October 10th, 1808
Whiteoaks, Wiltshire
Tom hadn’t visited Whiteoaks in more than two years. It hadn’t changed: a glittering, sharp-edged marble palace surrounded by perfectly sculpted parkland.
The curricle’s arrival brought Kemps hurrying down the long sweep of marble stairs.
Lucas’s oldest brother Robert—who’d inherited the palace a decade ago—wrung his hand enthusiastically and Robert’s wife, Almeria, embraced him and kissed him on each cheek, and their children pressed forward, half-shy, half-eager, calling him Uncle Tom.
It felt almost like coming home. He’d spent months of his life at Whiteoaks—practically every holiday while he was at school and university, almost every furlough since joining the army. He climbed the familiar stairs and entered the familiar bedchamber, the bedchamber he’d always had, across from Lucas’s, with a view over the park. When he stepped into the room he had the oddest sensation that the clock had turned back and he was eight years old again, accompanying Lucas home from Eton for the first time.
Tom stripped off his gloves and turned on his heel, and drank in the quiet grandeur of the room—the silk-covered walls, the four-poster bed with its blue and silver hangings, the Aubusson carpet, the moonlit landscape by Joseph Wright above the fireplace—and then he mentally placed it alongside the memory of his room at Riddleston Hall, small and dark and shabby, and gave a soft laugh. And Lucas wondered why I never invited him home.
But it hadn’t been just the shabbiness; it had been his father, too—the flaring rages, the drunkenness.
Tom grimaced, and turned to the footman who’d been detailed to wait on him. “I’d like a bath, please, Joseph.”
After the bath, Tom visited his favorite room at Whiteoaks: the gallery. He had to traverse almost a quarter of a mile of corridors to get there, but every staircase and every corner held memories. Here was the alcove where he and Lucas had hidden to ambush Julia and her cousin, Tish; and there the window seat from where Tish and Julia had ambushed them in return; this was the staircase whose banister they’d all slid down, shrieking; and that the door they’d tried to balance a bucket of water on top of—and failed; and over there was the window from which all four of them had watched Robert propose to Almeria in the garden. That last memory was the oldest of the lot, nineteen years ago now.
By the time he reached the long gallery, Tom’s mood was verging on melancholy. So many memories—and all of them with Julia in them. He almost expected to hear her voice echoing gaily in the corridors, almost expected to hear her rapid footsteps, her irrepressible laugh. A door opened ahead and a woman emerged, and for a brief, disorienting moment he saw her as Julia—and then he blinked and realized it was a housemaid.
The housemaid gave him a startled look and a curtsy.
Tom dipped his head in return, and stepped into the gallery, and paused. Paintings. Hundreds of paintings.
He exhaled slowly, and began an unhurried circuit, the landscapes first, and then, when he couldn’t avoid it any longer, the portraits.
The Kemps had a strong family likeness: large-boned, fair-haired, handsome. Here was the nabob who’d amassed such an extraordinary fortune in India, here was the son who’d married into the gentry and produced eight children, and here were the eight children, from Robert down to Lucas and Julia.
Julia looked like a changeling, a dark-haired little pixie in a family of blond giants.
Tom halted in front of the painting of Lucas and Julia. As portraits went, it was a fairly good one. Julia was prettier than she’d been in reality, but portraitists tended to do that: make eyes more lustrous, hair glossier, teeth pearlier. A subtle flattery that injured no one.
There’d been no need to enhance Lucas’s appearance; he already looked like a Greek god made flesh.
Other than Julia’s prettiness there were no flaws to the portrait—except that it was flat. There was no sense at all of who Lucas and Julia were. The artist had failed to capture Lucas’s quiet reserve and Julia’s vivacity. They might as well have been wax effigies, not people.
Tom stepped closer and examined the two faces. Lucas and Julia hadn’t looked like siblings, let alone twins—except when they smiled, and then the similarity leapt to one’s eye. But if the artist had seen that fleeting likeness, he’d been unable to render it on the canvas. All the portrait showed was how unalike Lucas and Julia had been. Lucas tall, Julia short. Lucas brawny, Julia slight. Lucas golden-haired and blue-eyed, Julia dark.
Their differences had gone deeper than mere appearance; they’d been opposites, two halves of a whole—Julia, exuberant and full of mischief, her tongue running on wheels, enjoying being the center of attention, delighting in making people laugh; Lucas quiet and steady and watchful. Julia messy, shedding hair-pins and tearing flounces; Lucas immaculate. Julia always plunging into trouble; Lucas rescuing her. It was Julia who’d fallen into the lake; Lucas who’d pulled her out. Julia who’d climbed a tree Lucas had deemed unsafe; Lucas who carried her home when she’d tumbled from it. It wasn’t that Lucas lacked courage—he’d climbed a much higher tree—but he considered his risks before he took them, whereas Julia, spontaneous and reckless, had never considered risks at all.
And she had died because of that recklessness—putting an unfamiliar horse at a fence it couldn’t jump, something Lucas would never do. Lucas had never overfaced a horse in his life; he had too much good sense, too much innate caution.
Tom stared soberly at the portrait. Twins, and yet so different. Gravity and Levity, someone had dubbed them once, but as sobriquets went, it had missed its mark. Lucas liked to laugh, he just did it more quietly than Julia. He’d done everything more quietly than Julia.
Tom studied the painting. This isn’t how I would have painted them. In his portrait Julia would have been at the center, talking animatedly, not pretty, but lively, her hands outflung expressively, and Lucas would have been off to one side, leaning against the wall, smiling as he watched, his pride in her clear to read on his face.
Two halves of a whole—and now Julia was dead.