“Can’t one just,” Zeb said with feeling. “But I really wouldn’t have objected to a grand gesture of a different kind. It’s just, I don’t like promises. And the bigger the promise, the worse it feels, and it felt like you were asking me for so much.”
“I was. I wanted so much. And…ugh. When you said what you did, I assumed you meant—well, that you were seeing other men. I know you are a great deal more, uh, free with your, uh,physical—”
“Slutty.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, I did. I wasn’t, though. Seeing anyone else.”
“I know that,” Gideon said. “You’d have told me. But I couldn’t see it at the time. I put you on the spot, knowing you don’t do well on the spot, and then I thought the worst because I was jealous, and therefore I didn’t ask some simple questions that could have saved us both a lot of pain.”
Zeb had never really been able to unpick the horrible mess of last year through the morass of guilt, self-blame, and regret. He let out a long breath now, with the sensation of a fog finally blown away. “You’re right. Itwasboth our faults, and we’renotfit to be let out.”
“Some sort of nursemaid is clearly required. Could you explain something?” Gideon said. “I heard what you said about promises, but I don’t really understand. All I know is that you have a random but deep-seated fear of them that gets worse when they’re larger. Are you confusing them with spiders?”
Zeb really did laugh then. He lay, shoulders shaking, under Gideon’s arm, because with Gideon holding him, even the worst things seemed possible to be laughed at.
“Swine,” he said. “It’s not—not random, though.”
“No?”
Gideon didn’t ask more. He just waited. Zeb nuzzled back into him, blinking. He didn’t much want to tell this, but the alternative was Gideon not understanding, and that was infinitelyworse.
“I was brought up to take promises seriously. My word as my bond, the eternal disappointment caused by breaking either. It was one of my father’s bugbears.Promise you’ll do better at school. Promise you won’t lose this one. Promise you’ll remember to go, that you’ll get there on time,that you will be more like your brother. Why aren’t you more like your brother?And I’d make the promise because he made me, and be punished for not keeping it—untrustworthy, irresponsible, feckless. And then—do you recall asking why I was a clerk and Bram a wealthy man of letters?”
“You said your father left him all the money.”
“I was eighteen when Father took ill, and Bram twenty-eight. Father announced he was leaving everything to Bram because I wasn’t fit to manage my own life. Impulsive, incapable of applying myself, all that. But the thing is, in the same breath, he charged Bram to set me up in life and give me a kindly steadying hand. He specificallywasn’tcutting me out: he was passing on his paternal responsibility. Bram swore to stand in the place of a father to me at Father’s deathbed, and Father joined our hands as a sign of that pledge. It was utterly nauseating. But hepromised.”
Gideon’s body had stilled. “So what happened?”
“Father died. The will was executed. And in the space of a few weeks, Bram went from ‘I will pay your university bills and give you a generous allowance’ to ‘You cannot expect me to fund all your entertainments’ to ‘You should be grateful for anything’ to ‘You are wasting your education and must be made to growup’. And that was it. He cut me off in the middle of the university term. I had about thirty pounds to my name. I had to leave off my studies and find work, with not the faintest idea what I might do. So, of course, I went around family friends, in the hope of at least finding a nice office job, and discovered that Bram had got there first. He’d told them all he’d been forced to take this step because of my gross unreliability and whatnot.”
“Why?Why would he do that?”
“Why tell them? So people wouldn’t think ill of him when I complained about his behaviour. Why do it in the first place?” Zeb made a face. “If you ask me, he made the promise because he wanted to be the family patriarch, and he broke it because he liked having twenty-five thousand pounds in the bank, and he lied so he could reconcile the two in his head.”
“Which is why you don’t want the Wyckham inheritance,” Gideon said. “In case you do the same.”
“Anyone can renounce money they don’t have. I sometimes wonder, if Bramhadshared, if I was living prosperously on Wyckham money when Jerome called on me, would I have listened? Or would I have told him to clear off? I should probably be grateful Bram saved me the moral test.”
“Christ. Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I didn’t tell anyone for years. I was too ashamed.”
“You aren’t the one who should feel shame about this.”
“But I do. It’s humiliating that my father had so much contempt for me, and it’s hideously embarrassing that Bram could be so petty and greedy andsmall. I’m ashamed for him. Theprick.”
Gideon nodded slowly. “If I may say so, your family are some of the most awful people I’ve ever met in my life.”
“Aren’t they just.”
“And I don’t believe for a moment that you would behave like your brother,” Gideon added. “You should think more of yourself. A lot more. You were the best thing in my life, and I was a damned fool to let you go.”
“That’s funny,” Zeb said. “Because so were you, and so was I.”
“Oh God. Zeb, could we—please—”
