I can’t.Lucien thought.I can’t be here...can’t do this…
He pulled away from his mother’s touch, scrambling for some reason, any reason, to get away. When he glimpsed a familiar figure disappearing into the customs house, he seized his chance.
“That is Sir Fred Whitby just returned from France.” Lucien was already stepping away from Simon and their mother. “It’s imperative I speak to him without delay.”
His mother tipped her head to the side, bewildered.
Simon flushed. “What the devil?”
“You heard what I said. It’s imperative—”that I get away from here, away from this. I can’t breathe...Somehow he kept his voice level. “Simon, take mother and the girls in my coach and head to Everdene while I tend to business here. I need to discern what is happening on the continent. There are barricades once more in Paris, uprisings in Italy and Germany.”
“I—I don’t understand why you’re bringing this up this now,” his mother stammered. “That’s still all far away.”
“We’ve already had rioters in Trafalgar Square and flooding down Pall Mall, breaking windows. How much closer do you want riots to get?”
“You can deal with that tomorrow,” Simon insisted. “Jesus, Luce. This is yourfamily. You haven’t seen them for twenty damned years.”
Damned...Did his brother know just how apt that description was?
“I will come to Everdene Hall once Parliament lets out. I will see Jane and Cassandra then.”
Simon grabbed his arm. “How the blazes are we supposed to explain…”
“It’s been twenty years,” Lucien said. “A few more weeks will hardly make a difference.”
He caught a glimpse of his mother’s gentle face beneath the brim of her bonnet, life’s hardships etched deep. Their gazes met. Held.
Her lovely eyes filled with a deep knowing. His mother said gently, “Simon, let him go.”
Simon’s hand fell away, and Lucien felt a knife twisting in the hollowed-out shell where his heart used to be. Was some part of his mother relieved to be rid of him? Could he blame her?
She knew better than anyone who he really was.
The one who had betrayed them all twenty years ago.
CHAPTER 2
The little hellions were at it again. Grace Elliot stood in the doorway to the study observing her three younger brothers, Ethan holding an ink pot, Bennet’s jacket decorated with a large smudge over his little belly, while Avery, at twelve, wielded a quill with fierce concentration, drawing a curly mustache on one of the rather alarming peacocks on their stepmama’s beloved French silk wallpaper.
“It’s the third mustache this week,” a deep, familiar voice whispered to Grace. She turned to smile at Martin Pevensey the beloved butler who had served the Elliot family since before she was born. He wore his usual inscrutable expression but couldn’t quite hide the twinkle in his eye.
Grace tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear and sighed. “I know I should put a stop to their mischief, but one can hardly blame them. The peacocks are vastly in need of improvement.”
Grace still felt a sick twist in her stomach every time she entered the hallway that had delighted her as a child. The lovely mural of mythical creatures and pastoral settings her mother had commissioned in the entryway had been blottedout by swaths of wallpaper flaunting a flock of garish peacocks. Papa and his new ‘bride’ had brought them back from their honeymoon on the continent. The trip had been cut short when revolution broke out in Paris and Italy, but it seemed the newlyweds had carried the insurrection home.
Grace’s brothers were in revolt.
The trio of nursery-room pirates had been turning The Willows upside down since their new stepmother had arrived at the Elliot country seat. Not that Grace could blame the boys for acting up, all things considered. The garish peacocks that had covered the once-tasteful mural that their mother had painted were just one of the changes confronted. Lord Vernon Elliot had eloped less than a year after his first wife’s death, the precipitous union sending shock waves all the way to London. And no one had been more stunned than his only daughter.
After three years of her mother’s illness and a too-brief period of mourning, this sudden flurry of activity felt like being roughly shaken awake and finding oneself still trapped in a bad dream. All five of the Elliot children were reeling. The childless widow who had wed their father had come from a quiet household. She hadn’t expected boys popping out at her from behind drapes to catch their sixty-year-old father kissing his new wife with the ardor of a green lad, his cheeks flushed, silvery hair tumbling across his brow, gold-rimmed spectacles askew.
“He’s acting like a beau in his first season,” nineteen-year-old Will had complained when he’d arrived from Oxford for the holiday. “Mama would never act so foolish.”
No, Grace thought with a fresh pang of grief. Their mother would have told them of hearing the great emancipator, William Wilberforce, speak and how she’d helped gather petitions that had overturned the slave trade. She had even named her eldest son in honor of the great man and urged her children to fight for justice, too.
The new Lady Elliot had no interest in the world beyond her doorstep. Her one desire was to make Papacomfortableas she so often insisted.
“Comfortable?” Will grumbled uncharitably after one such declaration. “Then stop changing everything.”
