“Do you truly think Julia left them at the Park after being away for weeks?” Lucas flashed him a look of amused annoyance. “They are currently in the nursery playing with Adèle. And Julia is with Céleste under strict orders to rest, since so much traveling while in expectation of a new arrival has exhausted her. And my mother is here as well.”
“As are we,” Digby pointed out with a tug of his lace-edged cuffs.
“The King makes a good point.” Kes dropped into a chair. “You keep saying we should be with our families. The Gentsarefamily and have been from the beginning. Stanley insisted on it.”
“Benicks ruin families,” Aldric muttered the truth he’d known all his life. “Mine is a mess. My father’s business dealings played a role in Céleste nearly being killed last night and Adèle nearly being abducted in France. Crofton is the reason all of you have come to visit me and are, instead, depending on the hospitality of the Beaumonts. Henri trusted me to look after his sister and niece and”—he couldn’t even look at Henri—“we fell right into the trap being laid for them.”
Digby eyed his reflection in the window, smoothing the front of his jacket. “Let us know when you reach the part where you explain how it is that you haveruinedthis family of chosen brothers.”
Exhausted to his core, broken by seven years of blame and grief and sorrow, Aldric emptied his lungs as he sat on a sofa. “Stanley told me the day he asked if I would join the Gents that this ‘family of chosen brothers,’ as Digby so aptly put it, needed a voice of reason with the ability to offer alternatives to the foolish things they too often chose to do.”
Lucas grinned, and it simply broke Aldric’s heart further. This wasn’t the happy recollection he no doubt expected it to be.
“That was always my role. The General, the master strategist. This family depends on me to do that.”
“And you do,” Niles said. “All the time.”
Aldric shook his head. “Stanley going to war was the very definition of a foolish thing. We all knew it was. We all knew he was no soldier. I didn’t—” He swallowed down the lump forming in his throat, just as he’d seen Céleste do so many times. “I should have tried harder. I should have done more. But I didn’t. I—I failed him, and I failed all of you. I failed this family.” His next breath shook. “Benicks ruin families.”
Lucas’s brow pulled fiercely. “And you think you have ruined this one?” He motioned to the Gents as a whole.
“Not yet,” Aldric said. “But I promised Stanley I would get out before I did. I have pressed my luck as far as I dare. All my strategic prowess was barely enough to help get the lot of you, other than Digby, sorted out with your ladies. And I nearly lost Henri’s sister and niece.”
“Stanley was a brother to me from the time we were born,” Lucas said. “He would never have asked or accepted that promise from you. I suspect you made it yourself, hoping it would assuage this misplaced guilt.”
“It’s not misplaced. I should have done more. I should have tried so much harder to change his mind.”
“We all tried,” Henri said. “It wasn’t enough.”
“But I am—”
“Your ability to talk him out of foolish flights of fancy was of no use in this.” Digby didn’t often speak in complete earnest, but he did then. “He didn’t decide to go fight on an impulse or as a means to an adventure, and not even mostly to protect Lucas’s brother.”
Aldric had never heard Stanley’s motivations discussed in detail. As far as he’d always known, Stanley was simply being his rather madcap self. But Digby seemed to know something more. Looking around at the other Gents, he could tell this was new information for them as well. Even Lucas didn’t seem to know precisely what Digby was referencing, though he appeared to have some suspicions.
“Stanley’s reason for going ran deep,” Digby continued. “And unless you could have fixed what he was running from—and I assure you, Aldric Benick, youcould not—nothing you said or did would have stopped him.”
“And if he knew you had carried this guilt with you all these years,” Lucas said, “it would shatter him. He only ever wanted us to be happy and to be family to one another.”
Aldric dropped his head into his hands. He was falling utterly to pieces. “The only family I’ve ever had actively destroys each other. I don’t know how to be part of a family in any other way.”
Someone sat on the sofa beside him. He didn’t look, but Henri’s voice identified him.
“You have been part ofthisfamily since Cambridge. And we don’t destroy each other. That, Aldric, was Stanley’s greatest gift to you and me. He let us have a family that would counter the families we were born to. He gave us a chance to learn hownot toruin families.”
“If you attempt to argue that you haven’t learned that,” Digby said, “I will insist that Puppy pummel you.”
Aldric looked up a little. “I miss him.”
“Puppy?” Digby scoffed theatrically. “He’s right here.”
He could smile at the teasing and found he was grateful for that. “Stanley. I missStanley.”
“He was the greatest,” Niles said, but without the crushing weight of grief. There was a lightness borne of happy memories. “There’ll never be anyone else like him.”
“And,” Kes added, “unlike the rest of us, he wouldalreadyhave asked you at what point during your flight from France you fell in love with Céleste.”
Aldric turned wide eyes on him.
