Unveiled

“Christ, Mark.”

“You don’t always think about others the way you should,” Mark said simply.

That criticism cut more deeply than the reference to Hope. Mark stated it so mildly, making the wound sting all the more. Mark’s gaze was as piercing as only someone who had survived the precise contours of one’s faults could be.

“I think about others every damned second of the day. It’s because of you that I’m here, after all, because of what I wanted to give you—”

“And still you stomp about, leaving little eddies of destruction in your wake.”

Hell. Guilt was bad enough, without having his brother point out his every flaw. Ash had been the one to solemnly swear that he would protect and defend the younger children. He had been the one who had nodded as his father told him that their mother was given to excess. He’d solemnly promised to temper her zeal.

He’d failed. A few years later, despite his best efforts, his sister had died. A few months after that, Ash had left for India, determined to make his fortune and thus undo everything their mother had done.

But he’d left his brothers behind. He would never be able to forget the sick sensation he’d felt when he found Mark and Smite on his return, pale and thin, alone on the streets of Bristol. It had made so much sense to leave them. But nothing he did could repair what had happened to them in his absence. They wouldn’t even talk of those years, not to him.

And that hadn’t been the only time he’d abandoned Mark. Just the first.

“Very well,” he said stiffly. “You are quite in the right. I should never have left. I failed Hope. I failed you.”

A puzzled look flitted across Mark’s face. “How is it that we are talking about me, then?”

“Every time I look at you, I recall how I’ve failed you. There. I’ve admitted it. Are you happy now?”

“Happy that you look at me and see failure?” Mark’s voice was tending towards scorn now, and his lip curled. “Hardly.”

Christ. He was cocking it up again. “I know you’re not a failure. You took a first at Oxford.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Mark said hotly, “I’m a good deal more than that. Granville himself said I was the brightest student he’d seen in the thirty-five years he’d been in philosophy. And this—” Mark gestured at the pages that lay on the table in front of him “—this will show everyone what I can do. Even you, Ash. Even you. So don’t look at me and see failure. I haven’t failed anything.”

This had all gone horribly wrong. “Don’t get so upset, Mark. I’m not questioning your intelligence. Or your capabilities.”

“What are you questioning, then? It can’t be my principles, seeing as how you have none of your own to speak of.”

“Oh, it’s my principles you object to, then?” Ash felt the whole bitter weight of his responsibilities shift restlessly. He’d done everything for his brothers—everything. Mark was his principle. And if Ash’s hands were a little dirty, it was because he’d wanted to keep his brothers’ clean. “They’re a hell of a lot more honest than your own,” he snapped.

He wished he could take the words back as soon as he’d said them, because Mark actually gasped in surprise.

“What do you mean by that?”

Ash didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to let Mark know that there was yet another barrier between them, another one of Ash’s many failures. But Mark gestured, and the words tripped out anyway.

“Maybe you’re too young to remember what it was like before father died, or what happened in those years afterwards. You might not remember the day Mother decided to take to heart the Biblical command that one should sell everything one had and give it all to the poor. Nice, in principle; in practice, it leaves your own children starving, housed in rat-infested penury. We lost everything we should have had—modest comfort, education. She traded a secure competence for some stupid words she didn’t even understand.”

“You’re the one who never understood Mother,” Mark said.

“As if I could. She was mad, Mark. Plain and simple.”

Mark’s lip curled. “There was nothing plain or simple about her insanity.”

“Maybe it doesn’t seem that way to you. But I was supposed to protect you—all of you. Her principles killed Hope. They almost killed you and Smite. And throughout it all, Mother clung to dead words in a dead book, paying no attention to the living around her. Maybe you can understand why I mislike the notion of my youngest brother clinging to more dead words. Maybe you can understand why I wince, knowing that my little brother, who spent his childhood with a woman who quite literally went mad with her principles, is spending the summers of his youth practicing the same sort of abstemious insanity that he grew up with. Do you want to know why I’ve failed you? Because I haven’t been able to save you from a woman who has been dead these past ten years. I haven’t saved you from anything.”

Mark stared at him, his hands curled into fists. “You don’t know anything,” he spat. “Not about me. Not about Mother. You can be such a great oaf sometimes.”

“Oaf? Is that the best insult the brightest student in thirty-five years of philosophy can muster? Call me a damned bastard. Curse me. Consider a little blasphemy, Mark. It would make me feel a great deal better, knowing you were capable of even a little sin.”

“Far be it from me to leave you unsatisfied. Ash, you can go to bloody hell. It is the height of hypocrisy for you to criticize what I choose to do with my time, when I know for a fact that you haven’t even bothered to read my work. Not one word.”

Despite the finality ringing in his voice, he looked at Ash with an expectant hope in his eyes. And Ash knew what his brother wanted. He wanted to be contradicted. Wanted Ash to spit out that he’d read the carefully bound essays his brother had so proudly sent to him over the years.

But Ash’s best effort—“I stumbled through the introductory paragraph, before I threw up my hands in despair”—would hardly mollify his brother. The truth choked him, and if it were to come out, it would destroy Ash’s last chance of forging any sort of connection with Mark.

When he remained silent, Mark shook his head. “I don’t know why I bother. Some days, I think Smite has the right of it.”

The final sally, and Ash had nothing to say in response. Mark swept his gaze around the room at his books, stacked in neat arrays along the table near the window. Finally, he picked the top two from the pile and walked out.

He didn’t even stamp his feet as he left.

CHAPTER FIVE

MARGARET ENTERED THE room where her father stayed. His breathing, thin and reedy, echoed. He lay on the bed, his eyes closed, his skin as translucent as bone china, and looking nearly as fragile. It made her feel breakable herself, to see him so vulnerable. She closed the door behind her, and the curtains at the window fluttered weakly.

In her pelisse, she had tucked the letter that had been brought up from the vicar’s wife this morning. Richard had finally written her, and until this moment she hadn’t had a chance to look at the missive in private. Not that he’d been in any rush to communicate with her; it had taken him a full week and a half to send his first message.

She could hardly have broken the wax seal standing in the marble entry, after all. She might have run into Ash Turner. He might have simply plucked the pages from her hand. And then he would have known that she was one of the Dalrymples he so hated.

And then…

And then her imagination well and truly carried her away. It had been nine days since she’d so forcefully told him to leave her alone. And in that time, he’d subjected her to an ardent, soul-grinding, will-destroying campaign of…nothing. No attempted kisses. No conversation. No endearing little compliments, designed to erode her will into submission. It was almost enough to make her grant the man a grudging sort of respect.

She saw him daily. She could hardly help it; he’d taken over the suite of rooms off the gallery on the second floor, and she passed by his chambers several times each day on the way to her father’s sickroom. But he was so often surrounded by the men he’d brought up from London. The estate was aswarm with them; she supposed that diligence was necessary when a man was in trade.

It was discomfiting, to say the least, to discover that he so diligently performed his responsibilities.

Margaret shook her head and broke the seal on her brother’s letter. It separated into two sheets of paper. One page, covered in both sides, written in a dense hand, was labeled as information for her father. She set it to the side.

The other was addressed to her, and she felt a small thrill of pleasure at being remembered. Richard was a handful of years older than she. He’d always been kind. He, no doubt, knew how difficult it was for her to pose as a servant on the estate where she had once been in charge. He knew how irascible their father had become. And perhaps he had waited so long before writing because he remembered that tomorrow was her birthday.

The very thought brought a wash of loneliness. This year, after all, there had been no stream of birthday wishes from friends. It would be nice to know that one person in the world besides Ash Turner did not take her for granted.

She unfolded the sheet. It was depressingly void of content, except for a few short lines.

M—

Received your letter. A. Turner’s presence is bad enough. But I am alarmed to hear M. Turner is present. Beware. He’s a dangerous beast. Don’t spend time alone with him.

He’d signed with a flourish. She stared at the words, her lip curling in dismay.

That was all he had to say? No words of encouragement, nor of thanks? No other response to the missives she’d sent his way? She could have read him quite a lecture. But it was pointless remonstrating with a man who was many miles distant. Richard was busy and no doubt just as taken over by worries as she was. He’d focused on what he thought was the most important point: her welfare. She couldn’t fault him for that.