“And Mr. Bram Wyckham—”
“Bram?” Zeb yelped. “Bram is in this house? Right now? At the same time as me?”
“Mr. Bram Wyckham, Mrs. Wyckham, and Mr. Hawley Wyckham.”
“Sweet baby Jesus!”
Gideon inclined his head. The gaslight was by no means excessively bright, and the positioning of the lamps cast dramatic shadows. His eyes and cheeks were hollower than they used to be, Zeb thought. He looked drawn, older, almost cadaverous.
And he’d said Bram was here, so this wasn’t a dream. It was quite clearly a nightmare. “Tell me you’re not serious,” Zeb said.
Gideon gave him an expressionless look. Zeb wished he could detect sympathy in it. “Please follow Alfred, Mr. Zebedee. Mr. Wynn prefers punctuality at meals.”
***
Zeb’s allotted room was on the first floor of the west wing, towards the back of the house. It was reasonably sized, with a canopied bed, leaded windows, a heavily-framed oil painting of a man that Zeb didn’t want to look at, and a Tudorish sort of air it was three centuries away from deserving.
Zeb didn’t care about historical accuracy at this moment. He was more concerned with getting dressed, and also whether he could fashion a makeshift rope from bedsheets and escape.
Bram was bad enough. Elise made everything worse. Bram, Elise,and Hawley…well, if Cousin Wynn had planned this as a delightful family reunion, he had a shock coming.
And, worse than all that put together, Gideon. How could Gideon be here, working as Wynn’s secretary? How was Zeb supposed to spend a fortnight with Gideon calling himMr.Zebedeeand looking at him with such cold dislike?
Obviously Gideon still hated him. That was more of a blow than Zeb might have expected. He had woken up for a year knowing that Gideon hated him, of course, that he’d ruined the best thing in his life out of his own damn fool stupidity, but he’d known it from a distance: their paths hadn’t crossed since they’d parted. Now he was faced with Gideon hating him in person, and it hurt as much as it ever had.
Gideon ought not hate him. It was quite reasonable he did, in the circumstances, but he ought not. In a better-ordered world, his light eyes would have warmed as they used to, and his lips would have twitched in the little smile that utterly changed his serious face, and the stiffness of his shoulders would have relaxed, and Zeb would have run up the stairs and caught his hands…
That should have happened. And he shouldn’t have that drawn, unhappy look, as though he hadn’t laughed in a year; as though all the old stiff reserve had come back and calcified him. As though Zeb had ruined, not just what they’d had, but Gideon himself.
He sat on the bed, head in hands. He didn’t want to have hurt Gideon; he also very much didn’t want to spend a fortnight having the fact he had done so rubbed into his own face. Perhaps that was cowardly and he deserved the punishment, except he couldn’t imagine Gideon enjoying the next fortnight either. Why the devil was he here?Howwas he here?
Distantly, Zeb heard a gong. It didn’t register for a moment,then he realised with a jolt he was supposed to be downstairs.
At least he’d got everything done but his tie. He went to do that, and winced at what the mirror showed him.
He’d meant to get his dinner things cleaned and pressed for this visit, but there had been all the kerfuffle with work, and various tasks had come up that he couldn’t even remember now but which had seemed more urgent at the time, and the fact was, he hadn’t got round to it. The neglect showed. His dinner jacket was decidedly grubby and creased after a few excessive nights a couple of years ago, followed by an unspecified period stuffed into the bottom of his wardrobe; the disgraceful state of his black trousers suggested very accurately that he’d spent some time kneeling in them; and his white waistcoat lacked snowy spotlessness in the same way that London’s streets lacked a patina of gold.
In fact, he looked an utter scruff. He usually did, in part because of his shambolic inability to get things cleaned and pressed, rather more because he simply didn’t care. His father had frequently expressed that cleanliness was next to godliness, and, as with many things, Zeb wasn’t inclined to follow in his footsteps. Left to himself, he would live in old tweed, older shoes, and a general state of baggy comfort. If only people would leave him to himself.
But hehadwanted to sort out his dinner things for this visit, and at this moment, the failure felt crushing.
He batted ineffectually at the unruly curls he might have smoothed with pomade if he’d had any. He’d intended to buysome when he got his hair cut, which he also hadn’t got round to. Bram was going to love this.
Zeb got the tie dealt with in the speckled mirror while, to one side, the portrait contemplated him with a sneer. “You can sod off,” Zeb told it, and wondered whether it would be rude to take it down and turn its face to the wall.
Stop dallying. Get on.
Zeb took a deep breath, and headed out of the room to find himself in a long, empty corridor. The dim gaslight revealed it was papered in dark red with an aggressively repetitive decoration of swerving, bloated lines, and hung with dark paintings of grim old men and empty moors. At least they distracted the eye from the wallpaper. Doors stretched off in both directions.
It would be very easy to have no idea where to go at this point, and end up helplessly baffled and miserably late for dinner. It was what he’d usually do, in fact, which was why Zeb had made himself consciously note the way to his room. Now, if he could just remember what that was.
He checked his bedroom door to be sure he could identify it on his return (three from the end, and opposite a painting of a man in a Georgian wig who looked like his father but with syphilis), and headed off with reasonable confidence that he had to take the first right turn and then a left. He did so, but decided after about ten feet he’d been wrong: he didn’t recognise this corridor at all. Hell’s bells. He doubled back, took the next right in an exploratory way, and decided that was wrong too. He turned back to retrace his steps, trying to quash the rising fearthat he’d got turned around somehow, came round a corner, and almost walked into Gideon.
“Oh,” Zeb said.
Gideon’s jaw was set. “May I show you the way downstairs?”
“Gideon—”
