Mr. Sylvester was a little abstracted now, inspecting the proffered watch as though it were a long-lost love. “Lord Fawnleigh left a similar timepiece with me the other day for repair, but I daresay yours is finer, Lord Bolt.”
“Ah, Fawnleigh. Do give him my regards when he returns, will you? Perhaps I’ll see him at White’s. And do feel free to share the news of my”—he winked—“resurrection.”
Mr. Sylvester beamed. “I shall be happy to assist you in that regard, sir.”
It was a beginning.
Lucien hoped the news—hisversion of the news—would spread gradually, like moss on the side of buildings after rain.
And little by little it would seem as if he’d never been gone, and little by little he would come to seem—what were the words she’d used?—well, “ordinary” and “quite respectable.” Not the sort of man who would ever again appear in gossip columns.
Exeter had a surprise for him when he arrived.
Mutely he pushed a sheet of foolscap over to him. He hadn’t broken the seal, but Lucien recognized it. He stared down a moment, stunned.
Then slid a finger to break it and unfolded it to read.
A representative from Triton Importers may call upon His Grace, the Duke of Brexford from two o’clock to two thirty this afternoon.
His already beleaguered heart jolted.
He sat while the news reverberated through him.
He could not quite decide whether the knot in his gut was trepidation or excitement. But he had learned the hard way that imagination could just as easily torture as it could entertain. It was something that needed to be done. He was ready.
“Well,” Lucien said finally. “I suppose it’s a good thing I shaved this morning.”
He’d been inside the London townhouse twice when he was very small, about three years old. He remembered how everything gleamed, the marble floors like a glassy sea, the chandelier in the foyer hovering like a planet. His feet had clattered and echoed, whereas running across the floorboards of their country cottage resulted in a satisfying dull thunk, like a deer running on grass. He’d wanted desperately to slide down the gold banister and skate across the floor in his stocking feet. He had been forbidden to touch anything, of course. His father had gone up the stairs with his mother while a kind housekeeper had given Lucien a biscuit.
He was admitted by a butler whose expression was admirably as fixed as the statue of Apollo inside the doorway, but whose eyebrows could not be restrained. They twitched upward.
No doubt because he’d noticed how Lucien could have stepped right out of those portraits lining the staircase, the ones of ancestors done in oils. One after the other as he walked on up. He saw his eyebrows on one dour fellow. His long, chiseled chin buried in Elizabethan ruff on another. The beat of his heart echoed in his ears, as if it, too, were being slammed down on marble, like his boots. It was cold inside his chest. His hands were hot.
He paused in the library doorway.
The man standing behind the desk gazing out the window was tall, portly, and his hairline had inched back until it began in about the middle of his head. What hair he had left was gray. Lucien’s hand curled reflexively. He remembered once grabbing fistfuls of it when he’d been hurled up onto his father’s shoulders when he was three, so he could reach a branch of blossom for his mother.
Lucien understood, with a blinding epiphany, then that he had loved this man, with a child’s inability to discriminate.
And this was why he could not reconcile one man with another. It was not so much fury as love. And fury had been easier to sustain than grief and pain.
The duke turned around with a start.
He froze, his face blanked in fear. And squinted. “What thedevil...”
His voice was a rasp. The duke was still a handsome man. No signs of dissipation. He had no proclivities toward excess, like his son. Some other ancestor must have bequeathed that particular impulse to Lucien.
The duke shoved a pair of spectacles up onto his face.
Lucien, of course accustomed to stares, waited it out.
“Lucien?” The duke’s tone, while frayed, wondering, even dumbstruck, could not be precisely described as “joyous.”
His eyebrows were fluffy gray tufts now. Lucien suspected he was looking at his own eyebrow future.
“You’re neither hallucinating nor suffering dementia, Father. It is I.” He kept it light. Ironic. His own voice was steady enough. But it echoed strangely in his ears. He felt a bit as though he were witnessing this moment from somewhere up near the ceiling, rather than participating in it. He couldn’t quite feel his arms.
But he managed to bow low.