But that hadn’t been the cause, only the final sundering of a bond that had been attenuating a long time. Bertie, secure in his parentage, had seen school and sports as little more than rituals to which he must give a nod. To Stuart, everything that he was asked to undertake—new subjects at school, new sports, new hobbies that Sir Francis wanted to share with him—had been a test, a test he couldn’t afford to fail, lest he be shamefully ejected from his new life.
Bertie had never understood why Stuart would spend his holidays reading all the extant volumes of Controversiae in the original Latin, translating Candide into English when perfectly good English editions already existed, or running miles every day across the thirty thousand acres of moors that belonged to the estate—never, that was, until the idea occurred to him that Stuart was deliberately trying to win a greater portion of their father’s love, an idea bolstered by Sir Francis’s increasing pride in this younger, illegitimate brother.
It seemed implausible, in retrospect, that their bond should have been susceptible to such gross misunderstandings. Yet like a shining blade rusting to dust, it had happened gradually, sometimes imperceptibly, until it was too late.
To Stuart’s left a door opened. A narrow swath of light swung into the basement. He shifted in surprise and knocked over the candlestick he’d set down next to him.
The opening door—it was the door to the service stairs—reversed its motion.
“Madeleines,” he said, as the door was about to close. “They were Bertie’s favorite.”
For a long time no one responded. He’d spoken in French. He wondered now if he’d confounded a peckish maid braving the cold stairs for a bite of something to eat.
Then her voice came, careful and low. “Yes, they were.”
Giddiness flooded him, a reaction better suited to an adolescent given to a secret rendezvous than a respectable middle-aged man who would rather draft parliamentary bills than make love.
“Was he happy?”
“Bertie?” His question surprised her. “I think so.”
“Tell me why you think so.”
He moved to gain a direct line of sight to the service stair door. It was slightly ajar. The stairwell was dark except for a flickering orangish light, and the only thing visible of her was, as always, a bit of her black dress.
“The people of the parish thought well of him: The gentlemen liked him, and so did their widows.” Was that a note of slyness to her voice? “He busied himself with the composition of a local history and the expansion of the gardens. And he ate better than anyone else in Britain.”
He smiled. Dinners obviously mattered a great deal to both Bertie and his cook. “Good,” he said.
Bertie had never returned to London after he’d lost the town house to Stuart. It cheered Stuart that Bertie had settled into his life in the country, that he’d been surrounded by people and food he enjoyed in his last years.
“Were you—” she stopped.
“Yes?”
“Were you close once, the two of you?”
His heart swerved. “Did he tell you that?”
“No. He usually spoke of you as if you were a horseman of the Apocalypse. I thought he must have cared greatly for you at some point, to have become so embittered,” she said.
Stuart, in return, had never spoken of Bertie to anyone, had pretended that Bertie was something that could be excised entirely from his existence.
“Yes, we were close once.” The admission, after all these years, was as sweet as it was terrible.
“What happened?” she asked softly.
He didn’t want to talk about their estrangement, the slow choking of affection, the uneasy drifting apart, the sudden, sinking realization one day that coolness had turned into hostility, that he had no concrete understanding of how they’d arrived there, and therefore no notion at all how to return things to the way they’d once been.
“Do you know the first thing Bertie ever said to me?” he asked instead.
He’d said his good-byes to his mother in the midst of the bewildering elegance of the manor. Or rather, she had talked and he’d stood dumb and mute, stunned from her revelation that she would not remain at Fairleigh Park with him. The more she reassured him that he would be all right, the queasier he’d become, until his silence had drained her of her power of speech altogether. In the end, she’d only embraced him and walked away.
And when he’d turned around, there had been Bertie, gesturing from behind a door.
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘They say the French eat snails. I want to try. Will you help me find some?’”
The woman in the service stairwell chuckled. “Did you?”
“Not immediately.”
His father had come into the drawing room instead and given him a stern talk. Stuart was to be a gentleman now. He must forget everything he’d ever seen, heard, or learned on the streets—never mind that Stuart had never lived a day on the streets, and had only been taught what all English children ought to be taught at the charity school he’d attended.