Still, Andrew felt the weight of his brother’s arm around him, the quiet bulk of Gareth’s presence at his side.
Soon would come the stiffening in outrage, the drawing away in horror.
“Gareth, don’t you understand what I am telling you? I dishonored a young woman, allowed her to lie about whose child she carried, failed to take responsibility when she became your chosen bride, and then committed murder, with the result that my perfidy might go unnoticed.”
“You intended to leave Julia floundering in the water once you got Mother into the boat?”
“Of course not, but by then…” Nothing but frigid green-black water, towering waves, the roar of the wind, and wreckage in all directions. “I no longer knew where to throw the rope, and I have no memory of how Mother and I made it to shore.”
In contrast to the mayhem of Andrew’s memories, Gareth’s voice was calm. “For half your life, you have thought yourself a conscienceless, rutting coward who murdered his own unborn child?”
“For half my life, I have known the truth about myself,” Andrew replied. To say it though, and to Gareth, had made a curious change. Andrew could finally breathe. He could draw air all the way into his lungs in a manner that had slipped from his grasp so long ago, and so subtly, he hadn’t noticed.
“Adam told me,” Gareth said. “He told me that woman had been after him and every other man in the family, including our grandfather. Grandfather was not affronted by her behavior, Andrew, why should you have been? Why did neither Adam nor I, nor Grandfather, nor Father, for that matter, think to protect you from her?”
Shock went through Andrew, a physical sensation not unlike an electrical spark. The shock of revelation, of learning something so far outside his imagined universe, his very body had to react. “What… are… you… saying?”
So Gareth repeated himself, his voice more firm.
“She as much as offered to bed down with the old marquess, and did with you, probably with Jeffrey, and who knows how many others. She certainly made a play for Adam, and for me. Adam told me I ought to bring it up with you, since he suspected she’d gone after you as well, but I argued with him, bitterly, thinking Julia would not have preyed on a mere boy. She wasn’t right, somehow, wasn’t… natural.”
“She claimed Jeffrey had enticed her with promises of marriage, but she assured me the child was mine. Adam and I argued over your betrothal to her, but even then…” Andrew had not told his oldest brother the truth in the course of that protracted altercation, but Adam had apparently had his suspicions.
Suspicions that cast Andrew as a victim.
“Had she been with child, Brother, as often as she spread her legs, she could not possibly have given you that assurance.” Gareth gave Andrew’s shoulders a shake for emphasis. “She apparently tried that ruse with Jeffrey, among others that we know of.”
Andrew seized on the single word: ruse. “What ruse? What do you mean?”
“She was no more with child than I am.”
“But, Gareth, there she was, the waves dragging at her, screaming to save our child, begging me…” Andrew’s breath constricted again, and vertigo threatened.
“I am telling you,” Gareth said, shaking Andrew’s shoulders again, harder this time, “there was no child… You did not murder your unborn child, you did not betray me, you did not commit murder. You made mistakes, Andrew, mistakes common to adolescents the world over. And no one, not your own father, not your brothers, not the head of our benighted family, made any attempt to protect you from them.”
The very irascibility of Gareth’s tone was as reassuring as the weight of his arm across Andrew’s shoulders, and yet, comprehension would not coalesce into acceptance. “I cannot understand this. I cannot get my mind to absorb this version of my history. I cannot.”
“There’s more,” Gareth said, “but it will keep. I cannot believe you lived with these lies and falsehoods for this long. I am sorry, Andrew. I am so sorry.”
The arm around Andrew’s shoulders became a hug then, a simple, affectionate embrace Andrew found he wanted never to end. His brain could not focus enough to sort out the ramifications of what his brother had shared with him, not yet. But his heart felt lighter, able to beat freely, unburdened save for the task of sustaining his own life.
Andrew loved his brother again; he simply loved him, openheartedly, joyously. It would take time for the guilt and shame to fade, but if he and Gareth had time, they could arrive to that.
“This stair,” Gareth growled, “is giving my arse a pain. I am going to shave, eat something, then chase your wife out of Felicity’s bedroom, so I might pray my marchioness back to a semblance of health. Where shall I chase her to?”
“Bed,” Andrew said. “She’s been up far too long, and she needs her rest.”
“I am getting old.” Gareth rose stiffly and extended a hand down to assist Andrew.
“Yes. You are, old and wise. Gareth…” He dropped his brother’s hand. “Thank you.”
“Now you grow tediously maudlin. Good night, little brother.”
But as they turned to go to their separate rooms, Gareth grabbed him in one more hug. “And thank you too.”
They walloped each other on the back, once, hard, and went to face their separate challenges.
***
The marquess’s household remained unsettled, the marchioness’s health precarious at best, and the addition of two newborns upsetting established routines. Worse, neither the lord nor the lady of the house was available to reestablish order, because Heathgate spent almost all of his days with his wife.
Felicity slept. She slept for much of three days, rising to a stuporous wakefulness only to nurse her children, use the chamber pot, and drink either beef tea or sugared hot tea. While she suffered no fevers, she did continue to bleed heavily.
So Andrew did not leave, given that the servants were turning to him and to Astrid for guidance. Moreover, his original purpose in joining the household, to talk to his dear wife, remained a priority.
“Come, your lordship,” Andrew said irritably to an equally annoyed brother, “your eldest has not seen you yet today, and your wife is sleeping. Leave this room for at least the next five minutes, or I will haul you away bodily.”
“You can bring James down here,” Gareth argued.
“Gareth?” Felicity’s voice from the depth of the huge bed silenced both men, and Gareth was beside his wife in an instant.
“Right here, beloved.”
“Go with Andrew. If you keep arguing, you’ll wake the babies.” In addition to me, she left unsaid.
Gareth scowled but kissed her cheek. “I will be back shortly.”
Andrew walked with him up to the nursery, mostly to make sure he went. Andrew himself had spent considerable time with James and little William, and had carried them down to see the new arrivals while Felicity and the babies napped, oblivious to the visitors. James had yet to visit with his mama, however, because she was still terribly weak and rarely awake.
And when they arrived to the nursery, they found James’s nanny had bundled him up for a brief outing in the snowy back garden.
“She’ll lose him in this damned snow,” Gareth groused.
“If she does,” Andrew replied, “he will howl loudly enough to summon the watch clear from Town.”
“And wake his mother, brother, and sister,” Gareth agreed, his expression lightening marginally. “I have been an utter ass, haven’t I?” he said, settling on James’s low bed.
“Yes—but you have also been enduring heartbreaking circumstances better than I would.” Andrew rummaged through a carved toy chest and found a ball he and Astrid had used to amuse James a lifetime ago. He tossed it to his brother, who caught it deftly in one hand.
Gareth tossed the ball back to Andrew, who perched on the toy chest.
“I tell myself if there’s no infection,” Gareth began, “then Felicity should rally and eventually recover. But then I look at her, slumbering in t
hat bed, hour after hour. She forces herself to stay awake long enough to nurse the babies, but drifts off before she herself has anything to eat. She is not rallying, and she is still bleeding.”
Andrew tossed the ball to Gareth again.
“Fairly said it might take several weeks for the bleeding to subside entirely, and certainly a week of heavy bleeding is normal.”
“And what would he know of such things?” Gareth said, lobbing the ball back to Andrew.
“He has been trained as a physician,” Andrew said as he continued their game of catch. “Astrid told me Fairly lost a spouse who had borne him a child.”
“Fairly? The mercantile shark, the self-contained, brothel-owning, dapper, articulate, odd-eyed, insufferable, pain-in-the-arse brother of our respective wives was a physician?”
“I don’t know that he practiced, but when I asked it of him, he filled my head with more detail about women’s, er, plumbing, than any man should know. He endorses breast-feeding, by the way, and says it might help the womb heal and return to its original contours, so stop arguing with Felicity about it.”
“And does he endorse having a mother starve to death so she can nurse her babies?” Gareth shot back. “And he’s a widower who has buried a child?”
Andrew held the ball for a moment, looking Gareth straight in the eye. “Yes,” he said, firing the ball. “He has lost both a wife and a child.”
Gareth absently threw the ball back. “Shite.”
“Probably as accurate a summation as any.”
“Are you making headway with your wife yet?” Gareth had turned his attention to something besides his marchioness for the first time in days, and yet it was a subject Andrew wished he’d not brought up.
“My wife has been sleeping nearly as much as yours, and when she isn’t sleeping, she’s taking care of her sister or the babies, or answering the servants’ questions so we will continue to have clean laundry and hot meals.”
“Coward.”
“Quaking in my perpetually soggy boots,” Andrew agreed mildly. “I can’t find a good time to approach her.”
“You aren’t even sleeping with her, which is pure foolishness. Women like to cuddle, and you’re the creative sort. You should be able to work with that.”
Andrew fired the ball at Gareth’s chin. “So women like to cuddle, do they? Imagine the opportunities I have missed because this subtlety eluded me.”
“Let me put it this way,” Gareth said, matching the force Andrew had applied to the ball. “If my wife were not bleeding her life away, I’d be sharing that bed with her every spare moment I had, even if it were simply to hold her.”
Andrew caught the ball and held it. “I take your point, Brother, but I have not yet accepted that your wife is bleeding her life away, and neither should you. Though now that I have you alone, I have a question for you.”
“Ask,” Gareth said flatly. “If it’s a question about funeral arrangements, be warned I am up for a bout of mean, bare-knuckle fisticuffs.”
A tempting offer.
“The other night, you told me Julia was not expecting, not my child, not Jeffrey’s—I believe your words were, there was no baby.”
Andrew had repeated those words over and over in his mind, the relief of Gareth’s pronouncement renewed each time.
“Those were my words, and I meant them. When we realized four years ago some aspects of that accident hadn’t been fully resolved, I had Brenner go back and talk to anyone we could find who’d been employed on our Scottish property that summer. Brenner interviewed Mother, Julia’s parents, and as many of the servants as he could locate.”
“That must have been some undertaking.”
“It took weeks, and more than one trip North,” Gareth said, “and he would have interviewed you, but you had already taken yourself off to foreign shores. In the course of his efforts, he came across the woman who had been Julia’s lady’s maid. She had since become a nanny to a cousin of a cousin and so forth, but she recalled the whole summer quite well.”
Why had Andrew never thought to do this? Why had he thought exile on the Continent his only option? “And?”
“Julia’s courses had arrived the morning before we went out on the boat, Andrew. The maid recalled how irritable and difficult her employer had been in the days leading up to the accident, knowing full well Julia had been swiving anything in breeches to try to conceive her much-vaunted child. The maid knew Julia’s patterns, however, and dreaded the tantrum that would ensue when Julia realized she wasn’t pregnant.”
Andrew tossed the ball from one hand to the other. “And that was the more you referred to?”
“Not all of it. Brenner uncovered evidence Julia had paid one of the local sailors to tamper with the rudder.”
“What in the bloody hell could she have been about?” Andrew said, standing and pacing to a dormer window, because tampering with a rudder was tantamount to… murder. Cold-blooded, premeditated, malice aforethought murder.
“Even her maid had no conjecture as to why Julia would have sabotaged a boat she herself was on, but the tampering would not have been evident except in heavy seas. If enough force were applied to the guides and cables, they would have snapped, but not in calm seas. And if you’ll recall, Julia was not sanguine about joining the outing.”
Gareth had carried her up the gangplank bodily, her objections peppering the air.
“Jeffrey loved to take that boat out,” Andrew recalled, facing his brother, “and the seas were calm when we cast off.”
“They were, so perhaps she was merely laying a trap to rid herself of Jeffrey at a later date, should he have been her spouse. She resisted my insistence she join the outing, if you’ll recall. Resisted bitterly. But then, Grandfather also considered himself quite a yachtsman, and Julia’s fatal trap could have been intended for him.”
“But you were prepared to spare Jeffrey the chore of marrying her, and Grandfather was happy to let you do it,” Andrew reminded his brother as he tossed him the ball.
“The offer I made to Julia was to marry her and to live with her in the household of my choosing. She did not accept that offer, because she ‘wanted to raise Jeffrey’s child’ at the family seat, where she knew Jeffrey would be forced to reside at least some of the time. I believed Jeffrey’s protestations regarding the child’s paternity, and would not capitulate to Julia’s conditions. So at the time of her death, she was not, in any sense, my fiancée, despite press and portraits to the contrary.” He punctuated that statement by aiming the ball straight at Andrew’s chest.
Andrew caught it and tossed it up into the air.
“These things you tell me…” he said, heading for the door. “I feel disoriented, as if I’ve taken a bad fall from a fast moving horse.”
“Give it time,” Gareth said as Andrew tossed him the ball one more time. “Where are you off to?”
“Going to ride my horse,” Andrew said, because a man needed to plan his strategy if he were to reclaim his wife’s affections—and her trust.
“There’s nigh two goddamned feet of snow on the ground, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“You know how some horses are mudders? Most horses don’t like sloppy footing, they hate the mud hitting their bellies, and they don’t have the knack of keeping their feet under them in bad going.”
Gareth shoved up from the small bed. “And others bestir themselves to a decent effort only if they’re on a muddy track,” he finished the thought.
“Well, Magic is a snow horse. He marched right over here through more dirty footing than I’ve ever asked a horse to negotiate. Five miles of it was nothing to him, thank God.”
Gareth considered the little rubber ball in his hand. “I haven’t thanked you yet for making that journey, Andrew. It was inexcusably risky of you, but I appreciate it all the same.”
A little scold made the thanks go down more easily. “I needed to be here.”
“Yes, you did, but I’ve been meaning to ask you: What exactl
y did you and Astrid do while I was taking my nap in the freezing hallway?”
“Astrid didn’t explain it to you?” Andrew said, his hand on the door latch.
“She evaded the question, which I will not tolerate from you, so talk.”
“Why not browbeat her?”
“Because I can beat the stuffing out of you,” Gareth replied in the same pleasant tone Andrew had used.
“If you must know, all we did was turn one of the babies in the womb,” he said. “I’ll just be off now…”
But before he could get the door open, a rubber ball hit his backside with stinging force, and his brother’s “You did what?” roared through the nursery. By the time Andrew turned, Gareth had launched himself across the room and effected a neat tackle, bringing himself, Andrew, and a shelf full of toy soldiers crashing to the floor.
Nineteen
Felicity kissed the smooth brow of the tiny infant in her arms. “What is that sound?”
Astrid glanced upward, only to hear another loud crash, followed by a series of bumps and thumps. “Our husbands went up to visit James in the playroom.”
Though Andrew did not keep her informed of his comings and goings, and Astrid lived in fear of a note telling her he’d decamped for Town—or Sweden or the Antipodes.
“If these babies had been sleeping…” Felicity muttered darkly. One child was at her breast; Astrid was returning the other—already enjoying a postprandial nap—to the bassinet.
“But we’re all awake,” Astrid pointed out, smiling, “so let the boys play. It’s hard on Andrew being cooped up in the house and being away from his horses. I can’t imagine Gareth is used to this much inactivity either.”
Another sharp thump had both ladies peering at the ceiling.
“Gareth needs to quit fretting,” Felicity said. “I am stronger by the day, and there have been no fevers. Here.” She held Pen out to Astrid, wiped off a damp nipple, and fastened the bodice of her nightgown. “Pen was slurping and dreaming and slurping some more. My arms are too tired for that.”
Andrew; Lord Of Despair Page 26
