“Was Augustus Nicholas’s father?” Etta whispered into the night.
“Yes.” The whole bed shifted as Sophia turned over. The silence stretched out for a few beats, punctuated only by her sigh. “I don’t know much about this, truthfully—most of it is gossip. But Augustus was madly, madly in love with Rose. Your mother. Everyone knew it, just like they all knew that he wasn’t the same after she disappeared. He was…troubled.”
What had the letter said? But I also hope that this helps you put it all to rest, and eases your bedeviled mind.
“He spent years searching for her, even after Grandfather tried to force him to stop. Eventually he had to do his duty and provide an heir, so he married, and Julian came into the picture. But Augustus was…not pleasant. Never faithful. Never loving. An absolute beast. He took what he wanted from whomever he wanted. Do you understand?”
Etta understood.
Nicholas’s mother had been the family’s slave, and Augustus had assaulted her, abused her, and in the end had never freed her. Etta’s fury sprouted a new head, this one with knives for teeth. She thought, just then, that she could tear down the walls of the inn with only her bare hands.
“Julian wasn’t like that,” Sophia continued softly. “Not at all. He was kind.”
“Did you love him?” Etta asked. There was a careful reservation in Sophia’s voice when she spoke about him; either the grief was still too new and intense to touch, or there hadn’t been a great, smoldering kind of love between them.
“I was…content,” Sophia said. “He deserved to live, not the bastard. It’s Nicholas’s fault Julian died, you know, and he readily admits it—like that could somehow absolve him of some of the guilt. They never should have taken that path through the Himalayas, not in the rainy season. He was there to take care of Julian, to see to his needs, keep him from harm; to sacrifice his life, if need be. He should have forced them to turn around and take a different route.”
Etta turned over to face her, almost too afraid to ask. Nicholas had stopped traveling for a reason. He’d implied he was trapped in this era, and she had a feeling she was on the verge of finding out why. “What happened?”
“They were going to search the Taktsang Palphug Monastery for something Grandfather wanted—”
The astrolabe? Etta wondered. Nicholas hadn’t seemed surprised to hear of it.…
“The monastery is high in the mountains, built into a cliff with sheer walls. If you believe the rat’s story, there was a storm, and Julian slipped and fell. How could they have been standing so close to one another, and Nicholas not have been able to catch him?”
“Oh my God,” Etta whispered.
Sophia turned to face the wall, the column of her spine rigid. “One brother lived, one brother died. And if you ask me, he did it on purpose.”
Etta felt her jaw set as she hugged her arms over her stomach. “Why would he ever do that? Julian was his half brother—and more than that, Nicholas is honorable—”
“What good is honor when greed eats away at its foundations?” Sophia continued. “You’re right, though; it all comes down to the blood they shared between them. With Julian out of the picture, he had the next best claim. He is in Grandfather’s direct bloodline.”
“No,” Etta whispered, closing her eyes at the image. Not him. The thought ate away at her picture of him, dissolving it completely. He was her anchor here, the one reliable person who she could count on for the truth, for decency. She couldn’t let Sophia take that away from her, too; not until she’d heard Nicholas’s side of this. “No way.…”
“And you know what the truly sad thing is, Etta?” Sophia whispered. “If he’d asked, if he’d put his case forward, Grandfather would have considered it. I know he would have. Because being born a bastard in this family is still preferable to being born a girl.”
“Leave, Sophia,” Etta urged. “Run away if you have to—if there’s really nothing you can do to fix things in this family, get out the way my mom did, and start over!”
It was a long while before the answer drifted back to her.
“If I’m not an Ironwood, then I am no one,” Sophia said in a thin voice. “And I have nothing.”
“That’s not true,” Etta said, shocked by the defeat in the girl’s voice.
But only the passage answered back, in a rolling murmur, a growling whisper of lies—one that spoke of freedom, of discovery, of reclaiming what was lost, but delivered only a cage of lies and disappointment.