Rosie and Luc stared, seeing a different person. She returned to the table and looked down at them, her face serious and intense, her eyes alight with distress. “I’m so sorry,” she said quietly.
“No,” said Lucas, his forehead creasing with angry pain. He sounded so bereft that Rosie’s heart broke. “I don’t want to be Lawrence’s son. I want to be Dad’s.”
“And you are, in every other way, but—”
“What happened?” Rosie asked in a small voice. “Did you have an affair?”
Jessica’s gaze fell. “I made an awful mistake,” she said.
“And that’s me, is it?” Lucas cried, rising to his feet. “An awful mistake?”
“No, no, that’s not what I meant.” Then Jessica was holding his hands and protesting how much she loved him and he was trying to pull away and all three of them in tears. Horrible.
“Rosie,” Jessica said grimly, “let Lucas and me have few minutes alone.”
Shock like that made the whole world spin. Sitting on a chair at her bedroom window, Rosie cried a little and wasn’t sure why. Lucas was still her brother, no one had died. Still, it felt like the death of something.
After an hour she heard the click of her door, and Jessica’s footfalls on the carpet. “Are you all right, love?”
“Is Lucas all right?” said Rosie, turning. “That’s the real question.”
Jessica perched on the side of the bed, facing her. “Not yet, but I hope he will be. We’re still the same people.”
“Are we? Thank goodness.” Rosie wanted to be angry, but she was too bewildered.
Jessica asked softly, “Your level of boiling fury, on a scale of one to ten?”
“About a nine,” said Rosie. “It’s all right, Mum, I’m not going to yell at you.”
“You’ve every reason.”
“Yes, but we don’t do things by yelling, do we? We’re civilized. But . . . I can’t believe it. Dad adores you.”
“And I adore him.”
“Then how could you?”
“Sometimes it’s not enough.” Jessica looked at her bare feet, rubbing one on the other. “When things seem too perfect, you can get restless. I had a moment of insanity long ago, which only made me realize how much I loved Bron after all.”
“And this moment—without details, please—what brought it on?”
Jessica met her gaze with steady eyes. “There’s nothing I can say to excuse myself. It was impulsive and selfish, that’s all.”
Rosie was grateful for the lack of information. “Does Dad know?”
“Yes. He’s always known.”
“And he forgave you?”
“Eventually.” Jessica smiled wanly. “He’s a good man. He has a heart the size of the Earth. He decided on the spot to treat Luc as his own, and he always has.”
“And there’s no chance Luc could be his?”
“None. He was away for some weeks on business at the crucial time, so . . .”
“So when were you planning to tell us?”
“I don’t know. It was easier to put it off. Why make an issue of it, and make Luc feel different? Bloody Lawrence! But it’s my fault. The last thing I wanted was for you to find out like this, but it was bound to happen. Mea culpa, I’m so sorry.”
“Boiling fury now down to a six,” Rosie murmured. “Sapphire, last night—she was hinting at how alike Jon and Lucas are. Very strange. When I tried to ask what she meant, she looked all serious and gave us a lecture about communicating with our parents.”
Jessica groaned. “Oh, great, so Sapphire knows.”
“I suppose everyone in Cloudcroft knows, except Luc and me.”
“No. Only Phyll and Comyn, and they’d never tell. Whether Lawrence has told his own sons—I’ve no idea.”
“Oh god.” Rosie realized that the shock wave would go on spreading outwards. More ammunition for Sam, more reason for Jon to disdain her? “Mum, remember the advice you gave me . . . about our power to control our fertility? So if it wasn’t an accident—why would you decide to have a child with Lawrence?”
The question hung in the air between them.
“I can’t answer that.” Jessica’s voice went hoarse. “Yes, I let it happen but to this day I’ve no idea why. An impulse. As if Lucas insisted on being born and I had no will to prevent it. And who’d want to be without him?”
“No one,” Rosie said emphatically.
Jessica tilted her head to one side. “Can you forgive me?”
“As long as Lucas can.” She moved next to her mother and hugged her. “It’s not the end of the world.”
They held each other for a long time. “You’re a wonderful girl, Rosie. You have Auberon’s kind heart, for sure. I must phone him, and there’s still Matthew . . . Come on, let’s face the day.”
Rosie stood up, calmer now but shaken. “Mum . . . your, er, moment with Lawrence . . . It’s not why Ginny left, is it?”
A long pause. Eventually Jessica answered on her way to the door, “Let’s just say it didn’t help.”
Later, Rosie found Lucas by the sound of a tennis ball slamming against the garage wall. He grinned at her, turned away and went on throwing the ball harder than ever.
“Stop it,” she said, pulling at his arm. She took him to an arbor with a moss-covered sundial and a stone bench, and sat him down beside her. “How was your chat with Mum?” He sighed and looked away. “Come on, we have to talk.”
“What for?” he said. “Mum thinks she can make it all better, but she can’t. I thought I knew who I was, and now . . . I feel sick.”
“It was unbelievably cruel of Lawrence to tell you like that. Why did he do it?”
Lucas shrugged. “First time he’d ever met me alone, and he’d had a few drinks. At least he was honest. It’s the deceit I can’t get my head round.” He sat with his hands braced on the edge of the bench, dark hair dangling forward. He did resemble Lawrence in a way, she thought, long-limbed and skinny like him. “I don’t want to think about how it happened.”
“Me neither,” she said, and they fell quiet, determinedly not thinking about it. “Only Mum knows, and she’s not saying.”
Lucas chewed at a thumbnail. “You want to know what I was doing with Jon last night? We were trying to get through the locked Gates to the Otherworld.”
Her jaw dropped, even as Jon’s name sent an electric pang through her. “What? How?”
“Not literally.” He gave an uneasy laugh. “Through a sort of . . . trance.”
“And did you?”
“No. I think he expected me to have incredible visions, being of the old blood and that.” Luc’s head drooped lower. “D’you think he knows we’re . . . ? God, I can’t say it. Brothers. Is that why he expected more of me? I wanted to please him. I don’t know why. There’s something about him . . .”
“Yes,” Rosie said helplessly. “I know.”
“But if no one’s told him . . . Will he be angry? Will he still want to be friends with me?”
Rosie grabbed his hand. “There’s no one who wouldn’t want to be friends with you, Luc. If he doesn’t, that’s his loss.”
He grinned, looking briefly like his old self. “Thanks. I bet you’ve forgiven Mum already, haven’t you?”
“Pretty much,” said Rosie. “Why?”
“Because that’s how you are. A bleeding angel.”
“Can you forgive her?”
“Don’t know. She and Dad let me spend my life thinking I’m one thing, then I find I’m something else entirely.” He looked as she’d never seen him before; desolate, lost, and suddenly older. “What the hell am I supposed to feel or do about any of it? What do I say to Dad tonight?”
“Dad will be fine,” she said firmly.
“He might, but will I?”
Jessica paced the familiar rooms of Oakholme, thinking of everything that she could have told Rosie, and hadn’t. In the bedroom, she opened the box that contained her albinite bracelet and draped the chain of sparkling gems a
cross her palm. Lawrence had given her the bracelet after Lucas was born.
Auberon knew she had it. He’d never demanded she give it back; in return, she never wore it. It wasn’t a gift given in affection—that wasn’t Lawrence’s style—but a sort of respectful goodbye. Typical of Lawrence; no words, just cold jewels—but an acknowledgment of Lucas, all the same.
Music had been Jess’s lifeblood, her home the stage, her life the passion of her songs. At home with two young children, she’d missed it. Sometimes she felt that she’d lost her real self. It wasn’t that Auberon took her for granted; rather, he loved her too much, protecting her like some rare egg wrapped in silk tissue. Her bird spirit had rebelled. She’d wanted someone not to protect her, but to admire her with raw lust.
It had been during an icy stretch of Lawrence and Virginia’s volatile marriage . . . An Elysian ritual to celebrate the luscious spring, with dancing and too much honeyed wine . . . Jessica had happened to dance with Lawrence, and the dance had left them both hotly aroused in a way they dared not admit.
Couples would often slip away into the forest, not always with their usual partners. Auberon, however, wasn’t wild like that; he liked to stay in the center of things. That night, Jessica had rebelled against his decorum. Instead of returning to his side she wandered into the woodland and there she met Lawrence again, alone by a tree as if he’d been waiting for her.
To claim she’d been bewitched sounded lame. She’d certainly been drunk. No words; just a look of reckless, mutual heat. And away into the woods, with the peaty earth, the fragrant bracken and springy grass, clouds sailing across the stars, tree branches trembling and owls haunting the night as they devoured each other.
It had been incredible.
The one thing she’d never spelled out to Auberon because he hadn’t asked—although he obviously knew—was that it had happened more than once. Gods, many times that summer. The coincidence of Auberon’s long business trip had made it all too easy. So exciting, to see Lawrence’s stone-cold exterior thaw for her. Delirious, she’d opened herself completely to him, opened every last gate within herself until conception was inevitable, as if to keep him inside her forever. She still felt a guilty throb of heat, remembering.
But it was only lust. Lawrence had no tenderness in him. In the end it burned itself out with its own arctic chill. Finally she understood what she truly wanted, and Auberon had waited patiently for her to come back.
She still questioned the flood of madness that had led her to conceive Luc—and led Lawrence to collude, because he had. Vanity? Look how beautiful we are, we should have a child? Or some shadowy manipulation by unseen Aetheric powers of which they weren’t even aware? No, that was evading responsibility. The fact was, Lucas was here and she wouldn’t change a thing.
Dignified to the last, Virginia had never said a word to Jessica, but the frigid hauteur of her eyes said it all. Another seven years had passed before she actually left Lawrence, but it must have added unbearable strain to their fragile relationship.
No, nothing Jess said to her children could possibly make it sound acceptable.
Strangely, it was Matthew, returning home that afternoon, who took it hardest. He blanched as his parents haltingly explained. They were all stiff, measured dignity, while he looked close to tears. Rosie, curled next to Lucas on the sitting room sofa, looked out at the summer evening and longed to escape.
“You know what? I sort of knew,” Matthew said tightly.
Lucas gasped, “What do you mean?”
“You look like Lawrence. Can no one else see it? And I always knew there was something going on, some secret buried. Being Aetherial, nothing’s ever straightforward, there always have to be layers underneath. Why can’t we be normal?”
“Whatever normal means,” Jessica replied, eyelids lowered and arms clasped across her waist. “I can’t justify what happened . . . things happen in the Otherworld that sometimes shouldn’t.”
“Good job the blasted Gates are shut, then!” Matthew turned on Auberon. “And what about you, Dad? Don’t you want to knock Lawrence’s teeth out?”
Auberon stayed deadly calm, but Rosie saw the color rising in his face. “It’s not the way we do things.”
“Who’s we? The noble Vaethyr? We behave no better than humans! Why didn’t you kill him?”
“We make free choices,” said Auberon. “We don’t own each other. Do you not realize that your mother and I made peace on this issue years ago?”
“I’m not talking about Mum! I’m talking about Lawrence Wilder springing it on poor Luc in the middle of the night! Are you going to let him get away with it?”
Rosie felt tension in the air like wire about to snap. Jessica took a step towards him, saying shakily, “Matt, I know you’re upset—”
“I’m upset? What about Luc? You’ve just told us something that’s destroyed everything I thought we were supposed to be! So much for the perfect family! Lawrence must be in stitches! Jesus!”
There was a split second of awful silence. The whole room trembled. Then, an explosion of glass. Auberon hadn’t moved, but a Tiffany lamp on a table four feet from him burst into fragments, showering the room in rainbow shards. The lightbulb exploded. The heavy stem of the lamp hit the carpet.
They all flinched. Matt gave a sharp cry of pain and sat down heavily beside Lucas, one hand flying to his face. Rosie saw blood spill between his fingers. A piece of glass had struck his lip. Wincing, he probed the wound and looked at the blood on his fingertips. Jessica was there at once, solicitous, but Auberon fixed him with a firm stare.
“And there you’ve exactly hit the point. Lawrence attacks my family because he’s jealous of us. He cannot hold his own household together so he seeks to disrupt mine. If ever I stormed up there to confront him, he would read it as victory. That’s why I don’t retaliate. Jess came back to me, and I have his son, and I will never let him see that he’s hurt us. That is my revenge.”
“Well, you’re a bigger man than me, Dad,” Matt said, muffled. “Me, I’d want to knock seven shades out of him.”
Lucas groaned. “Matt, shut up, will you? Don’t make it worse.”
Shaken, Rosie got up and began picking bits of glass out of the carpet. When she heard a quiet knock at the front door, she rushed into the hallway to open it. Matthew’s friend Alastair was on the doorstep, looking startled when she answered. “Oh, Matt didn’t tell us you were coming,” she said.
“He didn’t know,” said Alastair. “I only dropped in to see if he fancied a pint.” He glanced curiously at the glass fragments in her hand, inclined his head at the raised voices behind the half-open door. “Have I chosen a bad moment?”
Rosie let out a breath and gave a half-smile. It was a relief to see a different and friendly face. She didn’t know Alastair well but he always seemed cheerful, and he was antithesis of Jon; reddish-fair, his face broad, freckled and smiling, with hazel eyes and fair lashes. Not bad-looking, really, in a generic, sporty way. She liked his Aberdeen accent.
“We’re having a family crisis, that’s all,” she said, embarrassed. “We’re not normally like this.”
“I know.”
“I’m sure it’ll blow over, but . . .”
“Look, I’ll go. Tell him I came by.” He stood looking at her. “Rosie, you look upset.”
“It’s unbelievable,” she said, her throat suddenly aching, “how a handful of words can tear up your life, spin you round and drop you into a world entirely different from the one you thought you were living in. What are you supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” he said, bewildered. “Whoever’s upset you, hurt them back, only worse. Really hit them where it hurts. Me, I usually punch a wall so I only harm myself, but . . .” He trailed off with an uncertain half-grin. “Are you all right?”
“Not really,” she said. “D’you mind taking me to the pub instead?”
After two large vodka-tonics, she told Alastair what the quarrel was about and watched hi
s reaction. He was plainly surprised and went quiet, his eyes unfocused. Then he shook his head, took a drink of beer and said, “Your father’s amazing.”
“Forgiving Mum, you mean? Couldn’t you?”
“Oh, I suppose I could. It hurts, like being stabbed; I know that. An ex of mine, once, she . . .” His hesitation woke a pang of empathy in Rosie. “Anyway, she wasn’t worth forgiving. But someone like your mother, how could a man not forgive her?”
Rosie sighed with relief, feeling on safe ground again. “I wish Matt had taken it that well. He blames anything that goes wrong on us being . . . different.”
“I don’t get it. You’re a great family.”
“I know.” The admiration in his tone amused and warmed her. “And Matt knows it. He has our best interests at heart, but he can’t resist telling us all how to behave, even our parents, even though he’s out of line and knows it.” She paused while Alastair bought her another drink, then went on, “I’ll tell you what he’s like. Matthew is like a boy from an arty, eccentric bunch of bohemians, who’s embarrassed by them because he wants to be a city slicker in a suit.”
They laughed together at the image.
“Your parents seem normal to me,” said Alastair. “At least they’re together.”
“Yours not?”
He had that quiet look again; sorrow under the cheerful exterior. “Father’s dead now. Mother’s long gone with some bloke or other. It’s history. Matthew and your folks are more family to me than they ever were.”
“Oh, Alastair, that’s so sweet.”
“So, your parents used to be hippies, then?”
“Undoubtedly,” Rosie giggled, “but that’s not what I meant by ‘different.’ Suppose we were from another country, and even though we’ve been British for centuries, we still practice the old traditions. Matt finds it tedious and backward, that’s all.”
“Yes, so he says, but I’m not sure what he means.” Alastair leaned forward, looking intrigued. “So, what’s your mysterious background, then? Irish, Romanian, Viking? Are you Russian émigrés or something even more romantic?”
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