“I beg your pardon?” she said, shaking her head and giving one last rub to each now-empty ear.
“You don’t have to be alone.”
Again, it was Julianna’s voice coming out of Father’s lips.
Extraordinary.
She awakened with a start.
Frantically, she checked her ears. They were empty.
After fumbling to light a candle, she got out of bed and hurried from her windowless room. She went outside and stood in front of her sister’s house and looked up at the starless city sky.
Amy had been right. It hadn’t been a message from Father she’d been struggling to hear; it had been a message from herself. From herself, to herself.
And it hadn’t been that Father had been unable to speak; it had been that she had been unable to hear.
She had heard now. The question was, what was she going to do about it?
No, the question was: Was she too late?
Chapter 18
A Dollar and a Dream
“Thank you all for coming,” Effie said as he stood by the fireplace in a drawing room in the London house and contemplated his closest friends—Archie and Simon, of course, but he had also invited Olive. “I have some news I wanted to share with you in person.”
“Does this news involve a certain Miss Evans?” Olive asked with a twinkle in her eye. The others snickered like school boys.
“It does not,” Effie said solemnly, and they fell silent.
He had made the right decision, he assured himself, in rebuffing Julianna’s invitation to go to the sea. It hadn’t merely been an invitation to go on holiday. It had been the introduction of a pattern. A template for what being together would be like, if one could even call it “being together.”
The rest, he wasn’t so sure about. Was he really just never going to see her again? Never write to her? It had felt like the right thing at the time. But could he live without her?
He had avoided thinking about it by putting his plan into action, because whatever else happened, he had set his mind on this. The living part.
“We are soon to be joined by Kenver Nancarrow,” he said by way of introduction, and also by way of distraction—he didn’t want to talk to them about Julianna. Not yet. The wound was too fresh.
“The Highworth steward?” Archie asked.
“Mm,” Effie murmured, for that was a correct if incomplete characterization of Kenver. “He wrote that he would be arriving tonight with some news, and I asked him to come at eight o’clock.”
“That is still an hour off,” Archie said.
“Yes. The news I have to tell you concerns him, so I wanted to speak to you before he arrives.”
“Well, let’s have it, then,” Simon said.
Effie took a sip of his wine to fortify himself, for he felt as if he’d sprinkled gunpowder around the room and was about to drop a lit match.
“Olive already knows this, but Kenver Nancarrow is my brother.”
The room went dead silent until, after a long beat, Simon said, “I beg your pardon?”
“Well, I suppose he is my half brother, if you want to get technical, which I do not. It seems my father dallied with his mother for quite a few years. He is six months older than I. Father put him through university and hired him as steward, and he has of late uncovered evidence that Father has arranged his affairs to make it look as if he had married Kenver’s mother before I was born—with the expectation that Kenver would then claim the title after Father passes.”
He paused for a breath—that had been an overly long sentence. Julianna would have told him to break it up.
