A man did not see the things he and his friends had seen and rest easily. There had been thirty of them at the beginning; there remained only the twelve of them now. Ewan remembered each of the deaths. He’d been the muscle, the brute force that went in before the other men with more sophisticated skills. And so he’d been there when men were shot or stabbed or blown to pieces. Ewan had fully expected to share the same fate. There was nothing special about him. No reason he should be alive when so many of his friends were dead. It had been sheer luck and sheer waste.
While his dead friends were mourned by their parents and siblings, no one cared whether he lived or died. He was an imbecile, an embarrassment to the family. The Earl of Pembroke would rather not be reminded he had a dullard for a son. He had two perfectly normal sons, and if the third were to die on the Continent, he would not be missed.
As it was, Ewan came back from war and resigned his commission, which was inconvenient for everyone.
Ewan stood before one of the duke’s shelves, staring at the long line of book spines. His father had a library, but Ewan had never been left alone in it. He’d never once been offered a book from the Pembroke library to read. And he’d never asked.
Ewan could read a few of the titles. Not all of the letters insisted on jumping off the spines when he looked at them. The words were not supposed to do that. His brothers and cousins had thought he was trying to be funny when he had mentioned that words and letters sometimes jumped around when he tried to read them. Ewan had never mentioned it again, but the laughter still echoed in his memory.
Something was wrong with his mind. He’d realized it that day, and he hadn’t been much older than five or six. He’d known it already because he’d had trouble with nursery rhymes and learning the alphabet. But that was the day he’d known he was different from everyone else. The day he’d realized he was stupid.
Dumb.
A lackwit.
It wasn’t the last time he’d felt like an idiot. His tutor had seemed to take perverse pleasure in forcing Ewan to read aloud, an onerous chore for him and anyone listening. His cousin Francis, who was closest to him in age, had sniggered and taunted him every time Ewan said top instead of pot or loin instead of lion.
Eventually, Ewan did everything he could to avoid his lessons. He argued his head ached too much to go to the schoolroom, and it was not an exaggeration. His head did pound after he tried to make sense of words jumbled on a page. And yet, as he ran a hand along the spines of the books, he wished he could read them. So many men and women seemed to enjoy the act of reading. He’d watched his friends at the Draven Club reading the paper or a book and envied them the knowledge they had. Ewan knew no stories but those he’d been told, knew no news but what he heard from others.
And here in this room were thousands upon thousands of stories, not to mention books about other places and people. And Ewan would never know any of the information because every page looked like someone had shaken it up and moved the lines of text around.
But he’d found a place in the world, despite being a dimwit. As the boys grew older, Francis had stopped laughing when Ewan had confused letters or sounds. Ewan had made him stop laughing. Francis might be able to read anything put before him, but he didn’t have Ewan’s height, strength, or brawn. The last time Francis had teased Ewan, Ewan had waited for him after class, picked him up, and thrown him halfway across the lawn.
After that, Francis had resorted to meaner and sneakier methods of making Ewan’s life miserable. The abuse had gone beyond typical boyish pranks. Francis had managed to turn the boys’ tutor against Ewan, which had resulted in beatings and extra reading and writing assignments—none of which Ewan had any hope of completing. When his brothers and cousins had gone to Eton, Ewan had followed for a year and then been sent home in disgrace. His father told him openly he was an embarrassment to the family name and honor. From then on, he’d done his best to ignore Ewan.
Only Ewan’s mother, the Countess of Pembroke, had spent any time with him or seemed to love him. She’d encouraged his facility with numbers. He could do almost any calculation in his head. She’d also helped him purchase a commission in the army. As a third son, and not one well-equipped for the clergy, the army was the most logical place for him.
But his mother had never possessed a robust constitution, and she’d died before Ewan had been able to accept his commission. Without his mother in residence, Ewan had no reason ever to return to Pembroke Manor.
And now here he was in his father’s world again—in Francis’s world. During the war, Ewan had long hours of walking and waiting to think about his cousin’s behavior. Ewan had been a convenient outlet for Francis’s disappointment at his station in life. Not only had Francis not been born the son of the earl, his father was a notorious gambler who relied on his brother, Ewan’s father, to free him from financial scrapes.
Francis had taken out his frustrations at his unhappy and uncertain childhood on the easiest target—Ewan Mostyn. No one would have stood for taunting or teasing of the heir to the marquessate, and Ewan’s second oldest brother was both handsome and intelligent. But Ewan had been big and dumb and slow, and Francis had seemed to dislike him from the first time the two boys—just toddlers—had met.
That was all in the past now. Ewan wouldn’t have wasted his time seeking his cousin to exact revenge, but neither was he averse to placing obstacles in his cousin’s path to happiness. If Francis wanted Lady Lorraine, Ewan would happily thwart him. But that wasn’t the only reason he’d taken this position. Ewan knew Francis better than anyone else, and Francis didn’t love anyone but himself. He’d somehow managed to convince Lady Lorraine he loved her, but Ewan suspected what Francis really loved was the lady’s dowry. And the only thing Francis loved more than himself was blunt.
Ewan didn’t know Lady Lorraine very well yet. His impressions thus far were that she seemed to have a knack for finding trouble, and she was willful in the way daughters of dukes—and earls, for that matter—tended to be.
She had no love for opera, which meant she was not a complete loss. She was also quite pretty in a way that tended to distract him. Women did not usually distract him. Women usually annoyed him with all their games and chattering. But he hadn’t found himself annoyed when he’d lifted Lady Lorraine into his arms and carried her away from the brawling men.
He’d liked the feel of her in his arms. She was soft and fragrant and warm. He’d looked down at her pale face and wanted to kiss her until the color flooded her cheeks again.