In the Arms of a Marquess(68)

“I’ll try to remember, milord.”

“I will appreciate your effort. Do you recall, were my father or brother entertaining guests in those days just before the fire?”

“Well, no.” The man shook his head. “I can’t say as there was anybody about that week, with the rain like it’d been. Milord thought it poor shooting in rain, you know.”

Ben’s breath stole out of him slowly, relief slipping along his veins.

“Ah, yes. Of course. The rain.” The very reason for the ample charred remains of the cottage. The rain had fallen hard and fast for nearly a week then let up. But as the cottage burned, the clouds let loose again, halting the fire’s progress prematurely but still too late, leaving a ruin of lives in soggy puddles.

“ ’Cept milord Styles, course,” Andy added. “But he weren’t but family, at the box so often that year before the fire, specially after Master Arthur passed.” The groom nodded thoughtfully. “Came to get me after he got out of the house. We stood there watching, both of us weeping like women. Didn’t mind crying myself since he was, after all.” He tugged his cap lower. “Th’other week when he were here he brought me a bottle, if you don’t mind me saying, milord.”

“Not at all,” Ben murmured, limbs frozen, lungs in a vice grip.

“Drank it with me, in fact. Said it was for old times. For Lord Jack.”

“Of course. Thank you, Andy. I had wondered. Now I know.”

“Yessir.”

Ben left the stable, dragging himself hard from the place his heart and mind pointed toward, a place he hadn’t been in years, of such profound loss he shunned it because it hurt too much to linger there.

Styles had been there the night of the fire, yet he had never spoken of it. Moreover he lied about avoiding the box for so many months. Andy would have no reason to tell tales now. Already overwhelmed with taking up his new role in England so soon after his uncle’s death, when the tragedy occurred Ben hadn’t been in any right mind to interview the sole surviving member of the household, and Andy had not offered up any information voluntarily. Perhaps the local magistrate had questioned him, but Ben never knew.

Ben could only imagine one reason Styles would withhold such information from him.

The fire had been his fault.

His stomach clenched, his head spinning. The only man he had trusted since the death of his brothers and father, the single person who from the moment Ben acceded to the title accepted him without hesitation . . .

He strode up the drive beneath the lowering sun, struggling to hold the truth at bay. But it came, a tidal wave of pain and betrayal. He walked blindly through the front door of his house toward the parlor.

“Mr. Scott, I will be remaining the night.” He shut the door, went to the sideboard and poured a drink. Somewhere within the second bottle he hazily recalled telling Octavia that alcohol would not help with her distress. He sloshed the remaining contents of the bottle into his glass and drank it down.

Ben remained at Fellsbourne for three days, most of those hours spent in the same parlor, draperies drawn to shut out the day, his assiduous servants making certain that the liquor never ran dry. On the third night he finally roused himself sufficiently to stumble to the master suite.

Still half disguised, he awoke shortly after dawn in the bed in which he had made love to Octavia not a fortnight earlier. He dragged himself up and to the window, drew the curtains aside and pressed open the pane. The gray, misty air smelled of moss and molded leaves and fresh hay, of life and death continuing in cycles as old as the birth of the continents and oceans, oblivious to the cruelties of their inhabitants.

He must return to London. He would confront Styles and hear his old friend’s story. Perhaps he had it all wrong. Perhaps Andy remembered it poorly.

Perhaps.

But before he sought out Styles, he must pay another call, days overdue. His heart ached harder than it had in seven years, his world again turned upside down overnight. Now, finally, from one person at least, he needed the truth.

Chapter 18

LIGHT. That principle or thing by which objects are made perceptible to our sense of seeing, or the sensation occasioned in the mind by the view of luminous objects.—Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine

Ben did not call. Tavy bit back the tears, gnawed on every one of her fingertips, and cursed her weakness for a black-eyed lord. Then she cursed him. Then she cursed the practice of lying. Then she cursed him again.

Dragging herself out of her morass of maledictions, she went to the museum with Alethea and Constance. After oohing and ahhing appropriately, she and Constance parted company with Tavy’s sister and continued on to visit Lady Ashford. On the way they instructed the coachman to make a detour to Gunter’s. They ate biscuits and ices, and—in contrast to their highbrow pursuits in the museum—aggressively pursued remarkably silly conversation about complete frivolities.

By the time the carriage drew to a halt before the viscountess’s town house, Tavy had convinced herself that she felt nearly like a girl, with barely a care in the world, even as though she might not be required to flee back to India to escape the belly-deep pain of his presence in her life again. Her hands shook, even her lips quivered with the strain of pretense. But she was quite, quite proud of herself for not having succumbed to the desire to curl up in a miserable ball on the museum floor, or in her chair at the confectioner’s shop, so she must consider it a small sort of victory.