“Winter is coming,” Imogen pointed out.
“I would love to have you stay with me, Josie,” Annabel said.
“Will you be quite all right if I don’t join you?” Imogen asked. “I doubt very much that Griselda would like to winter in the Highlands.”
Annabel had snuggled back down in the covers. “Of course I will be. I’m married.” There was a little smile in her eyes.
“I thought you might be nervous about the babe,” Imogen said.
Josie gaped, and Annabel sat upright again. “How did you know?”
Imogen laughed. “For goodness sake, Annabel, you generally retire to bed for two days when your flux appears. We’ve been here since the end of May, and now it’s August. You’ve spent no time whatsoever groaning about the unfairness of a female’s condition. In fact, you look utterly pleased to be female.”
“Oh, I am,” Annabel said, the smile in her eyes growing.
“A baby!” Josie said. “When will it be born?”
“Not for ages yet,” Annabel said. “Likely in January or February.”
“I needn’t return to England for the season until the end of March!”
“Your company would make me very happy,” Annabel said, grinning at her little sister.
“Are you certain that you wouldn’t like me to stay as well?” Imogen asked, feeling a tremendous reluctance to do so. It wasn’t that she was bitter.
A surge of honesty corrected the thought. Of course she was bitter. Two of her sisters were happily married, and now Annabel was having a child. The memories of her two-week-long marriage with Draven were a cold comfort.
“I would love it if you wished to stay,” Annabel said, holding out her hand to Imogen. “But I think you should go to London and drive the gentlemen mad by acting like the light widow you so emphatically are not.”
“The season is over,” Imogen said. “Griselda and I won’t go to London. We’ll stay with Rafe in the country.”
“And Mayne?” Annabel asked.
Imogen shook her head. “A passing fancy,” she said. “Luckily he was shrewd enough to see that before I did.”
Annabel squeezed her hand.
“Perhaps over the winter you could occupy yourself by making me a list of appropriate parti,” Josie suggested. “I don’t want to waste my smirks on a man who is lacking in the necessary prerequisites. So many people drift through Rafe’s house that you are sure to hear all the gossip.”
“And those prerequisites are?” Imogen asked, amused.
“I’ve made a list, garnered from reading every single romantic novel published by Minerva Press.” Josie consulted her book. “An estate is necessary, and a title would be nice. He should be able to read, but not too passionately. Unless he likes novels. And I don’t want him to be overly fashionable.”
“Don’t you have any physical requirements?” Annabel asked.
Josie shrugged. “I would prefer that my husband be taller than I am. Since I am rather short, I foresee no difficulty there.” She frowned. “Why are you both laughing? There’s nothing ludicrous about my ambitions. My list is likely very close to yours, Imogen.”
“My what?”
“Your list,” Josie said. “Every woman has a list, even if she doesn’t write it down.”
“I don’t,” Imogen said, her lips tight.
“It’s been almost a year since Draven died,” Josie said, as usual wading in where any hardy soul would hesitate. “You’ll have to think of marriage again at some point. You don’t want to wither into nothing more than an aunt to Annabel’s children.”
She caught Imogen’s sharp gaze but missed Annabel’s. “Well, for goodness sake, you certainly found it acceptable to contemplate intimacies with Mayne. From what I understand, marriage is merely a regularizing of that sort of relation.”
“Josie!” Annabel moaned.
Imogen started laughing again. “Now there’s a coldhearted look at matrimony.”
“Your list and mine are likely the same,” Josie said. “You simply haven’t clarified your demands and I have.”
“Tell me again what qualities I am looking for?”
“An estate. A title, if possible. Intelligence, but not to an uncomfortable degree. The same goes with fashion. One would dislike being married to a man who always looked better than oneself.”
“I think you should be a tad more specific,” Imogen said. “Our own guardian would fit every category you mentioned—Rafe has an estate, a title, sufficient height, no sense of fashion whatsoever, and a reasonable amount of intelligence, if slightly pickled.”
“You’re right,” Josie said. “I shall add an age limitation.” She sat down, quill poised. “Shall I cut them off at thirty, or twenty-five?”
“My point was more that Rafe is a drunkard,” Imogen said. “Your list overlooks every important characteristic that one would want in a husband.”
“I suppose you are talking about steadiness of character,” Josie said. “Rafe actually has that. He’s attractive too, very. He’s just too old for me.”
Imogen suddenly noticed that both Annabel and Josie were watching her. “He’s far too old and too drunk for me,” she said quickly.
“You are over twenty-one,” Josie said with her customary crushing truthfulness. “And you are a widow. I think it is an entirely inappropriate match, as far as age is concerned.”
“Rafe may not be perfect for you, darling,” Annabel said, taking Imogen’s hand. “But someone will be.”
A little wry smile turned the corner of Imogen’s lips. “In truth,” she said, “I’m one of those people who fall in love only once, Annabel.”
“If we could all plan the moment when we would fall in love as easily as I am making this list,” Josie said, “the world would be an altogether more tolerable place. For one thing, I would make certain to fall in love only after a man had sworn undying love.”
“Good luck,” Imogen said, hearing the disconsolate ring in her own voice.
Annabel squeezed her hand again.
2
A Conversation Being Heard Out of Order, as It Took Place Some Three Months Previous
May 1817
Holbrook Court, seat of the Duke of Holbrook
There was his nose and his jaw. Not his waistline, but definitely his eyes. Even as a man who had spent more time before the mirror at Bartholomew Fair than the glass in his own bedchamber, Rafe knew those eyes. Deeply shadowed, under straight brows. They were his.
And his father’s.
It was as if one of the illusion mirrors from a fair had come to life and was standing before him. At Bartholomew Fair, for example, a person with tuppence to spend can view a man with two heads, or a chicken with three legs. For another tuppence, one can turn oneself into the sideshow: the Illusion Room features a mirror that endows one’s stomach with the curve of a Christmas pudding. Rafe had rather disliked the effect. Even pulling himself up and assuming a stature most suited to the Duke of Holbrook had no effect.
The Earl of Mayne had laughed at Rafe’s sour expression. He was surveying his polished elegance in a mirror that made him as willowy as a nymph. “Try this one,” he had said, “you’ll prefer it.”
Secretly, Rafe had. The image in the thinner mirror had no softness about the waist; all of a sudden he looked taut and fit, as if he never greeted the dawn with a full stomach and an aching head.
Now it was as if that second mirror image had come to life and was standing before him.
“You were born in 1781?” he asked, trying to pull his wits together.
“I’m thirty-six, having been born within a few days of yourself, as I always understood.” There was just the faintest pause, and then he added, “Your Grace.”
“May I offer you a whiskey?” Rafe said.
“Not at this hour.”
Rafe walked over to the sideboard and poured himself a glass. Holding it in his hand made the next question easier. “So did you arrive in the world a few days before o
r after myself?” He didn’t turn around, just stared through the mullioned windows of his library. He’d stood before them time and again, but now those little diamonds of shimmering Elizabethan glass seemed suddenly to frame the great sweep of front lawn with black-edged perfection.
Behind him, Mr. Spenser sounded amused. “I chased you into the world, Your Grace. But I can assure you, I have no wish for your estate, even if such a thing were possible.”
Rafe turned about. “I had not assumed that you were expressing the desire; I merely wished to know our birth order for my own satisfaction.”
There was a sardonic gleam in his half brother’s eyes, and the fact that Rafe himself habitually greeted lame answers with the same look of disbelief was cold comfort. “My Christian name is Rafe,” he said abruptly. “I dislike being addressed as Your Grace.” And then, as if the two facts followed each other naturally, “I had a brother named Peter, but he died some years ago.”
“I was under the impression that your given name was Raphael,” the man said. He had seated himself while Rafe had his back turned, and he sat easily, with no sign of discomfort. As if they were equals, and as if he introduced himself to a brother or two every day.
“It is,” Rafe said. “And your name?”
“We are tarred with the same brush,” Mr. Spenser said rather obscurely.
Rafe found himself blinking like the village idiot. “What?”
“Gabriel.”
“Raphael and Gabriel,” Rafe said. “Bloody hell. I had no idea.”
Suddenly the rather serious set of his brother’s face shifted to a grin. “The discovery that you are named for an archangel drove you to curses?”
It was in his smile that Rafe found the difference between his brother’s face and his own. For Gabriel Spenser’s grin had a charming seriousness to it that had never been part of Rafe’s personality.
“What could our father have been thinking?” Rafe demanded. And then he caught, lightning quick, the shift in his brother’s eyes that showed he knew perfectly well what the old duke had been thinking. “Next thing you’ll be telling me that Holbrook dandled you on his knee,” Rafe said resignedly.
“Only until age eight or so,” Mr. Spenser said, adding with a touch of something like prudence, “Your Grace.”
“Bloody hell,” Rafe repeated. “And don’t call me Your Grace. I’ve never taken to the title.” There was a moment, and then: “My brother and I saw my—our—father on a biannual basis, just enough so that the duke could inform himself on how rapidly we were approaching the age of majority. We never appeared to be getting old fast enough.”
He hated sympathy. Except from Peter, and it was an odd realization to find that he didn’t mind seeing it in this new brother’s eyes either.
“Would it be all right if I call you Gabriel?” Rafe asked, sipping his whiskey.
“Gabe.”
“How many of there are you?” he asked, suddenly realizing that the countryside might well be littered with his kin. “Have I a sister?”
“Unfortunately, all the archangels were male.”
“There are always the apocryphal gospels.”
“I’m the only child of my mother. And the apocryphal gospels are unreliable. Your father would never have countenanced naming one of his children Uriel, although the name appears in the Book of Enoch.”
“He’s your father as well,” Rafe observed. And: “You seem remarkably well informed about biblical matters.”
“I’m a scholar,” Gabe said with a faint smile. “Of biblical history, particularly the Old Testament.”
Rafe’s head was spinning. He had just discovered that he himself was named after an archangel and now it seemed that his brother was a scholar. A biblical scholar? For all Gabe looked like Beelzebub himself. “Damn me pink,” he said. “Father didn’t send you into that field because he named you with such ambition, did he?”
“The same nomenclature didn’t turn you into a priest. No. Your father did pay for me to go to Cambridge, however. I am still there, at Emmanuel College.”
“Is it bloody difficult to pass those exams?” Rafe said with ready sympathy. He’d been to Oxford himself, and although he found it easy enough, everyone knew that Cambridge was full of brilliant men who prided themselves on actually teaching something to their students.
“In fact, I did manage to pass the exams,” his brother said gravely. “I am a professor of divinity.”
Rafe blinked at him. Gabriel’s hair was standing up at the back of his head, precisely as Rafe’s was no doubt doing. “At Oxford, there are only twenty-four professors in the whole university.”
“I suppose I haven’t had the intrusions of rank and birth to hamper me,” his brother said thoughtfully. “I can see that this house, for example, would be a terrible distraction.”
Distraction? The seat of the Holbrooks since the 1300s…a distraction? But there was something Rafe had to ask. “Did my father have other children that you know about?” His lips felt stiff, even forming that question aloud. He was never fond of his father; indeed, he had hardly known the man. But he had thought him honorable if distant, interested in his reputation, if not his sons.
Gabe looked at him levelly, from under those black eyebrows that mimicked his own. “Your father and my mother were quite devoted to each other.”
Rafe sat down, unable to imagine his father devoted to anyone.
“I do not think,” Gabe added, “that you need worry about covetous siblings leaping from the woodwork.”
“Ah,” Rafe said. “Of course…” But he couldn’t think what to say next. Only a fool would describe his mother as devoted to his father; they rarely saw each other. If one of his parents was in town, one was sure to find the other in the country.
A moment of silence fell between them. We’re as alike as two peas in a pod, Rafe thought. Gabe had his large body, albeit with no softness in the waist. That was his unruly brown hair, and those were his large feet. The curve of his lip, the cleft in his chin, the square jaw were all familiar. Even the way Gabe was tapping his middle finger against the arm of his chair, which was precisely the kind of fidget that Rafe found himself doing when he had an unpleasant subject to broach.
“I expect this sounds preposterous,” Gabe said. “But my mother, in particular, was quite sorry to hear of your brother’s death. She thought him a delightful man, and very like his father.”
Rafe stared. “She knew Peter?”
“Yes. I met him as well. When your father’s will was proved, there was a bequest for my mother and myself.”
“But I was there when the will was read!” Rafe felt as if he were riding a nag, trying to catch a group on thoroughbreds. “I would surely have noticed when that bequest was mentioned.”
Gabe shrugged. “A silent clause, as I understand it. One has to guess that they are quite common. I expect the solicitor informed your brother in private.”
“He was your brother as well,” Rafe corrected. “And so Peter sought you out.” Of course Peter would have done that. He would have wanted to make sure that their father’s mistress was well taken care of. His—no, their—elder brother had been the consummate gentleman.
“His Grace took tea with my mother. She quite enjoyed his company.”
Rafe put his drink to the side. “Why did you wait so long to tell me of your existence? Peter died four years ago.”
Instead of answering, Gabe looked at him quizzically. “You are quite different from your brother.”
“It seems I have two brothers,” Rafe said a bit sharply.
Gabe ignored that. “I would guess that your brother Peter would no more have asked an illegitimate brother to address him by his Christian name than he would have walked on water.”
Rafe shrugged. “You likely know more about occurrences of the latter than I do.”
After a moment, Gabe said, “I have seen no need to inform you of my existence. Your father was more than generous in his bequest.”
&n
bsp; “If there is any help that I can offer,” Rafe said, “you must never hesitate to ask. You are my brother, for all you keep calling our father mine.”
“Don’t you wish to confirm my parentage with your solicitor?” There was a twist to Gabe’s mouth that Rafe recognized with a drop of his stomach, because it wasn’t his but Peter’s. It seemed this new brother was a mixture of the two of them.
“There’s no need.” Rafe met his brother’s eyes squarely. “I am only sorry that Peter did not see fit to share your existence earlier.” Peter wouldn’t have even thought of it, of course. His dearest brother had seen the world as a maze of distinct compartments, and illegitimate brothers did not belong in the same room—or compartment—with legitimate ones.
Then it was Gabe’s turn to lunge from his chair and stare out the window. Only a faint stiffness about his shoulders betrayed tension. “It is a small thing that I ask,” he said finally.
“Anything,” Rafe said, wondering how many pounds he could raise in the next day or so without traveling to London.
“I need you to put on a play.”
“What?”
“A play,” Gabe repeated. “In the Holbrook Court theater.” He swung about, those level eyebrows lowered now, tensed like a bull about to charge.
But Rafe couldn’t help grinning. Just so would he have asked such an absurd question: hunched against the stupidity of it. “For God’s sake. Never tell me you, a Cambridge doctor of divinity, have an ambition to tread the boards?”
He could feel laughter growing in the very edges of his soul. In fact, he hadn’t felt this cheerful since—
“No!” Gabe said, looking disgusted.
“Damn,” Rafe said. “I had a notion I could watch you tantalize the ladies while wearing my skin, so to speak.”
“No such luck.”
“It would have raised my countenance no end,” Rafe said pensively. “Just think: the brother of the Duke of Holbrook as the ladies’ favorite in Romeo and Juliet.”
“I’m too old for the role. And that would be illegitimate brother, hardly a compliment to the family.”
“I don’t give a damn about your status. That’s one thing you have yet to learn about me. I am not Peter. What about Antony and Cleopatra? Antony was over forty, wasn’t he?”