Page 57 of Married to the Duke By Midnight

Robert rolled his eyes at him and smiled, nevertheless. He could be patient. He thought he had been, but he needed to be even more so, it seemed.

“Now that I have solved your problems, I need your help with my own,” Thornston said, putting on more air than he normally did, meaning that whatever he said next was important to him.

He pulled a folded piece of paper from the pocket in his light blue jacket and started unfolding it.

“Remember how I have been looking for my aunt since I came into my majority?” he asked.

Robert nodded. Thornston’s aunt had eloped with a stableboy when she was only seventeen and Thornston’s grandfather and parents had never spoken to her again. Thornston had put it into his head that he wanted to be reunited with her. He said he wanted to help her financially, but Robert suspected that it was also due to the fact that she was his only living relative.

“But I thought the investigator you had hired had learned she was dead?” Robert asked as Thornston smoothed the letter against the wooden table. The paper rustled slightly in the light breeze.

“I did,” Thornston said flippantly without meeting his eyes. “But the investigator was able to have a look at the church registers in the parish she lived in…”

“I do not even want to know how he did that,” Robert interrupted.

“And he found that my aunt and the stable hand had three daughters.” If Robert did not know Thornston so well, he would never have picked up on how significant this was for him. But the way his friend’s voice became almost devoid of emotion while being even more flippant than before signaled it to him.

And it was massive, Robert recognized. Thornston had believed himself to be without family and now he had found three cousins.

“That is incredible,” Robert therefore told him.

Thornston only acknowledged this with a quick dip of his head while looking at his hand that continued to smooth the paper on the table.

“I intend to marry one of them.”

Robert froze as if someone had pointed a gun at him. He had frankly never expected to hear his friend say those words, at least not in the next decade. He slowly eased into what he hoped was a more casual position as he tried to find the right words.

“Are they… how old are they?” he asked as he cleared his throat.

It seemed a neutral question to ask.

“It says that the eldest is three and twenty.” Thornston looked at the letter again, even though the front with his name and address on it was still facing up. “The second eldest, one and twenty, and the youngest eighteen.”

“Oh,” was all Robert could say. Then he remembered what Thornston had said about needing his help. “And how do I fit into this? You seem to already be doing all you can to find them.”

“I am,” Thornston mumbled, his dark brown eyes briefly met Robert’s. “Do I have your blessing in such a match?”

“Of course,” Robert told him without hesitation, and he could see his friend’s shoulders slump just the tiniest bit. Robert had not been aware of the tension in Thornston’s body. “You will always be welcome in our house. In Xavier’s as well,” he added because he knew it to be true.

“Many people will probably… frown upon it, but… it feels like the honorable thing to do. For them. It would elevate them to the position they would have had, had my aunt not eloped.”

Robert nodded along as Thornston explained. It was a much more thorough plan than he had realized. It must be something that his friend had contemplated for some time.

“And I need to marry at some point,” Thornston continued without looking at him. “I do want an heir of my own. It just has not… taken precedence before. But this would be… killing two birds with one stone.”

He winced at the euphemism.

“Or something less violent for something that might prove to be quite pleasant.” He said the last part with a slight grin and a sideways glance in Robert’s direction and Robert knew they were venturing away from the serious moment.

“So, when will you marry?” Robert asked.

“As soon as the detective is able to locate my cousins,” Thornston said with a shrug and placed the letter back in his pocket. “He believes them to be living in Kent.”

“That is not far away,” Robert began, but was interrupted by a distant rumbling. “Thunder?” he asked as he looked at the sky.

“The cliff,” Thornston said in a decisive voice.

They both sprang to their feet.