“That’s considerate of you, Mr. Smith,” she said cautiously.
“If it’s all the same to you, Mrs. Tanner, I think we can dispense with that fiction. I beg your pardon if I’m wrong, but I believe you knew my late father, Sir Humphrey Easterbrook. I’m under no illusions about what kind of man he was, or what kind of misdeeds he must have committed in any place he spent time. I can assure you Daisy would be quite safe in my company—indeed any woman would be quite safe—but my assurance alone will do nothing to stop gossip. However, and I’m afraid there’s no delicate way to ask this, but if there is some other family connection between Daisy and myself . . .” He took a deep breath, as deep as he could, which only resulted in a coughing fit. When he steadied himself, he managed to smile at the older woman. He had to handle this well; he needed to make sure she didn’t think this was blackmail or extortion or even some kind of high-handed charity. “The fact is that I need to hire someone to look after me, and it would go better for everyone concerned if that person were a family connection. I could be grossly mistaken and it’s presumptuous for me even to have this conversation, but my understanding is that it’s commonly known that you weren’t married to Daisy’s father, and I’ve noticed that—” He stopped himself. He had blathered long enough and now needed to make his point. “Mrs. Tanner, is Daisy my sister?”
She continued to look at him unflinchingly, and he guessed that she was deciding whether to lie. “Well, yes, Sir Martin, but we thought you knew.”
Martin bristled at his title but there was nothing to be done about that. He couldn’t renounce it, and even if he could, it would look like he was trying to deny who he was, who he had been. It would feel like cowardice. “And so I did. I wasn’t certain whether you did, though.”
She shook her head. “As if I wouldn’t notice that you’re the very spit of him at that age. That morning I walked into your cottage and caught you in bed and you dressed me down, you sounded just like him as well.”
“I apologize. It can’t have been a pleasant surprise. I wish there were something I could say to assure you that I’m not like him, or at least that I’m trying not to be.”
Mrs. Tanner looked at him for a long minute. “If you’ll beg my pardon, once I got over the shock, I realized you were only worried about your young man’s privacy, which is a sight more than your father would have ever cared about.”
Martin opened his mouth to deny that there was anything requiring privacy, to insist that there was nothing untoward about two men sharing a bed. But Mrs. Tanner had seen him and Will together for months; if she had arrived at the truth, then making a show of denying it would do no good. Besides, he was trying to show her that he was trustworthy, and maybe he needed to trust her as well. So all he did was wave over the barmaid and ask for a pair of pints.
“I’m quite poor,” he said. “Otherwise I’d try to do something for Daisy, especially given that she constitutes a full half my blood family. As things stand, I realize that instead I’m asking Daisy to do me a favor for a sum of money that might not be worth her while and which might cause her parentage to become the source of a gossip for months to come.”
“People have been wondering about Daisy’s father for sixteen years, and the only reason I never set anyone straight was that I was afraid her da—your da—would come back and make trouble. But if he’s dead, and good riddance to the bastard, then it’s no skin off my back.” The door swung open, bringing in a gust of fresh air along with Daisy, who flung herself into the chair between her mother and Martin. “Daisy,” her mother said, “you’ll look after Mr.—Sir Martin—while he’s poorly, won’t you? Three shillings a week, more if you need to spend the night.”
“Right,” she said, casting a keen glance at the signet ring Martin wore and then raising her eyebrows at him with the clear message of It took you long enough.
“You can start by telling one of the lads in the stables that Sir Martin needs the pony cart to bring him to the cottage.”
“I—” Martin had been ready to protest that he could walk the mile to the cottage, but remembered that he was being cautious as well as honest. “Thank you, Daisy.”
When, finally, he arrived at the cottage, he felt like he had been gone longer than two weeks. He was surprised to see that the piglets were still small, the house unchanged. Even indoors smelled the same, like candle wax and timber. While Daisy put fresh sheets on the bed and lit a fire, he unpacked his trunk, laying his clothes on the back of a chair and stacking his books on the chimneypiece beside the volumes Will had left behind.
He hoped Will would visit sooner rather than later. He knew he was being selfish: Will had every reason to stay in London. Surely he would at least send a letter once he received Martin’s note, and that would be enough. Martin winced when he thought of that note. There wasn’t a single word in it that he’d take back, but he feared that he could have been more coherent in his phrasing. And now that he had had time to think about it, it seemed grossly presumptuous of him to insist on giving this cottage to Will and then resume living in it himself. But he had wanted to make sure that Will knew he had a place to live even if Martin died. He probably ought to have said that clearly in the letter. God knew he wasn’t any stranger to thinking about his eventual demise, but over the past few months he had stopped thinking about his death as something imminent, as something he could casually allude to in a hastily written note. The threat was still there, but it seemed both more remote, in that he wasn’t going to die this time, and more grave, in that he and the people he’d leave behind would have more to lose. It wasn’t the sort of thing that could be addressed in a handful of words.
“There you go,” Daisy said, wiping her hands on her skirt. “I’ll be back tonight with supper.” Then, to his surprise and mild consternation, she got to her toes and kissed his cheek.
“Anyone else would sack you for impertinence,” he said, his eyes stupidly hot, because it had finally sunk in that this girl was his sister. “You’re assuming a lot of my nepotism.”
“La, three shillings a week, what’ll I ever do without it.”
He rolled his eyes heavenward. “This child is my closest living relation. I am to be pitied.”
She cackled, kissed him again, and swept out of the cottage. He was beginning to believe that a sharp tongue and terrible manners were a hereditary condition. He changed into a dressing gown and slipped between the sheets, then read until he drifted into a sleep that was only slightly troubled by the fitful dreams of illness.
“I promise we’d have noticed a grown man lurking around the premises,” Ben said when Will arrived at Lindley Priory, Martin’s family home which was now being run as some kind of charity school for wayward youth. “What exactly did his letter say?” Ben held open the door to a room Will dimly recognized as Lindley Priory’s morning room, and which Ben evidently used as an office. Every surface was covered in papers, composition books, and toys in need of mending. It looked like a rag shop crossed with a lending library; Sir Humphrey had to be rolling in his grave.
“Just that he was coming home. I didn’t think he’d actually be at the Priory. But I thought he might be staying at the dower house or the inn, but no luck.” The dower house had been closed up, and the innkeepers knew Martin well enough to assure Will that they hadn’t seen him.
A few children ran careening past the door. Ben stepped into the corridor. “Carrington, Delacourt, and—oh, for heaven’s sake—Jamie, go outside if you mean to act feral.” Then he turned back to Will. “He hasn’t been back in almost a year. I don’t think this place holds many happy memories for him.”
Will almost laughed at the understatement. “He’s been ill, and he needed to go to the country.”
Ben frowned at him. “Walk around for a bit and see if anything occurs to you. I’ll see that a place is set for you at supper.”
Will climbed the steps to the minstrel gallery that surrounded the great hall. Lindley Priory had always been a dark and stuffy
place, too far from good roads to be a convenient place for Sir Humphrey to entertain guests and therefore hardly worth the upkeep. Centuries of footsteps had worn depressions on the flagstones of the steps and hall, and everything had the blurry-around-the-edges look of an item that had been handled too much. But on the walls hung portraits of people who looked like Martin. Below, in the great hall, was the hearth around which Martin’s ancestors had gathered. He had been raised to lay claim to this place and it would never sit right with Will that the man he loved had been done out of the life he should have had. Will would always, in some small way, grieve the future that Martin never had, even if Martin didn’t himself care.
Maybe it was the old familiarity of the setting, maybe it was the fatigue after so long on the road, but Will had the sudden memory of his younger self in this house. He had been fifteen or sixteen, home on leave for the first time, and almost overflowing with happiness. His future felt full of such joy, ripe fruit available for the taking, and all he had to do was reach out. Martin had been so proud of him. Will had long since made his peace with his current state, but maybe it was all right for Martin to regret the future Will didn’t have—the loss of that effortless happiness, the narrowing of his prospects. Maybe Martin could be bitterly angry about the harm that had been done to a person he loved, but still love the person Will had become. Will hoped so, because he was fairly certain he was going to die angry with Sir Humphrey for what he had done to his son.
Will wended his way through the maze-like passageways of Lindley Priory. As the home of a single child and his unloving parent, it had been cold and dreary. As a school for boisterous children who were unsuited to typical schools, it was oddly fitting. Nothing in this building of battered stone and ancient oak could be damaged by less than a mortar shell. He heard the sound of a class being dismissed overhead—chairs dragged across floorboards, footsteps just short of a run, barely suppressed laughs, and then a deluge of small bodies pouring out the front door. If anything could chase out the ghosts of Lindley Priory, it was a hundred happy children. If anything was a fair replacement for what Martin had lost, it was this.
He climbed another flight of stairs and made his way to a room on the southerly side of the house, just beneath the attics. The door was ajar, so he pushed it the rest of the way open. Three beds were lined up against the wall, a clothes press overflowed with grass-stained garments, a pair of muddy boots sat on the window sill, and a badly blotted copybook rested on the desk nearest the fire. Any trace of Martin’s solitary childhood had been wiped clean by the dirt and chaos of little boys.
Will descended a set of stairs that had always been reliably deserted, but which now contained several children building what looked alarmingly like a siege engine, but they had a teacher with them so he supposed it was all right. From there he slipped into the kitchen and out through the buttery then into the boot room. Every twist and turn of the house was the same, etched into his memory from dozens upon dozens of clandestine entrances and exits. When he finally stepped out into the warm summer air he knew it was for the last time. He’d never come back.
Maybe that was why he let his path continue along a familiar course, out through the gate and through the little wood, then up and across the hills, and finally to the house where he had spent most of the first fourteen years of his life. He hadn’t been here in—he stopped to count. Certainly not since leaving the navy. His last leave had been only days, not long enough to get this far north. He had been eighteen, just about to be assigned to the Fotheringay, still young enough to think his future held nothing but adventure. Martin had been gloomier than usual, not ill but drawn and tired; a few days ago Martin had said it was that summer he realized he was in love with Will, and Will wondered now whether he had known on some level, if maybe that was part of why Will hadn’t wanted to leave him. Of course he had to go, there was no question of anything else, but that leave had been the last moment he was young, the last time he had the luxury of only looking forward, never back.
During that awful visit at Bermondsey House, Will had meant it when he told Martin he didn’t let his mind grapple with what might have been. If he let himself imagine a world in which he had somehow stayed home, he didn’t know how he’d claw his way back to the present. But now, when he thought of his eighteen-year-old self standing in that same spot, the boy he had been seemed infinitely fragile, so easily broken, so hard to put back together. He had done it, though, and if he had gotten through the past few years then he could get through anything.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and took a hard look at the house that stood before him. Fellside Grange was smaller than he remembered, a ramshackle pile of slate-roofed chaos, and it was hard to believe it had once housed five children, various parents, and other adults. He’d go in and see his father; he had long since made peace with what it meant to have as careless a parent as Alton Sedgwick, and while he’d never feel warmly toward his father, any bitterness was merely residual, the faint aftertaste of something long gone.
But he knew when he looked at the house that it wasn’t his home, and hadn’t been for long years. The contours of this house were as much a part of him as the lakes and the hills around him, but any possibility of them being his home was lost to him. This place could join the ranks of things that were lost at sea and in bottles of laudanum and in the clean sweep of time. He had other things instead, things he mightn’t have had if he had somehow stayed that boy of eighteen. No, not instead—it wasn’t like there had been a fair trade, a bargain. There were things this Will Sedgwick had, and which were as carved into him as this northern geography and that sloppy gray house: a way of earning a living, a life, a love, a home.
And with that he let himself acknowledge the fact that had been just out of sight all day. This wasn’t Martin’s home either. Of course he hadn’t gone to Cumberland, and Will had been badly mistaken to have ever thought so.
He passed a hand across his face and groaned. If he wrote Martin at once, the letter might reach Martin before Will himself did. Three days, maybe four, and he could be at the gamekeeper’s cottage beside Martin, home, where he belonged, a future stretching out as bright and sharp as anything his younger self could have dreamed of.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Three days passed without a letter, and if Martin had been slightly less confident of Will’s regard—if he had been anything less than dead certain that he possessed the entirety of Will Sedgwick’s heart, the idiot—then he might have taken it personally. As it was, he assumed a letter had gotten lost in the post or perhaps that Will had lost track of time what with the excitement surrounding the play.
But when another two days passed without any word from Will, Martin started to worry. He knew that Will loved him, but maybe it was the kind of love that faded with a bit of space. Not the friendship, of course, but the rest of it, the posies and the kissing. Martin had always feared that Will had only been indulging Martin, in the way that he would probably indulge any wish Martin had. That was fine, he told himself. It was better than fine, because this way Will wouldn’t have Martin dragging him down.
So he tried not to think about it. He failed miserably, but he didn’t go to pieces; he slept and he read and he ate everything Daisy brought him. He took care of himself. He tried to fill his days with things that brought him joy, and when he told himself that he deserved all of them, he almost believed it. He was living his own life, making his own choices, and not doing a terrible job of it. When Daisy told him he felt warm, he took willow bark; in the evening when his lungs insisted on behaving like a bellows with a hole in one end, he even took the paregoric. He read all three volumes of Frankenstein, this time without the delirium of fever, and spared a moment of fellow feeling for creatures reared by perverse villains. Then he wrote a letter to his aunt requesting new books. It gave him a strange pang of guilt, as if he were asking for charity or kindness that would be better directed to a more deserving recipient, but he sent the letter anyway;
she enjoyed spending money and Martin wasn’t going to get in the way of her good time. Besides, chances were she’d send him books she had already read, and then he could write her his own opinions, and that would give them something to write about in their correspondence, which apparently was something he was intent on keeping up.
In fact, when he heard the clop of hoofbeats on the dirt path he thought it might be his aunt come herself to verify that he still lived, and he wasn’t even terribly annoyed by it. He got out of bed, pleased to notice that he wasn’t shaky or dizzy or anything other than a bit tired. But when he opened the door, it wasn’t Aunt Bermondsey but Hartley Sedgwick.
The blood drained from Martin’s face as he held on to the door frame for support. “Is he all right—he didn’t write but I thought he was busy—”
“What? No, he’s fine, as far as I know. He’ll be here in a day or two to let you know himself. Your letter said you went home so the idiot ran off to Cumberland. He sent this for you, as he didn’t know if you were well enough to pick up your own post at the inn.” Hartley held out a letter, which Martin took greedy hold of.
“Cumberland,” Martin repeated.
“Well, the next time you write dramatic missives, pay attention to your wording. He assumed—and so did I, until I thought about it—that if you were giving him the cottage, it meant you didn’t intend to live in it yourself.”
“I meant for him to have use of it if I die before him, but I didn’t want to give him a fit by saying so outright. Naturally, if we part ways before that point, he can have the cottage.”
“We both know Will, and I wouldn’t bet on that happening,” Hartley said. He looked at Martin, taking in his slippers and dressing gown, and presumably also his pallor and uncombed hair. “Are you . . . you’re clearly not well, so I won’t be tedious by asking if you are, but are you in need of anything?” He gazed over Martin’s shoulder into the cottage behind him.
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