‘Not exactly. He left me the Tregally house we live in, although it wasn’t in the best state then, the one hundred and forty acres of grazing pasture surrounding it and a tin mine without any tin in it. He left my mother—his wife—nothing. Not a single brass farthing. But he did leave instructions to my brother to deal with her exactly as he saw fit.’ Which had been to have her unjustly locked in a notorious private madhouse for three years until Luke had reached the age of majority and was able to get her out of it.
But he wouldn’t mention that bit.
It was a buzzing hornets’ nest and much too complicated and close to his heart to lay it open for dissection. He had learned, at great cost, to be careful who he shared it with as most people judged him differently as a result, but worse, treated his poor mother like a pariah. Even back home in Cornwall, only a few trusted servants were aware of some his mother’s struggles because first his father and then Luke had concealed them so well. Only Clowance was privy to the full extent of them all, and as they were ultimately his mother’s struggles and she was so very ashamed of them she couldn’t bring herself to even talk about them, it wasn’t his place to discuss them—even with someone he trusted like Hope.
‘He also made Cassius my guardian, although a fat lot of good that did me, because my dear brother wanted to immediately shove me in a uniform and dispatch me to the war.’ Yet another thing they had come to blows over, because his brother knew Luke would never desert his mother and that gave him the perfect excuse to cut them both loose. ‘When I refused he washed his hands of me and I was left to fend for us both.’ Except it had been too late to save her from his brother’s well-laid vengeful plans and by the time he had returned home to Tregally, his poor mother had been taken. Bound in a straitwaistcoat and gagged in his absence, then incarcerated in a hellhole a good hundred and fifty miles from her now completely penniless, powerless, and underage son. ‘I had to earn my own living from that day forth.’
‘Hence the stint as a herring fisherman.’ She shook her head, appalled. ‘The more I hear of Cassius, the more I dislike him. What I don’t understand, what I struggle to understand when I am so close to my own sisters, is what he had against you?’
‘He had it in for my mother.’ An understatement. If he could have, Cassius would have had her thrown anonymously in Bedlam as a pauper and made sure they tossed away the key. A mad marchioness was an unacceptable embarrassment to the Thundersley name, ergo, they had worked hard for a good quarter of a century to erase all evidence of her. That’s why his father had banished her to Cornwall in the first place after all, when Luke had still been in leading strings, and there she remained until Cassius had had her dragged kicking and screaming to the Mill House. Her unpalatable mental deficiencies were also the reason why he had also been exiled with her, because the presence of a motherless child might remind all and sundry to enquire about the mother. Not to mention the likelihood he had inherited the same weaknesses from that mother and her inferior blood, which made him as good as worthless as far as they were all concerned, and therefore best dealt with on the sly before it all became a problem too.
They were two dirty secrets brushed ruthlessly under the carpet. The family had done such a thorough job of it, he had lost count of the times he’d had to explain that he was indeed Cassius’s brother and not a distant cousin out of the direct blood line who had inherited, and that his mother was still alive when they all thought her long dead. Because his father had, he had only recently discovered, told everyone that was the case.
‘From the outset, Cassius refused to accept her and resented her for replacing his own mother as the mistress of the house, even though his own mother died several years before they married. He was fourteen when I came along and he didn’t take to the arrival of a brother any better than he did a new stepmother.’
It was likely then that his only sibling’s relentless campaign of vitriol had begun, and as the heir and because his father wasn’t particularly bothered about mending the rift when Luke was just the spare, it slowly undermined their status within the family until they were unceremoniously pushed out of it. Not all his brother’s doing, of course, because his father had always been stubbornly cut from the same cloth, but he had certainly fanned the flames before he had poured lamp oil on them later on. ‘The best word I can think of to encompass our sibling relationship was hostile.’ If they hadn’t been already dead, Luke would certainly have enjoyed strangling both men with his bare hands.
‘That is so sad—for you and your mother. To have no family...’
Luke nodded, because he supposed it was, although he had never known any different. ‘Sadder for my mother than me I think because her own family were so far away she had no one. Although her mother was English, her father was Spanish and she grew up in Andalucía, so she was basically a foreigner in my brother’s eyes. And because my father married her solely because she was beautiful and had a very distant and tenuous family link to the monarch of Spain—perhaps not the best criteria for choosing a wife—they had nothing in common. It was an arranged marriage which never worked. She was too young and a fish out of water. He was too old and set in his ways and saw no earthly reason why he should have to change them. Their temperaments clashed, their cultures and customs clashed, and they never ever really even liked one another.’
Talking about it all so openly over tea, when it was never discussed at all, was churning up all manner of forgotten memories, most of which wholly unsuitable for a discussion. ‘In fact, now that I think upon it, when either mentioned the other, even in the most general and innocuous sense, it was always with pursed lips. That they lasted two years living under the same roof was a miracle.’
It was only later, as an adult, that he learned she had basically been little more than a prisoner in the Berkeley Square house for the last year she lived there.
She could, he conceded, have been deemed too ill to go out on physician’s orders, which might well have been the case, and be misremembering what happened. Thanks to her illness, his mother’s memory of certain periods was unreliable and she had none at all of huge swathes of time. Luke had certainly been too young to remember the truth. All he recalled were her constant tears during those early years in Cornwall and days when she never seemed to leave her bedchamber. A familiar pattern which had repeated itself after he had liberated her from Mill House and the main reason he was plagued with guilt now at having been gone so long from her side. When news of Cassius’s untimely death reached Cornwall, his mother had insisted he head to London, urging him to use the opportunity to have an adventure. But every day he feared hearing her health had declined again and worried about not being there for her and by default, her recovery going rapidly backwards. Clowance was a godsend, but when she was in the grip of her demons, his mother had always needed him more.
Another buzzing hornets’ nest.
Hope’s auburn brows were furrowed in anger on his behalf. ‘Still, it was your father’s responsibility to have made proper provisions. It was thanks to his negligence that you were both allowed to be abandoned by your nasty brother.’
‘That it was. But...’ Luke shrugged. He had spent years feeling angry and bitter about it until he had realised all that vengeful negativity really only harmed him. His father hadn’t cared two hoots either way and in his self-righteous hatred, Cassius thoroughly enjoyed having the upper hand but fate had certainly punished him by taking him so early. That he had been taken before he could ensure his hated half-brother couldn’t inherit a penny would also ensure the bastard couldn’t rest in peace, and that petty knowledge made Luke’s unwanted inheritance slightly more bearable. He hoped the snake spun in his grave for eternity. He deserved nothing less. ‘That neglect also made me the man that I am. I wouldn’t be half as resourceful, resilient and utterly irresistible otherwise.’
‘Or quite so arrogant.’ She stared at him blandly over the rim of her cup. ‘How did you get from herring to slate?’
All her curiosity told him that she liked him. At least in private when they were alone. In the week since her parents had taken him under their wing, Hope had been careful to be either uninterested or dismissive of his company during the two dinners he had attended. Even when he had been dragged to the Royal Academy by Augustus to see his eldest daughter’s painting, she had kept her distance. But out here, when it was just the two of them beneath the moonlight and Charity wasn’t watching them like a hawk, she lowered those defences and they talked.
And talked and talked.
‘It’s an ironic twist of fate, I owe my stingy father for that too. Because the useless tin mine might not have had any tin left in it, but the land around it and the caverns it left below were all slate. I figured people always need roofs, so I started chiselling the stuff out to sell locally and it grew from there.’
‘Youchiselled it out?’ Clearly that prospect astonished her. ‘On your own?’
‘I’ll have you know I’m a dab hand with a pickaxe.’ To get a rise out of her, because sparring with Hope was now his most favourite pastime, he flexed his bicep. ‘Did you think these impressive muscles, that I cannot help but notice you admire so very much, came from barking orders?’
Her features remained as flat as the precisely cut roof shingles Tregally Slate was now renowned for. ‘If you are going to be tiresome, I’m going to bed.’
‘Then hand over the first couple of chapters of your preciousmagnum opusso I can read them while you are gone, as I’m not the least bit ready to sleep yet and am in dire need of something exciting to read.’ He had tried all manner of ways to get a glimpse of her story, but so far, she had batted each back. Yet her secrecy, and her reluctance to even hint at the main crux of the plot, only intrigued him more. He held out his hand across the three-foot void of empty space between their adjoining balconies, daring her to put them in it. ‘Yesterday you said it was practically finished and promised faithfully that I could read it once it was done.’
Instantly, she was defensive. ‘I am still pondering over the exact wording of the final scenes. I need to get those right.’
He wiggled his outstretched fingers. ‘Just the first chapter will do for now.’
‘Thanks to all the incessant hammering and distractions from your army of workmen again today, it still isn’t ready.’
‘Yet two days ago you faithfully promised me that you were deliberating about copying the first few chapters out and taking them to that publishing fellow in Paternoster Row...’ Only because he was diligently cajoling her into chasing her dreams because she seemed so reluctant to. ‘What’s his name? The one who said he really liked the first book but wouldn’t publish it unless you changed your name to Henry...’ He snapped his fingers trying to remember. With all the Thundersley invoices, ledgers, stocks and bonds he had been wading through of late, his mind was stuffed with random names which meant nothing. ‘Crocker and Co.?’
‘Cooper and Son.’ She was staring down at her hands, which was odd for Hope, when she normally stared him dead in the eye. Even when she was being aloof in front of her family, she did so boldly. More unusual was the fact that her hands were suddenly busy in her lap, when Hope wasn’t a fiddler. The only times he had ever seen her not as physically calm as a swan on a millpond was when he had flustered her.
