“Resolve it how?” Elise demanded.
Wynn looked around the table. “It is very simple. One of you shall marry Jessamine, and have my fortune with her.”
“What?” Colonel Dash barked. Bram gaped. Hawley gave a wolfish smile. Elise said, “But you promised it to Bram!”
“What if she doesn’t want to marry any of us?” Zeb asked.
“You have all been invited to stay so you can get to know her and she you. If she does not wish to marry any of you after that, I shall not force her, but I am determined the estate will remain in the family. Jessamine will choose one of you, or she may decline, in which case I shall make my choice among you all. Whichever it is, that man will have every penny.”
“But—!” Bram, Elise, Hawley, and Zeb all said, at different but urgent pitches.
Wynn lifted a hand commandingly for silence. From the door, the burly footman marched forward. The master of Lackaday House looked around at the table and said, “Has everyone had enough soup?”
Three
Zeb got up early the next morning and set out to escape the house without so much as stopping for a cup of tea. He needed to get out and walk. Fresh air and movement would give him a chance to think.
The rest of the evening had not gone well. Wynn had decreed that they would not discuss his proposal further, and so everyone had made the sort of excruciating small talk you might expect when two brothers hated one another, and a cousin had notoriously had an affair with one brother’s wife, and the other brother had been exposed as a feckless wastrel, and Hawley existed, and a stranger was avidly watching the whole thing, and so was Gideon.
At least the conversation hadn’t included the barely grown woman who was to be auctioned off with the house. Presumably that would be a pleasure for the evening to come.
He let himself out of the front door without seeing anyone.He wasn’t accustomed to the houses of the wealthy, not having been wealthy in a decade, but Lackaday House seemed rather lacking in the servant department. Maybe nobody wanted to work in a faux-Gothic mansion miles from anywhere. A big, echoing, empty faux-Gothic mansion, which last night had been so quiet that every creak of a board had sounded like a footstep, a cry, a sob.
He’d had a horrible night’s sleep in the peace and quiet of the countryside, and he wanted to go home to London, where it was never peaceful or quiet, rather than stay in a house with more or less every single person in the entire world he didn’t want to be in a house with.
At least he was alone for now. The grounds were extensive but odd: not kept in the way one would expect, with formal gardens or elegant planting. There were trees and bushes aplenty around the house, but he couldn’t see any evidence of flower beds to liven it up come spring, or of anything to relieve the impression of forested medieval gloom. It made for an aesthetic whole that suited the house’s Gothic atmosphere, which was wonderful if you liked that sort of thing. If it was Zeb’s, he’d plant flowers.
He walked on, not troubling to note where he was going. It scarcely mattered, thanks to the huge wall that he knew surrounded the grounds. If he walked directly away from the house for a mile in any direction, he’d bump into the wall, and conversely, it couldn’t be too hard to find his way back to the centre. Not that he much wanted to go back for more sneers about how he was a worthless layabout. He would have liked to throwthose words in his brother’s teeth and was exasperated that he couldn’t.
His wandering had taken him along a tree-lined path. It opened onto a much more moor-like area: a plain of orange, grey, and green grasses. In the distance stood Stonehenge.
That demanded investigation, so he set off towards it. The stone circle loomed impressively as he approached, standing alone on its plain, at least if you had your back to the house. Zeb could almost believe that he was alone in a solitary wilderness with an ancient monument, rather than looking at an absurd folly in an enclosed garden with his family nearby.
It was quite good as follies went, he had to admit. The circle was tidily complete, rather than half-fallen as with the real thing, but the stones looked suitably weathered and lichen-covered, and the central altar-stone was just the right size and height for a nubile young lady in a white nightdress to be subjected to dark deeds with a sickle.
A scene of exactly that sort had been the dramatic climax of Walter Wyckham’sThe Stone Circle, a Gothic melodrama about a cult of murderous druids. Unless Zeb was thinking of Walter Wyckham’sThe Monastery, a Gothic melodrama about a cult of murderous monks. It was one of the two: his grandfather had been imaginatively drawn to hooded lunatics inflicting torture on young, beautiful, helpless people.
Walter Wyckham had been a highly popular novelist once, his perverse imagination striking a chord with a lot of readers, including Zeb in his misspent youth. In retrospect, the booksseemed very much a product of the author’s personal peculiarities and obsessions. Zeb was glad for many reasons that the old buzzard had died two decades before his own birth, but one of those was that he would not have wanted to shake Walter’s hand: it would probably have been sticky.
The thought of sticky hands led him to remember a recent afternoon playing animal alphabet blocks with a friend’s children. He was trying to list creatures that began withPT, and stuck onptarmigan, when someone said, “Zeb.”
The voice came from right behind him. Zeb let out a yelp of fright and whipped round, heart thudding, to see Gideon.
“What theblazes,” he said. “Where the devil did you spring from?”
“Just behind you,” Gideon said. “You were wandering along in a brown study, as always—” He cut that off hard.
Zeb held back a wince. It had been an ongoing protest of Gideon’s that Zeb was liable to amble carelessly under the wheels of an omnibus one day. That had, of course, been when Gideon would have preferred him not to fall under an omnibus.
Gideon’s jaw set. He went on, “I followed you. I thought we should speak.”
He did not look as though he was anticipating that the conversation would be enjoyable. Zeb felt his heart sink. He attempted to hold himself a little better, straightening his shoulders, casually leaning back against the altar stone. “Right, yes, we should. I—ugh!”
He snatched his hand up from where he’d rested it on top ofthe altar, right in a pool of cold and viscous liquid.Well done, Zeb, suave as ever.He wiped his hand on his trousers without thinking, still less looking, and saw Gideon notice. He didn’t react or comment, but Zeb felt disapproval anyway because Gideon took more care of his clothes, as he took more care of everything. “Sorry. All right. I’m here.”
“Aren’t you just. Listen. I took this job because I couldn’t find another. I’ve been out of work for nearly a year, with that damned business following me around.”
“Ayear? But you’re so good—”
