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“I’ve seen enough.” Geoffrey swung around and shrugged. “This isn’t a proper residence. It’s a boardinghouse for poets, heretics, and foreign riffraff. When you return to Mayfair, you’ll dismiss them all.”

“When I return to Mayfair, I will.” Alan smiled. He might as well have said, when pigs fly.

Geoffrey nodded. “Here.”

Alan leafed through the papers, then took the leather folio case back around his desk. A yowl alerted him that Geoffrey had tried to sit in the green Chesterfield armchair.

“That’s Max’s seat. Try the sofa.” He didn’t look up. “The allowance is generous. But I require more if I’m to relocate.”

“I can let a house for you.”

“Buy a house.” Alan wrote the figure across the top page. He closed the folio. “And I have to do it myself. It’s a question of taste. I won’t live in some high-walled monstrosity on a noisy thoroughfare.”

Geoffrey was still standing. His smile showed that Alan’s bargaining conformed—pleasantly—to his expectations. He believed that he now set the rules of engagement.

Humor him.

Alan walked over and presented the folio.

Geoffrey took it and tucked it beneath his arm. “Before you judge Mayfair, remember Mayfair will judge you. High walls or a haircut. You need one or the other.”

Alan laughed. “Brother, was that a bon mot? How entertaining. Even so.” He curled his lips. “Our solicitors had best conclude this conversation.”

He saw Geoffrey to the front door, where Kuznetsov handed him his overcoat, hat, and gloves. The gloves—buff colored—looked as though they’d been used as an ink blotter, which perhaps they had. Kuznetsov seemed lost in thought as he held open the door. Geoffrey’s lips thinned. But he put his smile back in place.

“We’ll invite you to tea,” he said to Alan. “Before the end of the month, with the children. You’ll like that, won’t you? You can say goodbye to Claud.”

“Goodbye?” Alan accompanied him down the path.

“The warmer weather hasn’t relieved his complaint to the extent we’d hoped.” Geoffrey paused at the gateposts. “All this damp we’ve been having.”

“Where are you taking him?”

“I’m not.” Geoffrey’s eyes slid away. “I’m needed in Lords.”

“I see.” Alan stared at his brother’s face, the sour lines carving down from his nose. “Fanny will take him, then.” He gave a mirthless laugh. Her absence would make Geoffrey’s liaisons easier by half. “Where?”

“Italy, the mountains this time.” Geoffrey returned his gaze. “Pistoia.”

Alan felt a wash of cold. “That was where . . .” He ran a hand over his face. The air seemed thinner. It wouldn’t fill his lungs, even if he heaved, panted, clawed his chest. The old terror expanded inside him, expanded the time between one breath and the next.

He stood as straight as he could.

“Where you had your accident. I know.” Geoffrey hadn’t donned the soiled gloves. He turned them over in his hands. “I know every detail. You were lucky it happened there.”

“Mother thought so.” Alan drew a slow breath. “She adulated my surgeon. They seemed to share a singular accord.”

“Dr. Barbieri. The best in the world.” Geoffrey’s eyes were washed of color in the sunlight, more white than blue, with pinprick pupils. They flicked down Alan’s leg. “You wouldn’t walk if it weren’t for him.”

Dr. Barbieri had also had blue eyes. He used to sing under his breath when he checked the bandages. He always greeted their mother with a deep bow. Principessa, he’d called her. When Alan had written the hospital, years ago, he’d learned the man was dead.

“You can appreciate my choice.” Geoffrey inclined his head. “I’m sure Fanny would prefer Davos. But we have history in Pistoia, as a family.”

“Don’t send Claud there.” Alan’s tongue felt thick in his mouth. “Find another pretext for banishing your wife.”

Geoffrey’s teeth ground audibly. He didn’t separate his jaws to speak. “Claud is my son and heir. He is afflicted with tuberculosis, a wet disease that ameliorates in a dry climate. Mother swore by Pistoia. He goes. Fanny goes with him. End of story.”

“Entrust him to me.” Alan blinked against the sun, which felt too yellow, as though displaced from those Tuscan afternoons, when he lay on the terrace, the steep, parched landscape dropping away, the lonely cypresses beckoning.