He said all of these things quite neutrally. He didn’t want to give this man anything more of himself than he’d already given him. No emotion, no details, no clues to things he’d endured and learned to become the man he was now.
The duke nodded gravely, accepting the gratitude as his due. Interest flickered in the duke’s eyes. “Well. Success is a fine thing. Alas, I cannot possibly invest in your endeavors, because the duchess wouldn’t allow it, anyway.”
“Well, one must always do what the duchess says.”
The duke smiled. Oddly he had no facility for detecting irony, because he had no need for it. The spoiled and comfortable seldom did.
“There’s still a sad bit of land in Northumberland entailed to your title. You might as well claim it.”
This was useful information.
Lucien nodded.
“All right, then. I’m glad for your sake that you’re not dead,” the duke said briskly. After the manner of a person drawing a meeting to a close.
“Actually, Father, I did hope you’d indulge me in one modest request. I wondered if I might have the music box you gave to my mother. It’s ormolu, set with amber and carnelian, and it plays a tune by Mozart. I have nothing else of hers and it’s something she loved. I should like it to remember her by.”
Some instinctive caution prevented him from mentioning the false bottom that hid locks of hair, his own and his mother’s. He could not conceive now of exposing such sentimentality to the duke.
The duke gave his desk a little drum with his fingers. “Oh, yes. I know the box of which you speak. Alas, the duchess is quite attached to it and she keeps it in her bedchamber. But I can give you the name of a jeweler who made it, and perhaps you can get one made for yourself.”
And with this he looked pointedly at the clock.
Lucien placed his feet carefully on each of the stairs as he moved down, down; his head felt light and tight. Above him swung the chandelier with seeming infinite layers of crystals, one perhaps, for every anticipated generation of the dukes of Brexford. Everything, peculiarly, seemed new, as though he were seeing it for the first time. Nearly everything in his life he’d once formed a judgment about now seemed to require recasting, because things could only be understood by contrast with other things, the way light and shade need each other.
He paused to draw a breath up through a raw, scraped sensation that had settled in his chest. He knew what it was: the very last vestiges of a misguided love excised, like that last bit of shrapnel removed. It was all to the good. It was glorious that it was gone. He was free. And he knew what to do with pain. Breathe through it. Walk it off. Wait it out. Drink.
Think of Angelique, which he did now. Because somehow she was both anodyne and ache.
The questions she skirted, as if to confront them would jar an old wound... the things she left unsaid about those courtshipsand compensations. He suspected the stories centered around men just like his father.
How he wished he could change Angelique’s story.
He got out the door, and was just cramming on his hat when he heard the hard slam of boots coming up behind him on the cobblestones.
He pivoted sharply, hand on his pistol inside his coat.
Something of the ferocity in his expression must have stopped his pursuer cold.
It was a boy. Standing about ten feet away. He was nearly all legs; his feet and eyes were enormous, and his cheeks were rosy. About fourteen if Lucien had to guess. He was dressed like a lord, but he’d managed to get some sort of stain, mustard from the looks of it, on his cravat. It was glaringly apparent in the sunlight.
They stared at each other. Lucien’s senses were all a little amplified. Perhaps that accounted for the peculiar vertigo he felt as he looked at this boy. As though his own past was chasing him down.
“Sorry. Sorry. To shout. It’s just...”
Lucien arched his eyebrows aggressively.
“Would you be L-Lucien, then? Lord Bolt?”
“Who wants to know?” Lucien said coldly.
The boy blushed scarlet to the line of his hair. “I’m R-Robert, sir. ”
Lucien stared at him, frowning enough to make Robert fidget a little, fussing with the buttons on his waistcoat.
And then as though he’d given a spyglass a quarter turn to bring it into focus, he realized his vertigo was because he might as well be looking in the mirror at his fourteen-year-old self.
But Robert had his mother’s dark eyes and straight brows.