Evander folded the paper and placed it in his coat. He stood. Quentin stood beside him.
“Thank you, Donna Fierro.”
“Find him.” Lucrezia followed them to the door. “Bring him home. He has been away long enough.”
“I am going tonight,” Evander announced.
Quentin kept pace beside him on the pavement, his coat collar turned up against the evening chill. “Then I am coming with you.”
“This is between me and Richard.”
“And it will still be between you and Richard when you arrive. But you are not riding to Sussex alone in the dark after the day you’ve just had, and I’m not letting you. That is the end of the discussion.” Quentin flagged Evander’s carriage. “Sussex. Now. We can argue about boundaries in the carriage.”
Evander did not argue. The truth was that he did not want to make this journey alone, and Quentin knew it, and the fact that neither of them said so was its own form of honesty.
They rode south through the fading light. London fell away behind them, replaced by open country, hedgerows, and the long shadows of a fall evening. Evander sat with the folded directions in his hand and Lucrezia’s words turning in his mind.
Charlotte was carrying another man’s child.
Tommy. The baby sleeping in a crib in Blackholm House, gripping Mary’s collar, curling his fist around Evander’s finger. If Lucrezia was telling the truth, Tommy was not Richard’s son. The betrothal, the disappearance, the basket on the doorstep, all of it had been built on a lie Evander had never thought to question because the evidence seemed obvious.
Richard’s handkerchief. Charlotte’s ring. A note in Richard’s hand.
So the evidence had been staged. Charlotte and Richard had arranged the basket to look like Richard’s child precisely because the truth, that Charlotte had been carrying someone else’s baby, was worse.
Another question rose in Evander’s mind.
Who was Tommy’s father, then?
But that was an answer that could wait. For there was one priority now: go to Richard.
Then find Charlotte. She would be the one to solve this mystery.
Evander pressed his thumb against the bridge of his nose. The carriage swayed on the country road, and the questions multiplied faster than he could order them.
“You are thinking too loud,” Quentin said from the opposite seat. “I can hear the gears from here.”
“If Lucrezia is telling the truth, then everything we assumed about Tommy is wrong.”
“If she is telling the truth, then your brother is not a father but a conspirator. Which is marginally better, depending on one’s perspective.” Quentin stretched his legs. “It also means the real father is still out there.”
Evander said nothing. That was a problem for another day.
The carriage rolled on. The stars appeared one by one above the Sussex countryside, and the road narrowed, and the villages grew smaller and further apart.
They arrived after eleven. The cottage sat at the end of a dirt lane, sheltered by oaks, with a low stone wall and a light burning in the downstairs window. It was modest, clean, and well-tended.
And Richard had been hiding in it for over six months.
Evander climbed down from the carriage. His boots crunched on the gravel path. The night was cold, the sky clear, and the light in the window flickered as someone moved behind the curtain.
He knocked.
Footsteps. A bolt was drawn back, then the door opened.
“Well. It was high time, I suppose,” a familiar voice said.
Richard stood in the doorway in a linen shirt and bare feet, his hair longer than Evander had ever seen it, his face thinner.