Catherine Coulter the Sherbrooke Series Novels 6-10 (9781101562123)

by Coulter, Catherine

  Instant and utter silence fell over the breakfast table. Everyone stared at him, including the Wyndham cook, Joshua, who was handing Jessie a fresh piece of toast. As for Lucy, their serving maid, she was so distracted by the awesomely beautiful young master Jason’s words that she was in danger of pouring coffee into Mr. Wyndham’s lap. James grabbed her hand just in time.

  “Home?” said Alice. “But you are home, Uncle Jathon.”

  He smiled at the little faerie, the very image of her mother, who’d been born after he’d arrived here in Baltimore. “No, sweetheart, this isn’t my home, although I’ve been here longer than you have. England is my home, where I was born, at a beautiful house called Northcliffe Hall. That’s where my family lives, where I spent twenty-five years of my life.”

  “But you’re ours, Uncle Jason,” nine-year-old Benjamin Wyndham said even as he passed a crisp slice of bacon to Old Corker, the family hound, who’d been born within a week of Benjamin. “You don’t belong to them over in that foreign country anymore. Who cares about Northcliffe Hall anyway? We could name our house—make it sound all sorts of grand—if you wished us to.”

  “We’re already named, bacon-brain,” Jon said to his brother. “We’re Wyndham Farm.”

  “You’ve got quite a few cousins in England,” James Wyndham said to his son, but his eyes were searching Jason’s face. Then he smiled. “You know, it’s time for us to pay a visit to England as well. The months and years slip by, don’t they? Time simply marches forward, and so very quickly. Nearly five years. That’s amazing, Jase. It seems like yesterday we met you at the dock in the Inner Harbor and Jessie couldn’t take her eyes off of you, said you were even more beautiful than Alec Carrick, surely the most beautiful man God had ever created. She said you had an identical twin, and that meant there was another one like you. I’ll tell you, I was grateful she didn’t swoon.”

  “You remember I said all that?” Jessie said, a dark red eyebrow cocked up.

  “Certainly. I remember every word you’ve ever uttered, my sweet.”

  Jessie made a gagging sound that reduced her four children to giggles.

  James felt both immense sadness and joy in that moment. Evidently Jason had finally come to grips with the past.

  “Uncle Jason is prettier than Aunt Glenda,” Constance said and grinned, showing a missing front tooth. “When she’s not staring at him, she’s looking in the mirror, trying to figure out how to make herself look more like him. I told her once to give up. She threw her hairbrush at me.”

  James cleared his throat. “You’ll make your uncle Jason blush, Connie, so let’s move along. Marcus and the duchess were here last year, and North and Caroline Nightingale the year before. Yes, it’s our turn to go to England and visit with everyone, your family included, Jase. I want to see if my wife swoons when she meets your twin, and you’ve told the children so many stories about Hollis, I know they’re expecting him to deliver stone tablets to them. Ah, and your father and mother, of course.”

  “But they talk funny there,” said Benjamin. “Like Uncle Jason. I don’t want to go to this place.”

  “Think of it as an adventure,” said his mother.

  “Yes, that’s it exactly, Ben,” said Jason. He was thinking it would be an adventure for him as well as he sat back in his chair and laced his fingers over his lean belly. “All my family will welcome you as you welcomed me.” He paused, looked at James and Jessie, shrugged. “I want to go home. I’ll be thirty years old next January.”

  “That’s still only twenty-nine so you’re not that old, Uncle Jason,” Benjamin said. “When you’re as old as Papa, then you can go back there.”

  “Your father is only thirty-nine, not all that great an age,” Jessie said, then paused and blinked. “I’m nearly thirty-one, more than a year older than you, Jason. Good heavens, how the time leaps away from one.”

  Jason said, “Do you know I have a pair of twin nephews nearly three years old now, and I’ve never seen them?”

  “Yes,” Jessie said. “They look like their father, which means they look like you too.”

  Jason nodded. “My brother wrote that meant yet another generation looked like my aunt Melissande.” James had written so amusingly about how it drove their father mad, that Jason easily pictured his twin’s smile and his father’s face as well. So many letters over the years, and he’d only begun really answering three years before. For the first two years he’d been here, he’d written acknowledgments, nothing important, nothing that really meant anything, if indeed anything did mean anything back then. But things had slowly begun to change. He’d begun to see behind the words in the letters that arrived weekly from his family, begun to feel again what they meant to him, and his letters had grown longer and, perhaps, richer, because he himself was now in them.

  “Yes,” Jessie said. “We know. I feel we know all of your family very well indeed. It will be like seeing dear friends.”

  Jason hadn’t realized that he’d spoken about his family all that much.

  Alice said, “But none of your family have ever come here, Uncle Jathon. Why haven’t they come? Don’t they like you? Did they thend you away?”

  “No, Alice, they all wanted to come to visit me. The truth is, I asked them not to come. And no, no one sent me away.” He paused a moment. “The truth is, I sent myself away.”

  “But why?” Jonathan asked, sitting forward, hands on the table since he had no more bacon to slip to Old Corker.

  Jason said slowly, “Some very bad things happened five years ago, Jon, and I was responsible for them. Only me.”

  “You killed a man in a duel, Uncle Jason?” Ben asked, eyes shining, nearly ready to leap out of his chair.

  “Sorry, Ben, no. What I did was worse. I brought evil to my family, and that evil nearly destroyed them.”

  “You brought the Devil home, Uncle Jathon?”

  “That’s close enough, Alice. Fact was, I couldn’t stay, couldn’t bring myself to find anything good in my life there. I couldn’t face all the people I’d endangered, and so I asked your parents if I could come here and learn all about running a stud farm.”

  Jessie knew the children didn’t understand—not that she understood all that much herself—and, knowing they had a dozen questions to fire at him, she said quickly, “You’ve helped us more than we’ve taught you. And even though James and I have tried our best to fill up this blasted house”—she paused a moment, waving her hand to encompass her four children—“there was more than enough room for you.”

  “Oh no,” Jason said. You’ve taught me endlessly.”

  “Don’t be a dolt,” James said, then raised his hand when he saw that all four children wanted to speak at once. “No, no, children, be quiet. No more arguments to try to make your uncle Jason feel guilty about leaving you. He’s obviously made up his mind, and we will all respect his decision. You will not ask him any more questions. No, Jon, I see that busy brain of yours working hard. Let me repeat, you won’t ask questions and you won’t make him feel guilty about leaving.” He paused a moment, smiled toward Jason. “Besides, we’ll visit him in England. And you want to know something else? He’ll come back for visits. He won’t be able to help himself—he has to try again to beat your mother in a race.”

  “But why didn’t you want your family to come thee you, Uncle Jathon?” Alice asked. She was sitting on a pile of six books so she could reach the table, the top one being a huge volume that held an article by Jason’s brother, James, Lord Hammersmith, on a huge orange ball of gasses that had glowed brightly in Venus’s acrid northern hemisphere three nights running the previous April.

  Alice’s father opened his mouth to scold her, but Jason said quickly, “No, it’s all right, James. That’s a good question, Alice, and I want to answer it. I want all of you to understand that my family didn’t want me to leave. They didn’t blame me for what happened. They should have, but they didn’t.”

  “What did happen?” Jonathan asked and James Wyndh
am rolled his eyes.

  “Just know that it was bad, Jon, that my father, Hollis, and my twin could have been killed, and that it was all my fault. Now, they all wanted to come, but you see . . .” He paused a moment, trying to find the right words. “The thing was, I wasn’t ready to see them. To look at them was to see my own blindness, I suppose.” Badly said, but close enough.

  James said, “No more, children. No more.”

  Jessie rose from her chair and clapped her hands. “That’s right, you will now hold your tongues, as impossible as I know that is. Uncle Jason has made up his mind. Leave him alone about this. All of you know what you’re supposed to do after breakfast, so go do it and no complaints, if you please. James, Jason, if you two gentlemen will come with me into the parlor.”

  Jessie Wyndham faced her husband and the young man she’d come to love like a brother. “Now, Jason, it will be all right. I doubt the children will leave you alone, but feel free to tell them to shut their traps. That’s up to you. Now, it’s April the fourth. It will take you two weeks to get home. We will come to England to visit you in August. What do you think of that, James? Can we get away then?”

  James nodded. “August it is. Funny how both your twin and I share the same name.”

  Jason nodded. “It made me feel quite odd for a good six months saying my brother’s name to another man’s face.” He searched both their faces now, faces that had become so dear to him over the years. “I don’t know if I’ve really told you how very much you mean to me, you and the children. I am of no blood relation to you, but you didn’t hesitate to make me part of your family, to teach me. And you, Jessie, to beat the dirt off my heels in racing, laughing merrily all the while, no concern at all to the continued bruising of my fragile male self.”

  “That’s because James has the biggest fragile male self in all of Baltimore, and yours is paltry in comparison.”

  James said, “We won’t talk about huge female selves. Now, Jason, you became part of the family very quickly, but the rest of that is nonsense. Everything we had to teach you, you learned in the first year. You are magic with horses, they respond to you on an almost human level. It’s as if they know you’re there for them, that you will do whatever they need.” James shrugged. “It’s difficult to put into words, but I know any horse racing or breeding you do in England will be a success.”

  Jason stared at him, nonplussed.

  “That’s right, Jason,” Jessie said. “Now, when you go back, where do you plan to settle?”

  “Near Eastbourne, near my father’s home, Northcliffe Hall. Since my father forced my grandmother to move into the Dower House five years ago, James and Corrie and their twins stayed on at Northcliffe.” He paused a moment, gave James a crooked smile. “So that you will understand why my grandmother’s absence from the great house made such a difference, let me say that knowing your mother, James, has made me feel like I never left my grandmother. Undoubtedly my grandmother’s removal was an unadulterated blessing. She was very unpleasant to my mother and to Corrie.”

  “Oh dear,” Jessie said with some awe. “Your grandmother is like my mother-in-law?”

  “Yes, but she never tried to be subtle like Wilhelmina. She was always a hammer, went after her victims with a good deal of enthusiasm.”

  Jessie said matter-of-factly, “We are very grateful we only have to see her once a week. She’s always hated me, as if you didn’t guess that immediately, Jason. She says these horrible things, all thinly disguised to sound innocuous. Sometimes I just wish she’d shoot it all out, like your grandmother evidently does.”

  James laughed. “Actually, you’d have to be a blockhead not to understand that you’re being insulted down to your toes.”

  Jason said, “Like Wilhelmina, my grandmother hates every woman in the family. The only female she isn’t rude to is my aunt Melissande.” He paused a moment. “I desperately want to see my parents again. I want to see my brother and Corrie, and my nephews. And the funny thing is that it just came upon me early this morning—”

  Jessie’s right eyebrow went straight up. “Before or after you left Lucinda’s house?”

  “Before, actually,” Jason said, his voice and expression suddenly smooth and austere. “She was rather surprised when I bounded out of bed like Satan was on my heels.”

  “We will miss you, Jason,” Jessie said as she took her husband’s hand. “But we’ll all be together again in August. Not long at all.”

  She smiled up at her husband, blinked back tears, then walked into Jason’s arms. “I always wished I had a brother and God finally gave me one.”

  “He gave me a brother too,” James Wyndham said. “One with honor, immense goodwill, and a brain. Whatever happened all those years ago, Jase, it’s time to let it go.”

  Jason didn’t say a word.

  James quickly added, realizing that Jason wasn’t yet ready to let anything go, “I just wish you weren’t so bloody handsome.”

  Jessie leaned back in Jason’s arms, laughing. “It’s true, all the females between the ages of fifteen and one hundred follow you, Jason. Don’t even try to deny it. You would not believe how many ladies have cornered me, every word out of their mouths about you. Oh yes, they all want to be my best friends and visit me.” She turned to her husband. “As I said at breakfast, Jason is first, then Alec Carrick. Hmm, I wonder what Alec thinks about that.”

  Jason said on a sigh, “I wish you would believe me that Alec, like me, thinks it’s a bloody nuisance. Who cares about a face anyway?”

  That was so stupid, Jessie didn’t say anything.

  Jason paused, then hugged Jessie again. “The thing is, I always wanted a sister. And do you know what? You have hair just as red as my mother’s, and though your eyes are green and hers are blue, there is a great resemblance between you. She’s the most beautiful woman I know.” Jason touched his hand to her fiery red hair, a thick braided rope falling halfway down her back. “If, that is, beautiful faces make any difference at all.” He paused a moment, and his eyes darkened. “Thank you. Thank you both so very much for bringing me back to life.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Northcliffe Hall

  Near Eastbourne, Southern England

  Jason guided Dodger toward the Dower House at the end of the lane. It was a good three hundred feet from Northcliffe Hall, far enough away, Corrie had written, so that his grandmother couldn’t flounce in, wreak havoc, and flounce out, grinning with her few remaining teeth. His grandmother was an amazing eighty years old, even older than Hollis. He wanted to see her, hug her, and thank the Lord she was still here to be nasty. Perhaps great quantities of vinegar kept a person healthy.

  His father had written just prior to Jason’s departure from Baltimore that Hollis still had a surfeit of both hair and teeth. Jason was simply grateful that Hollis, like his grandmother, was still alive.

  Jason tethered Dodger, who was so happy to be home that he couldn’t stop tossing his head and sniffing the air. Jason hugged his neck, and the horse whinnied. He’d withstood the two-week voyage well. “You, old man, have more heart and fortitude than any other horse in the world.” He looked at the ivy-covered Queen Anne–style house and the beautiful garden surrounding it, which he knew was probably tended by his mother. The windows sparkled in the mid-afternoon sunlight, and there was an air of contentment about the place. He wondered if his grandmother had ever breathed a word of thanks. He doubted it.

  He smiled when he hit the brass knocker against the thick oak door.

  He couldn’t believe it when Hollis opened the front door. The old man stared at him, clutched his chest, and whispered, “Oh dear, is it really you, Master Jason? After all these years, is it really you? Oh my dear boy, oh my precious boy, you’re finally home.” Hollis threw himself into Jason’s arms.

  Hollis was so much smaller, Jason realized with shock, holding the old man as gently as he could. He’d known Hollis his entire life; indeed, his father had known him nearly all his life as well. Ho
llis had strength in those old thin arms of his, thank God.

  He breathed in the old man’s scent, the same scent as it had been all twenty-nine of his years on this earth, a mixture of lemons and honey wax, and said, “Ah, Hollis, I have missed you. I received your weekly letters, just like from my brother and from my mother and father. Corrie too. I’m sorry it took me so very long to begin to really answer them, but—”

  The old man cupped Jason’s face in his hands. “It’s all right. You will not feel guilty about it, you will not apologize. You’ve been answering my letters for three years now. That was enough.”

  Jason felt guilt rip at his throat, but he saw such love and understanding in Hollis’s wise old eyes that he nodded instead of throwing himself at Hollis’s feet. “Do you know Corrie has been penning letters from my nephews?” He drew in a big breath, then hugged the old man again. “I’m home, Hollis, I’m home now, for good.”

  “Hollis! What is this? Who is here? I allow you to bring me nutty buns when you take your afternoon constitutional, but look what you’ve done—you’ve let someone follow you. You’re handing over my nutty buns to some riffraff, aren’t you, Hollis? What absolute gall.”

  Jason recognized that sour old voice. “Some things never change.” He grinned as Hollis stepped back, rolled eyes that held both infinite acceptance and a great deal of amusement, and called out, “Madam, your grandson is here, not to steal your nutty buns, he assures me, but to visit you.”

  “James is here? Why on earth is James here? That wife of his tries to keep him away, I know she does. She’s a disgrace, that silly girl, like her mother-in-law, that hussy who’s married to my Douglas and refuses to look old like she’s supposed to.”

  Jason looked up to see his grandmother walking slowly and carefully toward the front door, using a highly polished cane with a lovely hummingbird knob. He could see her pink scalp through her snow-white hair, all done up in tightly crimped little curls.