William, who had run into a burning building in Salamanca to drag out a stableboy he did not know. William, who had volunteered for every dangerous assignment because someone must, and it might as well be him. William, who met the world’s worst offerings not with withdrawal, but with reckless, incandescent defiance.
William would have fought.
William would have stood before the Hardings and said:I love your grandson. He is mine—not by blood, but by promise. By choice. By the fact that I held him while he wept, taught him the names of birds, placed his father’s compass in his hand, and hung his painting upon my wall. He is mine, and I will not surrender him.
William would have looked at Lorraine and said:I do not care for scandal. I do not care for rank. I do not care what society decrees. You are the woman who saved me, and I will spend the rest of my life proving you were right to do so.
William would have done all of this without hesitation, without calculation, without three hours of rehearsal in a darkened room.
Because William had never been afraid of love.
William had been afraid of nothing.
And William was dead.
And Dominic was alive; hiding in his study while the people who loved him walked away.
Coward.
Lorraine’s voice. Julian’s. His own, at last—the one he had buried beneath years of silence, restraint, and the careful maintenance of an isolation that had never protected him from anything except the possibility of happiness.
He looked at the kestrel painting. At its uneven lines, its earnest colours, the careful inscription:For His Grace.
He looked at the brandy bottle, still untouched.
He looked at his hands—scarred, clenched, unsteady.
And for the first time in four years, he did not reach for the ice.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Will I have to learn the language? The Indian one?”
The question floated up from beneath the dining table, where Thomas had established a secondary headquarters for the carved elephant and Captain the wooden horse. Margaret Harding, who was midway through a slice of toast, set down her knife with careful surprise.
“Well—perhaps a little, my dear. Though you would manage perfectly well in English in Calcutta, and—”
“When I go to India. With you.” Thomas’s voice was matter-of-fact. Precise. The voice of a child who had assembled a conclusion from fragments and was presenting it for verification. “That’s why you’ve come. To take me to India.”
The silence that followed had the brittle quality of glass—clear, fragile, on the verge of shattering.
Lorraine sat at the far end of the table, her tea cooling untouched in her hands. She had not slept. Her eyes were raw, her chest hollow. She had come to breakfast because Thomas expected her there, and failing Thomas was the one thing she refused to add to the wreckage of the past twenty-four hours.
Margaret looked at James. James looked at Lorraine. Lorraine fixed her gaze on the tablecloth and wished—with a fervour she had not felt since the scandal—that the floor might open and swallow her whole.
Dominic’s chair stood empty.
“Thomas,” James said gently, “we have come to meet you. To spend time with you. We have not yet made any decisions about—”
“But that is the plan.” Thomas emerged from beneath the table, the elephant in one hand and Captain in the other. His brown eyes—William’s eyes—were steady. “I heard Grandmama speaking to you last night. She said, ‘when we take him home.’ Home means India.”
Margaret pressed her fingers to her lips. “Oh, Thomas, darling, I did not mean—”
“Is His Grace sending me away?”
The question detonated in the breakfast room with the force of a cannon shot.
Lorraine’s teacup met its saucer too sharply. Margaret gave a soft, broken cry. James went utterly still.
