Page 87

“No,” Lily said weakly. “No.”

Rowden rose and crossed to the bed, laying his hand on Giles’s chest. There was no movement. Aunt Dobbs scrabbled around the small table and produced a mirror. Rowden held it to Giles’s mouth.

“Call the physician back,” Rowden said, his voice hoarse, and the haunted look on his face made Sophronia tremble.

The Baron rose, his hands shaking on the arms of his chair. “No,” he cried. His voice held all the anguish and outrage of a wounded animal. “No!”

But there was nothing to be done. They tried everything they could think of. The housekeeper returned with ipecac, smelling salts, and a cloth soaked with mutton suet. The Baron called for bitters, then his smuggled brandy. They tried all of Giles’s balsams, cordials, and syrups, waving one concoction after another on his nose. Rowden pressed on his chest as if he could start the boy breathing again. Mrs. Watts brought Geoffrey’s Cordial, which had seen Giles through all his childhood ills.

“For the love of God, no,” Rowden grated out. “Opium is what killed him.”

“Don’t say that,” the Baron snarled. “Do not say that!”

They waited in a tense silence for the physician to arrive, hurried along by the housekeeper. The poor man wore the Baron’s banyan over his nightshirt and slippers on his feet. He tried all the things Rowden had done, with the same result.

The look on his face as he faced the Baron said the luckless physician felt his career and all his future prospects slipping away. He knew the wrath that would follow when he told Lord Denford the news he did not want to hear.

“My lord, I regret to say…I believe…the young man…”

“Go.” The Baron stared at the bed, at the still form of his son. “All of you. Out. Now.”

Lily sagged with a small whimper. Aunt Dobbs caught her arms. Sophronia swayed on her feet, stunned, and felt Rowden’s arm come around her waist.

“You.” The Baron’s face was drawn, his lips pulled back over his teeth as he glared at Rowden. His lordship had aged a decade in one awful night. “Don’t come back.”

Rowden stared back in silence, his entire body taut. Sophronia felt the blow. He had just lost someone too, the cousin he had always protected. And as always, the Baron blamed Rowden for every ill that befell Giles. Blamed him for merely existing, hale and strong and hopeful, when his own son’s life had come to a bitter end.

“Rowden is not responsible,” Sophronia said quietly. “Giles made his choice.”

“Do not make me look upon your face.” The Baron turned away. “Ever again.”

A heavy numbness filled Sophronia as she followed Rowden from the room. The housekeeper stayed to attend the Baron in his grief. Aunt Dobbs led away Lily. It would fall to the women, later, to tend to their dead. Right now Sophronia cared only about Rowden.

She followed him into his bedchamber, reaching for his arm with one hand, carrying in the other the candlestick he had not thought to take. The dim glow cast a small circle over the carpet when she placed the candlestick on a table. The light couldn’t penetrate the shadows that pulled in all about them.

She knew the look on Rowden’s face. She had seen it flash across his features years ago, when she stood in the parlor at Foxleigh and told him she meant to marry. She understood now what it meant.

He pulled away from her touch and strode into his dressing room, yanking open the wardrobe and a chest of drawers.

“This is your house,” Sophronia said. “He cannot make you leave it.”

“I cannot be here, not right now.” Rowden, too, looked haggard with the blow of grief, though the loss had not had time to sink in. Sophronia herself was still bewildered and in denial. Some part of her felt, despite what the physician had said, Giles was only sleeping a deep, drugged sleep, and he would wake in the morning with the headache and they would all take turns scolding him for giving them such a fright.

“Rowden—”

“I cannot be near him, and I cannot bear for him not to be here.” He pulled down a valise that sat on the top shelf of the armoire.

Somehow Sophronia made sense of this declaration. He could not subject himself to the Baron’s lashes, which in his grief would be deep and vengeful, not when Rowden ached himself. The absence of Giles would haunt this house in every corner.

“Where will you go? Back to Standen?” That was the Baron’s estate in Hungerford, the home where Rowden’s father, and then Rowden had been raised.

“Foster wants to send me to the Helvetic Republic. I’ll go there.”

“So you mean to run away and leave me,” Sophronia said. “Again.”

She hated how small her voice sounded, and she hated more that she had added to the agony on Rowden’s face when he turned to face her. He held himself still, hands clenching into fists at his side. He was holding back the wall of powerful emotion that threatened to crash over him. She felt it rising above her also, matching the wail of despair that was swelling within her. She had only just discovered she loved him, that he meant the world to her. He could not leave her now.

“I’ll never have his respect, nor decency,” he said. “Not due to anything I did, but because of who I am. He will never give me— I will never have—” He stopped the words, his throat working as if he were strangling.