Amusement twinkled in Gage’s eyes as he crossed the room toward the settee Keswick and his wife had vacated.
“I don’t know why you feel you have to be so damned . . .” Michael’s gaze darted to mine “. . . dashed mysterious all the time. Apologies,” he told me.
I waved it away. He wasn’t the first gentleman to curse in my presence, and I was certain he wouldn’t be the last.
His scowling visage returned to Gage. “What was all that about?”
Gage shrugged. “I wanted a vantage point where I could see everyone’s faces.”
Michael huffed. “This isn’t one of your investigations.”
Michael might not think so, but I wasn’t so sure. My eyes narrowed on Gage, remembering the way he had interrogated Michael about his certainty of William’s harmlessness.
A slight tensing of Gage’s shoulders let me know he was aware of my interest. “Well, old habits die hard,” he replied vaguely.
Michael’s expression said clearly that he thought that was cock-and-bull.
“Ye said tonight William had a small relapse?” Philip prompted, trying to steer the conversation back to more important matters.
He nodded. “For weeks he’s been making steady progress. Conversing with others. Taking interest in what’s going on around him. Behaving more and more like the brother I remember. But this evening, just after you arrived . . .” He sighed. “He . . . went away again.”
Philip’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What do ye mean he ‘went away’ again?”
“I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s as if one minute he’s there with me, and the next he’s not. His mind, it . . .” Michael lifted his hand in defeat “. . . goes somewhere else.”
“Was that why the servant at the top of the stairs called you away when we arrived?” I asked.
“That was Mac. He’s an old family retainer, and one of Will’s caretakers.”
I nodded, remembering Mac from a decade earlier when he’d acted as Will’s manservant at Swinton Lodge. Mac’s hair had thinned and grayed considerably in the years since I’d last seen him, but now that I knew it was him, I could see his resemblance in the stoop-shouldered servant who had stood at the top of the stairs.
Michael’s face dragged with worry. “I knew when he appeared that something was wrong.”
Gage tilted his head to the side in thought. “What does he do when his mind . . . goes away? Anything?”
“Well . . .” Michael looked at me “. . . he draws.”
“He draws?” Gage repeated in puzzlement.
“Yes.”
I don’t know why I was shocked to hear this, but I was. “He’s returning to what he feels most comfortable with.” Philip and Gage turned to stare at me and I endeavored to explain. “It’s what I do. When I feel troubled.” I shrugged one shoulder. “It’s what he did before.”
Michael’s gaze turned apprehensive. “I thought you said you had never seen any of his paintings.”
I licked my lips. “No. You asked if William had ever shown me any.” He narrowed his eyes at my splitting hairs. “And he didn’t. But . . . I did see some of them.”
His hands flexed on the arms of his chair, and I knew he was seeing the same images I was. The memories Will had brought back from Spain and Portugal and France.
“What paintings?” Gage demanded.
Michael shifted uncomfortably, making the legs of his chair creak beneath him. “I don’t quite know how to describe them.”
“I think they’re scenes from the war,” I replied when he hesitated to elaborate. I hoped that would be explanation enough, and we wouldn’t have to describe the war-ravaged countrysides on his canvases and in his sketches. The abject suffering. The horrors perpetuated by both friend and foe alike.
I was both relieved and alarmed to see understanding in Gage’s pain-shadowed eyes. The starkness of his features seemed too pronounced for a man with only abstract knowledge of what I spoke.
“Then they were disturbing?” he murmured.
I opened my mouth, to deny it, to try to explain it, I don’t know, but I couldn’t make such convoluted excuses. Not when the truth was so straightforward. “Yes.”
They had been disturbing. Particularly to my sheltered, untested fifteen-year-old self. I had known nothing of war, or the pain and devastation it caused. The only casualty of my acquaintance had been a younger son from a neighboring estate, a gentleman I barely knew. The newspapers did not report the worst for our sensitive ears, and as I was barely ten when the battle of Waterloo was fought, I paid little attention.