Unveiled (Turner #1)(51)

Ash sometimes suspected that Smite held him in acute dislike. He had every reason to do so.

“What did Smite say?” Ash choked those words out past the ache in his gut.

“Smite said you were our personal avenging angel.” Mark dropped his eyes guiltily.

Well. It could have been worse. It could have been a lot worse. “That’s true.” He met Margaret’s gaze and wagged a finger at her. “Cross my brothers, and I’ll salt the earth under your feet. I’ll raze your defenses and reduce everything you love to rubble. There. Now you’ve been warned.”

She smiled. There was a touch of unease to that tentative curl of her lips.

“Oh, you think he’s joking?” Mark said. “You cannot have forgotten, Miss Lowell, the circumstances that brought us here. This—” he waved his hands expansively at the room around them “—this is Ash’s revenge on the Dalrymples.”

Margaret’s face shuttered. There was no other word for the pallor that crept across her skin, the sensation that she had just slammed the storm windows shut in preparation for a great gale. Her body drew subtly in on itself. “Oh?” That single word wasn’t a query, but another line of defense.

But Mark didn’t understand that. Likely, Mark hadn’t spent time studying the moods that crept across her face. He didn’t understand her vulnerabilities. He didn’t understand that she was still a wild creature, a little hesitant to eat from his hand. Ash cast Margaret an apologetic glance, but she wasn’t looking his way.

Mark leaned forwards. “He can’t forget some small slight, delivered years ago. One that was met with more than sufficient punishment at the time. He saw the opportunity to bring the Dalrymples down—”

She would think Ash was the most capricious fellow ever if Mark continued to tell the story in that way. “You call that some small slight? Miss Lowell, judge the truth for yourself. My brother sent me a note when he was six months at Eton, begging me to take him home. Naturally—” Ash heard the scorn in his own voice “—I undertook to ride out to see him. Not to take him home—I was determined that he would have the education that I did not.”

She nodded, understanding what Mark did not know.

“As I recall,” Mark put in, “you read me the most astonishing lecture on my duty to my name and my person. Afterwards, I was too frightened to even so much as suggest leaving.”

“You see,” Ash said, “he’d suffered a thousand indignities from the older boys—shoves when nobody was looking, little cruelties and taunts delivered in lonely halls. He was small for his age, then, and quiet.”

She watched him, her hands clasped in a white-knuckled grip.

“And he was a Turner,” Ash continued. “It wasn’t enough that Parford let my sister die. Edmund wanted everyone to know that no matter what the bloodlines proclaimed, Mark counted as no kin of his.”

She cast her eyes down to the carpet. Her jaw set.

Ash smiled grimly. “My brother begged me to let him come home. I refused and told him that under no circumstances would I allow him to do so. I walked away from him.”

“As you should have,” Mark commented.

“A few weeks later, I had this notion I should go back.” It had been another one of his instincts, and it had practically screamed for him to return. “When I got there… I have never been so furious in my life.” He could feel his fury returning, just thinking of it. “They broke his nose. They blacked his eyes. Three fingers on his right hand—”

“But,” Mark put in quietly, “you didn’t see the other boys.”

“Ah, yes. The other boys. Edmund Dalrymple and four of his friends had taken him on together.”

Margaret looked at him in shocked dismay. She shook her head. “It couldn’t have been. Together? But—”

“Don’t tell me what could have been. It was, in violation of all gentlemanly conduct. Apparently, they had been trying to bully him. And apparently, he hadn’t given in.”

“This happened years ago,” Mark put in. “I see no reason to think of it. But has Ash forgotten?”

“Have they let me forget? There’ve been no physical attacks since then. But tell us truly, Mark. Has Edmund ever forgotten you? And Smite—Richard was never so uncouth as to attack, but I know why Smite moved to Bristol, instead of taking articles in London as we had once discussed.”

Mark shook his head earnestly. “Really, Ash. It doesn’t bother me—why must you take it so seriously? I try not to spare either of them my attention. I’ve better things to spend my time worrying about.”

Ash looked up. “They have spread rumors. Innuendo. Edmund once hired a caricaturist to portray Mark as a—”

“Ash, really.”

But his brother’s admonition only heightened Ash’s resolve. “For years, they used their station and their place in society as a way to humiliate my brothers. So, yes. I’ll take their station. I’ll take their place in society. And I’ll have no mercy whatsoever for the Dalrymples. If I can make their lives miserable in response, I will. And…” Ash felt a wolfish smile play across his face. “I can.”

Margaret stared at him, white-faced.

“Don’t tell me you agree with Mark,” he said in surprise. “Turn the other cheek, and all that nonsense. If someone threatens me and my own, I won’t rest until he’s been taught to leave well enough alone.”