lacked its usual sharpness. Verity answered too softly for him to make out the words.

Rafe did not stop. In his room, the air held the stale warmth of a fire burned too low. He removed his coat, then stood with it in his hands, unable to remember why he had taken it off. He laid it across a chair and opened the small campaign chest beneath the window.

There was little left of the life he had carried to war: a pair of gloves gone stiff with age, two letters from his father, folded along lines worn nearly through, a pistol flint wrapped in cloth and a ribbon from a uniform he no longer possessed.

Beneath them lay a narrow leather case. Rafe lifted it out. The hinge resisted before opening with a small crack. Inside, upon faded velvet, rested his mother’s pendant.

Gold surrounded a deep blue stone no larger than the nail of his thumb. Seed pearls traced its edge, dulled by years without light. The chain lay coiled beneath it, fine and pale as a strand of hair.

Rafe touched the stone with one finger. He remembered it against his mother’s throat when she bent to kiss him. Her perfume smelled faintly of violets. As a child, he held the pendant while sitting upon her lap, turning it until blue light moved across the stone.

He remembered Roland teasing him for weeping after her funeral. He remembered his father placing her jewels in the strongbox. Roland sold them by degrees. First, the pieces no one wore, and then those whose absence would be noticed. Their father paid the debts and said nothing until there was nothing left with which to pay them.

This pendant survived because Rafe had taken it with him. At Salamanca, it rested against his chest while artillery shook the earth. At Vitoria, it was in his coat when Ezra dragged him from beneath the horse. Through fever, mud and nights when he expected not to see morning, he kept it near him.

After returning home, he locked it away. He never knew what to do with the only gentle thing his family had failed to destroy. Everything else had gone: the silver, the pictures, the jewels his mother meant to divide between her children. Roland had taken those, then taken Verity’s fortune and lost that, too.

Rafe sat with the pendant in his palm until the stone warmed against his skin. The knowledge of Roland’s return had altered its weight. Roland had spoken of Verity as though she were just another possession he might reclaim, and leaving the pendant hidden away suddenly felt like allowing him one more victory.

Rafe could not restore Verity’s lost childhood or the years she had spent answering doors to men who came to collect another man’s debts. But he could place in her hands the one part of the Thornlow inheritance Roland had failed to spoil.

Rafe closed his fingers around it and rose. Cordelia was leaving the morning room as he reached the lower passage. Her eyes moved to his closed hand and then to his face.

“She is tired,” she said.

“I shall not stay long.”

Cordelia appeared prepared to object. Instead, she looked back at the partly open door.

“Do not upset her further.”

It was the nearest thing to a plea Rafe had ever heard from her.