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“Just so,” Julian said quietly.

“But I thought she told you the house would be yours,” Brookmire pressed. “I thought she said — ”

“No.” Julian’s voice dropped, his eyes closing as he recognized the same flicker of arrogance in himself that had lived in his father. “There was never any plain statement that I should have it. It was expected, but, ” His eyes flared as a new thought struck. “She wrote in her own papers that she prayed we would not become like him. In doing as she did, for she never once told me the house would not be mine, she has shown me the depths of my own arrogance. I have been drawn toward Miss Trent, yes. But I have also felt the fervent wish to take Stoneleigh back from her, believing it mine by right.”

Brookmire’s mouth lifted a fraction. “And now you see our father’s selfishness, and recoil from it. Lady Warrington is making certain you do not become him, Carrington. Even from the grave, she is at work upon your character.”

“So it would seem.” Julian rubbed his chin, thinking of the house — the familiar corridors, the weight of its history in the walls. He thought of his father leading him through it with a pride in his step, as if he were already its lord. And then of Miss Trent, crossing the threshold not as a visitor but as its mistress.

Anger did not come. Nor frustration, nor confusion. Only a hollow ache that Lady Warrington had done what their own father would not.

“I am ashamed of him,” Brookmire said quietly, looking out of the window. “Little wonder Lady Wexford thought Miss Trent would want nothing to do with you.”

“I shall have to tell her,” Julian said, his stomach lurching at the thought.

“You are afraid she will turn from you.” Brookmire’s eyes came to him, astute. “You care for her, then. You have never said it — but I have suspected.”

Julian smiled sadly at his hands. “I must tell her the truth, I know that. But yes — I am afraid she will want nothing more to do with me. Our father could have bettered their circumstances, and he did not.”

“But you are not our father,” Brookmire said firmly. “She will see that.”

Julian let out a long sigh. “I must hope so.” He paused. “Yes, Brookmire. I do care for her. I have said nothing, for I have not been sure of my own heart.”

“And now?”

Julian met his brother’s eyes and chose honesty. “Now I am afraid that, even should I confess it, the past will be too great a wall for her to climb.”

Brookmire shook his head. “I think you are wrong in that, brother,” he said, with more firmness than Julian expected. “I have wondered at your attention to the lady — but I have also seen how she looks at you. Indeed, were it not for the matter of the house, I should have asked you plainly whether you meant to court her.”

Julian’s mouth lifted, though the smile did not hold.

“Let the depth of what you feel give you courage,” his brother said quietly. “If she returns it, and I believe she does, then that has strength enough to break through this new wall.”

“I must hope so,” Julian murmured, lacking his brother’s conviction. His heart was full of fear, shrinking from the moment he would have to tell her all — afraid that, in the hearing of it, she would draw back from him, and his chance of ever taking her in his arms and confessing all he felt would be lost.

The carriage rolled on toward home, and he let the fear have its minute. Then he leaned forward and rapped the roof.

“Not home,” he called up. “Stoneleigh House.” And, to his brother’s lifted brows: “Today. Now, while the nerve is in me. She has had half-truths from every quarter since the will was read — she will not have them from me as well. Whatever it costs, she hears the whole of it, and hears it first.”

Brookmire looked at him a long moment, and then a slow smile spread across his face, and he settled back against the squabs like a man well satisfied with his afternoon’s work. “There he is,” he said, mostly to the window. “I did wonder where my brother had got to, these last few years.”

The carriage turned.

CHAPTER 14

She had taken to spending her mornings in the library, among Lady Warrington’s papers: the long table still set out as the lady had left it, as though she had only stepped away and meant to return. Lord Carrington called most days now, on one pretext or another, and they had fallen into the habit of working side by side, each taking a portion, reading until the light failed them.

“Here is another,” he said.

Viola looked up. He had a letter in one hand and one of Lady Warrington’s memoranda in the other, and his brow was drawn.

“A family named Aldous. She writes of them here: the father lately dead, the widow left with very little, three children.” He set the letter down and touched the memorandum beside it. “And here, her own note: what she meant to send them, and when. The spring of two years past, and again the following quarter.”

“As with my father.”

“As with your father.” He said nothing for a moment. “I have been looking. It is not only Tyne. It is not only the once. She kept a great many such people, quietly, without their knowing all of it, often without their knowing her hand in it at all. She made it her work.” His jaw tightened. “And the same thing repeats, family after family. What she set down to send never matched what reached them. Not for your father. Not for the Aldous family. Not, I think, for the Colbournes either. There is a note here of the late earl, and a sum, and the sum is one of those that does not arrive.”

The names meant little to Viola. But the pattern of them — laid out in a dead woman’s careful hand, the same betrayal worked again and again upon people who had no one to count their losses for them — settled over her like cold water.