Persephone hid a laugh behind her hands, and Ezra could practically see Hugh fantasizing about strangling Ezra.
“First, you show up at my club,” Hugh barreled on, as if Ezra had not spoken, “and now you come to atonevent? Lord only knows you aren’t thinking of getting married?—”
“Lower your voice, man. If anyone hears you evenhintat the word ‘marriage,’ I shall be mobbed.”
“And it’s not as though you enjoy making nice. You are up to something,” Hugh concluded with satisfaction.
Damn. How do I always forget how irritatingly astute Hugh can be?
He quickly thought through his options, then decided that offering a little information about what he wanted to know might bring him back enough of a return on the investment to make it worth his while.
“There is a child,” he said carefully. “Notmine,” he clarified when Persephone’s eyes went briefly wide. “But she was delivered to me. Left at my doorstep.” He lowered his voice further, though the din in the ballroom made it easy for them to have a quiet conversation without being overheard. “Wearing a medallion with the family emblem. Says her mother was one of us.”
Even without a true fear of being overheard, he felt it best to remain a bit circumspect. The nameLightholderattracted nobles like flies to honey.
Persephone went very still. Hugh swore quietly under his breath.
“Do you know who?” Hugh asked.
Ezra shook his head.
“The girl is only four, so even if she had said how old her mother was, I don’t know that we could take her at her word.”
“Children have a dreadful sense of such things,” Persephone said grimly. “Corinna—” This was their older child, who was a year or so older than Iris. “—recently asked me when you would be one hundred, Hugh.”
Ezra made a mental note to find this hilarious later, when he wasn’t focused on obtaining information.
“Wretched child,” Hugh muttered, with unmistakable fondness in his voice. “But you’re right, children that small don’t pay attention to those kinds of things.” He paused, frowning. “If the mother were young, itcouldbe the current generation… But I just can’t see it. They’re all too happily married—except for you,” he added pointedly, looking at Ezra.
“If I thought it possible that it were me,” he commented dryly, “I certainly should not come around here and ask questions, now would I?”
“Fair enough,” Hugh said.
“It would be sneaky, though…” Persephone mused.
“And yet so much more complicated than doing nothing,” Ezra countered.
“It has to be the old guard, don’t you think?” Hugh suggested. “One of the uncles?”
The uncles. The name they’d all used for the four dukes that Grandfather Cornelius had wrangled into the family by offering power, money, and his daughters’ hands. Ambrose Lightholder, Moses Warson, Reginald Blackwood—and the black sheep, Jeremy Swifton. Three of the four cut down before their time.
“That’s what I thought,” Ezra agreed. “But… The mother told Iris she was aLightholder. Not a Warson or a Blackwood or a Swifton.”
Hugh immediately saw what Ezra meant.
“So you think Ambrose,” he said. Xander’s father.
“Or Grandfather,” Ezra said.
Hugh swore again.
“Yes,” Ezra agreed. “Exactly that.”
Persephone looked thoughtful.
“I remember there was something Uncle Ambrose was cross about right before he died,” Hugh said, startling Ezra. He’d gotten so caught up in wondering about Iris that he had not considered that family gossip might also lead to information about the fire. “If he found out that Grandfather had a by-blow, he likely would have wanted to care for her, at least financially.”
“This was right before he died?” Ezra demanded.
