But it was a start.
CHAPTER FIVE
“Trevane. We thought you’d abandoned us for the countryside permanently.”
Lord Petersham’s voice carried across the card room at White’s with forced joviality, looking for any escape from his losses. Rhys paused in the doorway, arranging his expression into the familiar mask of amused indifference that had served him so well for fifteen years.
“The countryside has its charms,” he said, moving toward the table where his usual companions had gathered.
“But it lacks the essential ingredient of taking your money, Petersham. I found I missed the sport.”
Laughter rippled around the table. Rhys took his seat easily, from long practice, accepting the cards dealt to him without looking at them. He knew this room. He knew these men. He knew exactly what was expected of him and exactly how to deliver it.
What he did not know was how to stop hearing Mel Grace’s voice in his head.
A month is an eternity to a five-year-old.
The words had followed him from Cornwall like a persistent ghost, settling into the carriage beside him for the two-day journey, whispering in his ear as the miles accumulated betweenhimself and Hartfell House. He had tried to outride them, pushing his horse faster than was wise on the second day, but they had only grown louder in the silence between hoof beats.
They count the days, Mr. Langford. Anna keeps a calendar.
He picked up his cards now and examined them as though he had played this hand a thousand times before at the prospect of winning. It was a strong hand. Kings and queens arranged in promising configurations. Three weeks ago, he would have felt the familiar thrill of competition, the pleasure of knowing he was about to take money from men who could afford to lose it.
Tonight, he felt nothing.
“You are quiet this evening, Trevane.” Lord Ashton, seated to his left, was watching him like a man who made his living reading a gentleman’s particularities.
“Cornwall must have been more eventful than you see fit to disclose.”
“Cornwall was precisely as uneventful as Cornwall always is.” Rhys arranged his features into a smile.
“Sheep. Rain. The occasional dramatic cliff. I assure you, the excitement of London is a welcome relief.”
“And the estate business? All settled?”
“As settled as estate business ever is.” He laid down a card, watching the table react, calculating odds and responses with the automatic precision of long practice.
“Tenant disputes, roof repairs, the eternal question of whether the local vicar is embezzling from the poor box. The usual tedium of landed responsibility.”
The lie came easily, it always did. He had been lying about Cornwall for three years now, ever since Celeste had passed away and he had installed the triplets at Hartfell behind the veil of a convenient fiction that would protect them from society’s cruelest judgments. The children were his wards, nieces of a distant connection, orphans requiring support. It was a thin fiction, but the ton had accepted it because they had no reason to question it.
No one knew about the monthly visits. No one knew about the bedtime stories and the toad named Brutus and the small hand that reached for his whenever he walked through the door.
No one except Benedict.
Rhys glanced across the room to where Lord Benedict Vane sat in conversation with two other gentlemen, his posture relaxed but his eyes occasionally moving toward the card table with an awareness that suggested he was paying more attention than he appeared. Benedict had been his closest friend since Eton, the only person outside Hartfell who knew the truth about the triplets, and the only person in London whose opinion Rhys actually valued.
Benedict would want to know about Miss Grace. Benedict would want to know about the conversation in the study, and the calendar with its twenty-eight marks, and the way Rhys had driven back to London with Thistle’s stones in his pocket and Mel Grace’s words echoing in his skull.
But that conversation would have to wait until they could speak privately.
The evening continued as such evenings always did. Cards gave way to brandy, brandy gave way to the exodus toward whatever entertainments the night offered. Lady Thornbury was hosting again, Rhys learned, and his presence was expected if not demanded.
He went because he always went. Because the Duke of Trevane was expected to appear, to dance, to charm, to give the gossip sheets something to write about that wasn’t quite scandalous enough to require defending. Because the alternative was sitting alone in his townhouse, thinking about three small girls who were probably sleeping right now in their beds at Hartfell while their governess watched over them with her steady gaze and her devastating honesty.
Illegitimacy is a circumstance, not a character flaw.
The Thornbury ballroom was exactly as he remembered it from a dozen previous events: glittering with candlelight, thick with the scent of hothouse flowers and expensive perfume, crowded with the same faces wearing the same expressions of calculated interest. Rhys made his entrance at the optimal moment, neither too early nor too late, and allowed himself to be absorbed into the social machinery that had been grinding away at these gatherings for centuries.
