The Heiress Effect (Brothers Sinister #2)(39)

Hugo Marshall was a good bit shorter than Oliver. His hair was an untidy brown, his features square, his nose broken. He looked nothing like Oliver, and with good reason: They were not actually related. Not by anything other than time and affection.

Oliver very carefully didn’t look at his father. They had situated themselves next to their fishing pool—a wide, flat stretch of water where the stream went still. A large, gray rock on the bank made an excellent seat. “It took me far too long.”

His parents’ farm, just outside the tiny village of New Shaling, was a mere forty minutes’ ride from Cambridge. When he’d been at university, he’d visited every weekend he could.

“Free thinks you’re avoiding her,” his father said.

She would think that. His youngest sister had always had a temper—and a tendency to think the world revolved around her. That it appeared to do so on a regular basis had done nothing to dissuade her.

“Of course I wasn’t,” Oliver replied. “I was avoiding you.”

His father chuckled obligingly.

Oliver didn’t laugh. Instead, he busied himself with his own rod and line.

“I see,” his father said after a moment. “What horrible thing have I done now?”

Oliver cast his line with vicious intent into the pool, watching little ripples rise up in the otherwise still water. “Not you. Me.”

His father didn’t say anything.

“I’m struggling with a question of ethics.”

“Ah.” Hugo Marshall’s gaze abstracted. “Is it a thorny question of ethics? Or is it the sort of ethical question where the right choice is easy, but the unethical answer is too tempting?”

Trust his father to see to the heart of his problem without having heard a word of it. Oliver fiddled with his rod and didn’t look up. Normally, he’d have laid the whole thing before his father. But this time… This time, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to tell the story. Too much of it had to do with Hugo Marshall himself.

His parents had scrimped and sacrificed and saved so that Oliver could have the chance he did. He’d only barely begun to understand what his parents had given up for him.

When Oliver’s brother, the duke, had reached his majority, Oliver had visited Clermont House for the first time. Oliver had dimly known that his father had once worked for the Duke of Clermont in some capacity, but he’d never known details.

Not until he was twenty-one. Not until he’d arrived in London alongside his brother and was introduced to the staff. A good half-dozen servants remained from the time twenty-two years ago when Hugo Marshall had worked for the duke. They had been very curious about Oliver…and even more curious about what had become of Hugo Marshall.

“I knew him,” the housekeeper had said. “I was only first maid, then, and we’d all fight over who had to take him tea. None of us wanted the task, he was that fearsome.”

Fearsome. He’d seen his father angry a few times in his life, and Oliver supposed he was fearsome. But he’d understood that she had meant more than that. His father was fiercely intelligent and brooked no foolishness.

The housekeeper had sighed.

“He was the sort of man who I thought would be running all of London in twenty years. Sometimes you meet a man, and you just know about him. You know he’s going to be something more.” She’d sighed fretfully and readjusted her cap. “That’s what we all said at the time. We just knew. It was a feeling you had, looking at him. And then it all came to nothing.”

It all came to nothing.

Oliver glanced at his father. Hugo had cast his line in the deep pools at the edge of the river and sat without speaking, without expecting. Waiting to see if Oliver wanted to talk, assuming that anything that needed to be said would be.

It hadn’t come to precisely nothing. All that energy had been devoted to this—into fishing trips with boys who were not really his sons, to money made and then immediately invested into his children.

Every bit of excess that the business had produced had gone to his family—helping Laura and her husband start a dry-goods store in town, paying for Oliver’s university tuition, managing Patricia’s shorthand lessons and then, when she had married Reuven, giving them enough to start their own business in Manchester.

It all came to nothing.

No. It wasn’t going to be nothing. Oliver was going to make his father’s sacrifice mean something. He was going to make it mean everything.

“Does it matter,” Oliver asked, “if I want it very, very badly?”

“What is it you want?” his father asked.

I want you to be proud of me. I want to do everything you dreamed of and deliver it at your feet.

Oliver reached out and pulled a twig from the dirt, rolling it between his fingers. There were uglier wants, too, ones that made him feel almost uncomfortable.

I want them to pay.

Instead he shrugged. “Why did you do it? Give up everything to raise another man’s son?”

His father did look up at that. “I didn’t raise another man’s son,” he said sharply. “I raised my own.”

“You know what I mean,” Oliver said. “And that’s precisely what I am talking about. Why claim me? Why treat me the way you have? It must have been an enormous struggle deciding what to do about me. I know you loved Mother, but—”