“What about the rest of us?” Lady Hollingsworth demanded. “Do we not deserve an apology? First you court my daughter under false pretenses. And then you invite us under the same roof as a madman!” She nearly shrieked the last. “I have never been so ill-treated in all my life.”
“I apologize for not informing you of his presence immediately, but surely you can understand the matter is delicate. No one knows where William has been.” Michael made a sweeping gesture to include all of us. “No one besides those of you who are here. And I want it to remain that way.” He glared at Lady Hollingsworth. “When my brother is ready to reenter society, we will develop a fiction about his whereabouts for the last ten years.”
The feathers in Lady Hollingsworth’s hair quivered in indignation. “Reenter society? Are you as daft as your brother? He’s a madman! No one will be safe if he’s let loose.”
“My brother is not a madman! And he’s certainly no danger to others. He just needs more time to . . . readjust before he enters the world again.”
“Surely if Lord Dalmay had him locked up, he deserved to be there,” Lord Damien said, trying to sound reasonable.
“Father didn’t know what he was doing,” Laura replied heatedly, bright color staining her cheeks. “Will didn’t do anything wrong.” Her gaze dropped to her lap, where she plucked at the embroidery on her goldenrod skirts. “It’s not a crime to be sad. Or to have nightmares.”
I wondered how much Laura remembered of her oldest brother. She had been twelve when he . . . disappeared. Had she been told the truth of William’s whereabouts? The thought horrified me. At that age Laura would never have been able to understand.
Lady Hollingsworth sniffed. “I saw a lunatic once. And he was raving. Flailing his arms and shouting, spittle flying from his lips. He fought the men who tried to take him away. Broke one of their noses.”
“Will wasn’t like that,” Michael declared, shaking his head. He flung his arm out toward me. “Ask Lady Darby. He acted as her drawing master during the months before his . . . detainment.”
I gazed morosely back at the others as they turned to stare at me. I found it odd that of all the statements just made, this one should be met with the most surprise. Even Gage seemed unsettled by it, straightening from his slouch.
“I had forgotten that,” Alana murmured beside me, concern pleating her brow.
Philip lifted one of his hands from my sister’s shoulder to forestall further comment. “Now, hold on. Before we start collecting everyone’s testimony, there are a few things I don’t understand.” Alarm tightened his voice. “How long have you known William was locked in an asylum?”
“Almost three years,” Michael admitted. “And as soon as our black-hearted father admitted what he had done, I worked every single day to obtain his release.” His jaw was rigid with anger.
“Why did your father finally tell you?”
His eyebrows arched contemptuously. “Because he’d recently been ill. And seven years had passed. He wanted us to petition the Court of Chancery to have William declared dead and assert my claim to the title.”
I pressed my hand to my mouth in shock.
“I insisted he tell me how he knew that William was dead, and when he finally told me the truth . . .” Michael shook his head. The muscles in his jaw jumped.
At this display of emotion, Caroline shifted in her seat on the settee across from him, but her mother draped her arm over her daughter’s lap, preventing her from going to her betrothed. Laura reached out to touch her brother’s sleeve, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, gathering his composure.
“I begged him to tell me the location of the asylum where William was being held, but he refused. He simply would not listen to reason. I pleaded with his secretary and estate manager, and our solicitors, but none of them would admit that they knew anything. Either they truly were ignorant or they were too afraid of my father to confess.”
“And so you refused to make the petition,” Philip said.
Michael nodded. “And threatened to tell everyone the truth if he tried to push it through without me.”
“I don’t understand,” Miss Remmington said. “Couldn’t your father have just had your brother declared insane? Wouldn’t that have disinherited him and made you his rightful heir?”
Philip shook his head. “A man cannot disinherit his heir. And entailments cannot be broken by cause of insanity, only a conviction of treason or murder. So the most Lord Dalmay could hope for by having his heir proved legally insane was that the guardianship of William and the Dalmay interests would be given to Michael. But even then Michael could not inherit the title or its entailed property outright until William died.”
“But dragging William into the courts in search of a verdict of insanity would only tarnish the Dalmays,” Lord Keswick pointed out. “And the last thing Lord Dalmay wanted was to taint his own illustrious name.”