The brass fixtures on the coffin sparkled like children’s toys.
He went down on one knee. The kneeling cushion sighed, exhaling the scent of lavender. His hands fitted together by some old, dusty habit, fingers clasped as though to pray. But no prayer came to mind. He felt curiously removed from the scene.
It was ironic. All through his childhood he’d fought to throttle his emotions, to silence them lest they suffocate him—but only now, his illness long abated, did he finally master the skill. Even grief could not touch him. The thoughts passing through his head felt unattached. He listened impassively as a distant voice in his head spoke of rage.
This was a useless death.
Damn Richard’s idiocy.
You’re the one to blame.
Which was nonsense, of course.
He watched his fingers tighten, knuckles whitening against skin still brown from the Italian sun. Very well, melodrama would serve where prayer could not. Richard’s last amicable words to him, he could not recall. They had been drunk. But the next day’s anger—Richard’s accusations, and his cold replies, and the acrid scent of Gwen’s letter burning in the hearth—he remembered that quite clearly. He’d been sober, after all.
So there was no excuse for what he’d done next.
Knowing Richard to be a wide-eyed puppy, Alex had given him directions to a wolf pit. For days, Richard had been clamoring for adventure; when he’d offered to partner in the shipping firm, he’d not realized, perhaps, that business entailed actual work. What’s the point in making a profit if we can’t spend any of it? Restless, irritable, he’d been searching for the sort of easy, stupid antics favored by bachelor travelogues.
Then go, Alex had told him. That casino was not in any guidebook. It operated outside the law. But you go alone. If you think I mean to seduce your sister, you’ll prefer other company. And with that dismissal, he’d returned his attention to a litter of financial reports—as if such bloodless affairs had required more of his concern than the clawless idealist he sent off to play with wolves.
Richard had gone into that casino to prove a point. You have nothing to be proud of, he’d said as he’d left. For all your high-flying ideals, it’s simple cowardice that drives you. Anybody can make a pound, Ramsey. Anybody can play the rebel.
For that piece of naïveté, he’d received a knife in the ribs.
“You were a damned fool,” Alex whispered.
And also, no doubt, the best friend any man could hope for.
The only boy who’d bothered to speak to him during his first term at Rugby, that year before his body had remembered how to breathe and grow.
The only one who had encouraged him when he’d vowed to make something of himself. You’re a daft, dreaming idiot, his brother had sneered at him. How far do you imagine you’ll possibly go, without the family connections?
Bully for you, Richard had said. Let’s build an empire! Shall we?
Alex laid his hand on the coffin, cool wood polished to the smoothness of silk. So soon the worms would make a meal of it. But Richard was already gone.
“You were better than all of us,” he said quietly. He took a long breath and retrieved his hand. “Your sister will be safe.”
He had left her alone too long now.
The thought brought him to his feet. Gwen stood on the far side of the nave, her dark red hair a bloody corona in the crimson wash of light falling from a window overhead. Alex’s twin sisters flanked her elbows, but vultures were circling: mourners reached for her attention, eager to condole her, to impress their faces in her memory so it might work to their advantage later.
He picked his way through the crowd. Very few people he recognized, but as usual, most seemed to know him. Eyes followed his passage, whispers accumulating. The snatches of conversation that reached his ears made him sigh. His sins were numerous and novel, no doubt, but they were also heavily fictionalized.
Other remarks came to him, too: whispers about invitations to Ascot, the Eton-Harrow match at Lord’s. These were Gwen’s friends, all of them. Richard had never gone out of his way to collect lofty acquaintances, but only a month into her first season, his sister drew them with a crook of her finger.
The mourners’ grief was not wholly feigned, Alex supposed. Her brother’s death would remove Gwen from the marriage market for a year at least. Estates would continue to molder, lands to go to auction, as her fortune sat vexingly out of reach.
Halfway across the nave, Alex’s sister intercepted him. The sight of Belinda’s reddened eyes made something in him tighten. It caused that distant anger to intensify and draw nearer.
He took a deep breath. How irrational that his anger should focus on Bel. You’d prefer to be an outcast, Richard had told him once—admiringly, as Alex recalled. But Richard had missed the obvious point. No matter how far Alex traveled, his sisters’ love tethered him more firmly than chains. Their chiding letters followed him across the globe. They seemed to imagine that his presence would be a comfort to them—a boon, even—if only he would settle in England. Even now, after all of this, they probably still believed it.
This anger he felt made no sense to him. He never looked to his sisters for an example of good sense.
He took Belinda’s hand. It was too cold and limp for his liking. His grip tightened. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, then stepped closer. “Gwen was sick in the coach,” she whispered. “She needs to sit down.”
He glanced past her. Some stern-faced dowager was addressing Gwen, lightly touching her arm. In reply, Gwen’s lips turned up in a neat, mechanical smile.
Really, there was something perversely impressive in how doggedly she pursued her role. Puke in the coach, smile in public; she would swallow her vomit now even if it choked her. Condolers were flouting convention to approach her in church because it was the height of the season and their social schedules left no time for the burial or the reception thereafter. She would never acknowledge this, though. If she noted their unusual behavior, she would ascribe it to a kindness so large that it transcended convention.
He didn’t know how she managed to fool herself. She wasn’t stupid.
“Alex . . .” Belinda was giving him a searching look. “Are you certain you’re fine?”
Her meaningful tone puzzled him until he noticed her fingers brushing her throat. Ah. He gently loosed her hand. Thirteen years since he’d last gasped like a fish brought to beach, but that made no difference. His sisters doted by habit, fierce as nursemaids. “I’m well,” he said, deliberately gentle, because this concern grew wearing and his fatigue and addled emotions urged him to snap. “You’re right, though. Gwen needs to rest before the burial.”
Belinda sighed. “Your turn to try, then. When I asked her, she said the mourners might think it rude if she withdrew.”
Christ. “Your mistake was in asking,” he said and walked forward.
The dowager was stepping away. Motioning his other sister aside, Alex touched Gwen’s elbow. “Miss Maudsley,” he said, speaking formally for the sake of the onlookers, whose worthless opinions she so valued. “A word?”
She turned. “Mr. Ramsey.” Her smile for him looked as blank as any other, her large brown eyes not quite focusing on his. “How are you faring?”
“As best as can be expected.”
Some quiver crossed her mouth, breaking apart her smile. “How hard this must be for you,” she said unsteadily. “Of all people here, I know you share my grief. Richard was so . . . blessed for your friendship.”
“And I for his. Step aside with me for a moment.” When she looked hesitant, he took her hand and placed it on his arm. “I have something from your brother,” he said. “I meant to give it to you later, but perhaps it will lend you strength.”
As he led her through the black-clad mourners, the twins falling into step behind them, he found himself growing acutely aware of her hand on his forearm. A light touch. It focused his senses like a match struck in darkness. That letter she’d sent had been innocuous, a polite courtesy to a family friend. But Richard had not bothered to read it. Finding it on the desk in Alex’s suite had been all the proof he’d required of suspicions that must have been brewing—so Alex realized now—for months. You encourage her interest, Richard had shouted. You will keep your eyes off her!
The force of his own amazement had made Alex less than tactful in reply. Sweet God. I have no interest in schoolgirls. And then: She’s a very nice girl who smiles at everyone and disagrees with nobody. That will make her a prize on the marriage mart, but for myself, I can think of no better recipe for boredom.
His denials had been factual. Alas, they had not been honest.
He glanced briefly at her profile, so serenely composed despite the dark circles beneath her eyes. Not a thought in her head but for dresses and weddings, Richard once had laughed. But during their rare encounters over the past few years—during Christmas holidays at his sisters’ houses, or autumn fortnights in Scotland—Alex had noticed other things in her. She read a great deal but never spoke of it. She saw far more than she acknowledged. Her sunny optimism was not oblivious but deliberate. She had trained herself into it with such soldierly discipline that even her own brother had been fooled.
Alex understood such discipline. He knew the rarity of it, and the cost. And on the rare occasions when he happened to touch her, he did wonder what else she might have been, if she had not been so determined to be typical. If she had not been Richard’s sister. If she had not been respectable.
He appreciated curiosities. He would have enjoyed stripping away the layers of her pretense, finding out what lay beneath her smile. Coaxing her brow into a frown and encouraging her, in the dark, to whisper all the wicked, vulgar thoughts that she tried so hard not to think. He would tell her to be easy with him: he had no use for pretty manners or useless virtues. There was something far more interesting in her, and such potential in her self-control. What was she trying to deny in herself? Show me, he would have murmured. Let’s see what we can make of it.
But she was determined to be typical. And he had no interest in a lasting connection. He’d spent his entire childhood tied, limited, trapped; he would not willingly submit to that again.
He’d spoken the truth to Richard: he had never encouraged her.
They stepped into a little room off the arcade. Gwen released his arm. He knew no ceremony for such moments. Perhaps there wasn’t one. Wordless, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the ring.
Her eyes widened, filling with tears. “I . . .” Pressing her lips together, she took the ring from his hand. It slipped into the cradle of her palm, the simple gold band glittering in the cold white light from the window above. “I thought it was stolen,” she whispered.
“The Italian police recovered it.” Richard’s killer had met justice at the end of a noose yesterday morning; that news, Alex would consult with the twins before deciding how to share. “I received it only this morning.”
Her fingers closed into a fist. Such a small fist. Her head bowed. “Oh,” she said, and a tear slipped off her cheek to the floor.
The sight sank a knife through his chest, releasing some pure strain of grief, untainted by regret or doubt. It buffeted him so violently that he pressed a palm against the stone wall for balance. Idiot, he thought, the silent word flavored by astonishment, a touch of wonder. So, people really could be staggered: it was not simply a figure of speech.
By old habit, he took a testing breath. His lungs responded as they should.
Another tear fell to the ground. Why the hell didn’t his sisters embrace her? Bel and Caro were looking away, no doubt out of some misguided notion that Gwen’s grief needed privacy. Even Alex knew that this was the wrong approach.
He cleared his throat. “Forgive me, Gwen. The timing was ill judged.”
She shook her head fiercely. Her fist, the ring clutched within it, moved to her breast. “No,” she said hoarsely. “This is—the most precious thing, Alex. It was my father’s, before. And Richard wore it . . .”
“Always,” he finished, when it became clear she could not go on.
She nodded. Then, with a muffled sob, she turned into Caroline’s arms.
Good. He nodded to his sisters, then stepped back outside. Several mourners now craned to see into the anteroom. A smile twisted his lips. It must have looked . . . unpleasant, for most of the gawkers turned hastily away.
For all the attention he received, it was nothing compared to this avid curiosity for her. Amazing. With his shipping concerns, he had built something approaching a fortune, but he’d also made a reputation that discouraged men in search of easy pickings. Gwen, on the other hand, was a blank white page: pretty, fabulously rich, descended from nobodies. Now that her brother’s death left her without family, she must seem to this lot like a prize made for pirates, begging to be seized.
He propped his shoulder against the doorway to block the view to the interior. One of these people would have her, of course. Richard had seen to that. Promise you will look after her, he had gasped. See her . . . well settled. For my sake.
Alex remained uncertain if it had been punishment or pardon that Richard had granted by asking this promise. Either way, he understood what was meant by the request. The Maudsleys had never made a secret of their plans for Gwen. Her marriage would be their final triumph. Failing a prince, only a title would do. The Maudsleys had not leapt and clawed their way up in the world for less.
Well, he had taken the vow, and he would keep it. He had no designs on her.
But God save him if he had to help her find a husband.