Prologue
November1922
Yorkshire
Parties were a wretched invention.
Wesley stood near the wall, whiskey in hand. The ballroom was brimming with guests. They clustered in endless tight circles, their clothes too modern and their laughs too loud. Men in tuxedos with too-short tails, flirting with women in sequined dresses and feathered headbands, the lot of them sipping gin cocktails under centuries-old chandeliers.
Wesley didn’t follow trends. He wore the exact same style of tuxedo he would have worn ten years ago, when he was a shamefully innocent nineteen-year-old who had never heard of a trench.
The eyes of the other guests darted his way now and then. Wesley ignored it; he hadn’t made the trip all the way out to Yorkshire to care what the socialites said about him. Christ, whywashe here? His father had been the one acquainted with the Earl of Blanshard; Wesley had only been invited because he now carried the title. He’d been done with Yorkshire; had planned to go the rest of his life without seeing the green and gray moors and their frolicking lambs, or the giant cathedral in town.
But he knew why he was here. The Earl of Blanshard had implied his dinner would be a draw for military men, and Wesley craved that company like he craved his cigarettes, people who understood that the world wasn’t good or fair and no amount of frivolity would bring back everything and everyone the war had taken. Wesley had come up from London because he’d let himself indulge in a pointless, pathetic moment of weakness, and he had deserved to discover that there were no other soldiers in the ballroom after all. Now all he wanted was a smoke before he crawled out of his own skin.
A baronet he knew from his club, Sir Harold Kerrigan, broke away from the closest cluster of guests and began heading toward Wesley with the puffed-out chest of a schoolboy who’d accepted a dare. Marvelous; someone, probably a pretty woman Sir Harold wanted to impress, had decided Wesley needed to be engaged in conversation.
“Lord Fine!”
Wesley didn’t flinch at the new title, but it was a close thing.
“The new viscount, good to see you.” Beneath thin yellow hair, Sir Harold’s pale skin was flushed red through the cheeks and nose, and his hazel eyes were shiny from liquor. He’d chosen to flout traditions and go gloveless, the classless sod, and even more insulting, picked one of those modern double-breasted tuxedo jackets that mimicked military styling. If this soft prat had ever seen action, Wesley would eat the man’s under-starched collar.
“I say, I was sorry to hear about your father,” Sir Harold went on, as if Wesley could possibly want to talk about this. “You’re his spitting image, you know.”
Wesley’s brother had been too, all three of them over six feet tall with the same brown hair and gray eyes. Now only Wesley was left, and he couldn’t set foot in society without people who’d sat out the war in the comfort of their homes wanting him to know how sorrythey were for his losses.
“By all means, let’s hear your condolences for my father, whom I know you were barely acquainted with,” he said crisply. “Would you like to discuss my dead mother too? After all, this is a party.”
Sir Harold gave him a wide-eyed look.
“Oh, I’m sorry, was I supposed to say something tritely polite?” Wesley turned away, and Sir Harold unsurprisingly didn’t follow.
Wesley left the ground-floor ballroom, wandering down a wide hall with red carpet. The dark wood walls were lined with portraits of white men—Blanshard’s ancestors, certainly, because every last one was almost eerily similar in look to the Earl of Blanshard himself: the same small pointed nose and chin, the thin lips, the pale skin and eyes. They could have been portraits of the same man, only the clothes of the past two centuries changing.
Wesley preferred landscapes to people, both in his art and his company, but then, art was a waste in the first place. Nothing but an attempt at a distraction, as if a bit of paint could camouflage the shortfalls of one’s true surroundings.
At the end of the hall was a wide staircase curving up to the first floor. Wesley’s feet made no noise on the carpet as he climbed, passing a dark window at the landing, rain lashing the black glass. The smoking room had to be nearby; surely he wasn’t expected to make it through an evening without respite.
The stairs brought him to another wide hall, this one lined with doors along one side and an open railing that overlooked the downstairs on the other. Waist-high white pillars were spaced down the hall, topped with glass display cases. The closest one held a Spanish morion, the silver gleaming almost too bright in the hall’s electric lights.
Wesley wasn’t interested in art, but a helmet that might have seen battle did make him pause. As he leaned in for a closer look at the etchings that decorated the morion, a woman’s shout came from somewhere to his right.
“Mr. Chester! I told you to—oh, my lord!”
Wesley looked over to see a woman in a maid’s uniform, her face bright red. “Begging your pardon,” she stammered, making a hurried curtsy. “We had someone’s valet poking about earlier. I didn’t mean to—”
“It’s fine,” he said tiredly, before the maid could continue her self-recrimination. She was probably around thirty, like he himself was, like many of the women downstairs. But unlike the guests, she wore no makeup, the lines visible at the corners of her mouth and eyes. His soldiers’ faces had been like hers, aged too soon by too much work and uncertainty, and Wesley had a shred more patience for her accidental impudence than he had for Sir Harold’s insincere sympathies. “If you could point me to the smoking room?”
She curtsied again, rag still in hand. “Of course, my lord. The next hallway, second door. I’ll see that you’re tended to.”
The next hallway had doors on both sides, which meant it had twosecond doors. Wesley narrowed his eyes. The headache forming in his temple wasn’t going to go away without a smoke, and the maid truly could have been more precise and not wasted his time.
The first door he tried was locked, but the other door was, mercifully, the smoking room. It had the dark wood walls of the rest of the manor, with leather furniture in shades of burgundy and black. At least the art was landscapes here, every last one a hunting scene. Wesley’s father would have approved, and would have expected Wesley to approve as well—Wesley was a dead shot with a firearm, thanks to the man, even four years after the war. The thought only made Wesley want a cigarette more.
This early in the evening, the room was empty, the other men were likely waiting until after dinner to join each other for smokes. Exactly as Wesley wanted. He picked the chair in the deepest corner and settled into the leather. A footman appeared, a box in hand. He opened the lid, displaying a selection of fine cigars, two of them quite rare.
Wesley would have blown the man for a cheap pack of Woodbine. It was all tobacco, the doctors were saying it all rotted your lungs—what was the point in dressing it up? He’d smoked whatever he got his hands on in the army, same as his men. Giving it a fancy appearance now didn’t change how Wesley’s skin itched for it, how he became irritable as a bear without it, how he’d been infected with something as galling as an addiction.
