been looking for, why did it hurt?
‘James is teasing you, Luke,’ Lady Chloe Winterley, Viscountess Farenze, told her husband of six months gently.
James wasn’t sure if he loved or deplored her keen wits and kindness most right now. With Bowood always on the alert at his side, he wasn’t sure he wanted his estrangement from his brother taken out and inspected. It was what got him into this murky business in the first place, after all, and Bowood was one of the few who knew the truth about that dark time in the Winterley brothers’ lives. How could he not when James had fled to his school friend’s home and spilt his terrible new secrets into Harry’s ears that awful summer when he was seventeen and Luke was married to a vixen? Thank heaven his brother had found such happiness in his second marriage, even if it took him ten years too long to admit he couldn’t live without her any longer. The damage Pamela did to the Winterley brothers made James shiver, as if the doxy’s ghost was sitting nearby glorying over the rift she drove between them as gleefully as she did the day she made it.
‘High time I let Finch and his lady gather up their brood in peace,’ Lord Laughraine intervened, ever the bluff host. James marvelled once more that he’d found this haven in the storm his life had become this summer, and his lordship and his heir actually seemed to mean it when they pressed him to stay on now summer was over and Sir Gideon Laughraine was a very happily married man once more.
Riding back to Raigne in Gideon’s shiny new carriage through lanes already showing hints of autumn in the rich red of hawthorn berries and glossy blackberries basking in the October sun, James acknowledged Bowood’s arrival had taken some of the shine off the quiet country life he’d embraced this summer by buying a tumbledown old wreck of a house up in the Raigne Hills and the neglected estate that went with it. Brackley Manor, made of the local honey-grey stone and so ancient nobody had much idea when it was built, called to something in him. He didn’t want to call his instinctive attachment to a house the romantic whim Harry dismissed it as when he found out why James had lingered in this peaceful corner of England for so long. Yet Harry was probably right. The neglect of half a century made him long to see it come alive again under his care and it felt right to build something instead of plotting to destroy it, to restore instead of ruin a home, even if he wasn’t worthy of a happy retirement on his acres with a plump and contented little wife and a brood of children to make the old house a real home again.
Harry was part of another world, one where James no longer had a place. He was an unmasked spy; the most useless commodity a government could rid itself of as rapidly as possible. It was good of Harry to acknowledge him as a personal friend after that, he decided, and wondered why he didn’t feel the same impulsive warmth and gratitude towards his old friend and the man’s clever, devious parent as he had as a hurt and confused seventeen-year-old.
Back then Luke’s words echoed so savagely in his mind anyone who extended so much as a finger of friendship towards him after learning of them could have won his affection and loyalty. Now he wasn’t quite so sure the offer of an exciting new life and a secret beyond most youthful idiot’s dreams was as wonderful as he’d thought at the time. A summer in France, observing the daily horrors and euphoria of a revolution in full swing and reporting back to Lord Grisbeigh, sent him up to Oxford with a feeling of knowing so much he shouldn’t that Luke’s revolted avoidance of his younger brother hadn’t hurt as much as it should. Over the next three years he’d spent each long vacation in different parts of Europe and told himself it didn’t matter that Darkmere Castle in all its stern and breathtaking glory was lost to him along with Luke’s affection. The summers in Italy and Austria and even one memorable adventure in Russia set him up nicely for his future career of deception and disillusionment, but what if he hadn’t run to Harry that day? What if he’d had the courage to stay at home and chip away at the wrong he’d done Luke and, in his hurt pride, the lesser wrong Luke did him by banishing him from his home?
All of it was useless speculation now, but he still felt less trusting and grateful towards his old friend than he probably ought to. Another area of darkness in his cynical mind he didn’t want to explore, so did that make him a coward? Time couldn’t rub out his last terrible argument with his brother, but it did make his betrayal seem worse. Did you bed my wife? That harsh-voiced and unanswerable question was as clear as if Luke had asked it seconds ago even after seventeen years. It shook James to realise half his lifetime had gone by since that day. All he had to offer in reply was a dumb silence that stretched into a coward’s admission and Luke turned away from him as if the sight of his half-brother made him ill. I have no brother, then, he said and it was as true today as it was then, despite Luke’s new wife’s efforts to bridge the gulf between the half-brothers that her predecessor made.
* * *
‘Devil take it, Chloe, why can’t I stay?’ Luke asked his wife a few days later once she’d tracked James to his host’s library where he had permission to spread out the architect’s ideas for restoring Brackley to its former glory and adding a few fanciful touches of his own James wasn’t sure he approved of.
‘Because it’s my duty to see each of Virginia’s legatees alone before he embarks on his task for the season. I’d like to have seen your face if I let your brother sit in when I gave you yours, Luke Winterley.’
‘You weren’t my wife then.’
‘No, and I never would have agreed to marry you if I thought you didn’t trust me.’
‘It’s not you I don’t trust, it’s him,’ Luke said sulkily and James had to bite back a smile at the sight of his elder brother’s thunderous frown even though he hadn’t felt much like smiling after seeing the weighty letter in Chloe’s slim hand.
‘Stay if you must, Luke,’ he invited with a shrug it took a bit too much effort to make careless and indifferent. ‘It can’t come as a surprise to any of us what Lady Chloe has to say to me. I am the only person left on the list Virginia laid down in her will of us fools required to dance to her tune a season at a time. At least there won’t be any need to endure another wedding for my sake, after such a surfeit of them so far this year.’
‘Why not?’ Lady Chloe said so innocently he eyed her sharply and turned his attention to Luke for reassurance he didn’t expect the impossible, as well.
‘Because I haven’t the least desire to be wed and can you imagine me embracing fatherhood as you three did in your own unlikely way?’ he asked him directly.
‘Hmm, at the beginning of this year I would have said nothing was less likely, since then I’ve learnt even the impossible can happen if you want it badly enough,’ Luke said with a hot glance at his wife that made James feel he ought to blush, if only he still knew how.
‘At least you can end it on a certainty, then—I shall not marry. Not even Virginia could bring about that wonder and whatever she wants me to do will not result in marriage. As I have settled in a part of the country where you can see as little of me as you choose, Brother, we can continue as we are and I’m delighted to leave you two to carry on the Winterley line.’
It was a challenge too far, James realised as Chloe blushed rosily and Luke looked like a thundercloud, then stamped out of the room after curtly requesting his wife to get her business with his confounded brother over as swiftly as possible, then instruct her maid to pack for their departure on the morrow, now her last task for Virginia was done.
‘Why do you always have to stir his temper like that, James?’ Chloe asked with a sad shake of the head that killed the glib reply on his tongue stone dead.
‘It’s easier than trying to drag up feelings as dead as a doornail between us, Chloe. Don’t start a campaign to restore brotherly love between us, for that’s a marvel even Virginia
