Lucas ate his dinner without tasting it. The feeling that he was missing a limb, that part of him had been amputated, was back.
For the past sixteen months he’d carried that feeling with him—and for four days it had gone. Four days when his every thought and emotion had revolved around Tom: panic and shame, passion and guilt, and happiness. All wiped away, now that he was back at Whiteoaks.
He ate mechanically, smiled mechanically, spoke mechanically, aware of Robert watching him out of the corner of his eye and Almeria sending him worried glances.
Tom was worried, too. Lucas could see it on his face. There was no merriment in those green eyes tonight.
Lucas chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, and finally dinner was over. Almeria and the girls withdrew. The brandy and port were placed on the table.
“When’s everyone else arriving?” Tom asked.
Lucas listened with half an ear, sipping his brandy, wishing he could drink the whole bottle and then climb the stairs to his bed and pull the covers over his head and sleep forever. A name caught his attention. “Tish? When does she get here?”
“Next month,” Robert said.
Lucas nodded, and looked at the brandy decanter, and resolutely didn’t pour himself another glass.
“Shall we join the ladies?” Robert said.
They filed out of the dining room. Tom caught Lucas’s wrist, halting him. “Lu, are you all right?”
No. He felt numb, frozen, as if everything inside him had congealed. “Perfectly,” he said.
“No, you’re not.”
“Tired,” Lucas said.
“It’s more than that.” Tom touched the back of Lucas’s hand, a light, fleeting caress.
A surge of panic broke through the numbness. Lucas recoiled, his heart hammering. “Not here. Someone will see.” And he turned and almost ran to the drawing room.
Tom tried to speak with him again before bed, halting him in the corridor outside their rooms. “Lu—”
“Not here! Someone might see!”
“There’s no one here. Look, empty.” Tom gestured along the corridor in both directions.
“Someone might come,” Lucas said stubbornly.
Tom ignored this comment. His expression was uncharacteristically grim. “Something’s wrong. Is it Julia?”
Lucas turned his head away. Of course it’s Julia.
Tom took his hand. “Lu . . .”
“Not here!” Lucas tore his hand free and shoved Tom away so hard that he almost fell over. He wrenched open the door to his room and fled inside, slamming it shut behind him. His breath was rapid and shallow, panicked.
“Sir?” Smollet said, lifting his eyebrows.
Lucas caught his breath. He essayed a stiff smile and an attempt at cheerfulness. “Lord, I’m tired.”
Lucas’s second-oldest brother, Hugh, arrived the next morning with his wife. His youngest sister, Sophia, and her husband and children and two nursemaids arrived later that afternoon. Tom tried three times to speak privately with him, but each time Lucas pushed him away. I shouldn’t have brought him here. He’ll betray us.
The next morning, he hid in the library with a book, but Tom found him there. “Look, Lu—”
“No!” Lucas said, pushing past him, heading for the door.
Tom caught his wrist in a grip like an iron manacle. “For God’s sake, stop running away!”
Lucas tried to jerk free.
Tom tightened his grip, digging his fingers in painfully.
“Let go of me!” Lucas hissed. His numb grief was gone; in its place was panic. “Hugh’s a clergyman.”
“So?”
“So, if he sees us—”
“If he sees us he won’t think twice about it. He’s seen us together thousands of times.” Impatience was tight on Tom’s face, making him look sterner, older. “We’re going riding this afternoon. Just you and I. Two o’clock.”
Lucas shook his head.
“For Christ’s sake, Lu, if we don’t spend time together people will think something’s wrong.” Tom released his wrist, and poked him in the sternum with hard fingers, pushing Lucas back a step. “Riding. At two.”
Lucas reluctantly went riding at two o’clock. The horse caught his tension once he’d mounted, prancing and sidling in the stableyard, but Tom made no attempt to talk, setting the pace first at a brisk trot, and then a canter. By the time they reached the Marlborough Downs, Lucas felt the tension in his muscles starting to unravel.
The downs were good galloping country. They rode hard, not talking, and when they finally pulled up, Lucas felt more himself than he had in months.
Tom came up alongside him—not too close, not too far—and Lucas was abruptly ashamed of the way he’d behaved the past two days. Whatever else Tom was to him, he was his best friend.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “I needed that.”
Tom nodded.
They rode back more slowly, dropped down off the downs into the Whiteoaks park, trotted through the winter-bare bluebell dell, jumped the stream. “I want to take a look at the folly,” Tom said. “Do you mind?”
Lucas shook his head.
Whiteoaks’ folly sat atop an outcrop of rock amid several acres of woodland, a little ruined castle with a dungeon and a tumbledown tower and a secret passage. They left the horses at the bottom and climbed the steps to the grassy courtyard.
Lucas felt his mood darken. They’d spent hours playing here as children, he and Tom, Julia and Tish. Hide-and-seek, ambushes, battles, play-acting. The great stone walls still seemed to echo with their voices. If he listened hard enough, maybe he’d hear Julia.
“The dungeon still got those ridiculous chains?” Tom asked.
Lucas nodded.
They clattered down the stairs to the dungeon, where daylight shone in through an iron grille, illuminating heavy chains dangling on one wall. Tom uttered a half-laugh and shook his head. “So faux.” And then he turned to Lucas and the amusement drained from his face and something fierce and intent took its place. “Right.”
Lucas took a wary step backwards. “Right, what?”
“This,” Tom said, and then it was the Brook Street Mews all over again: Tom shoving him back against the wall, kissing him until Lucas could no longer think, then kneeling and sucking him to an orgasm so intense he saw stars.
Lucas leaned against the wall afterwards, trembling, dazed. Dimly, he was aware of Tom still at his feet, refastening his breeches. His thoughts lurched and staggered in his head as if he was drunk. Jesus. He slid bonelessly down the wall until he sat alongside Tom.
Tom put an arm around him and pulled him close.
Lucas rested his head on Tom’s shoulder. He felt like an egg that someone had broken. He was in a million pieces. A million tiny pieces. He drew in a shaking breath. It hitched in his throat, caught in his chest—and then, to his horror, he started to cry.
Tom tightened his grip. “It’s all right, Lu. It’s all right.”
Lucas cried harder than he’d ever cried in his life, so hard he could barely breathe, and Tom held him, and rocked him, and whispered, It’s all right, Lu. It’s all right.
Finally, the tears stopped, but he didn’t pull away, and Tom didn’t stop holding him. His breathing steadied, the tears dried on his cheeks, and still they sat, huddled against the wall in the dungeon. “I felt her die,” Lucas whispered. “I was on my way back from Marlborough, and I felt it. I knew. I knew she was dead.”
Tom’s arms tightened around him. He pressed a kiss into Lucas’s hair. “I know I’m not Julia, but I will always be here for you. Always.”
“I know,” Lucas whispered. “I know.”
Whiteoaks became easier to bear after that. They went for daily rides, and somehow those rides always ended up at the folly, and they’d go down into the dungeon or climb the ruined tower, and Tom would ask if he could kiss him, and Lucas always said yes, because when Tom kissed him, the world fell away and he felt happy. And after the kisses Tom would whisper in his ear Do you want my mouth or my hand? and he always said the same thing: Your hand, because when Tom used his hand it felt like they were making love—Tom pressing him against the wall, the two of them straining together, their cocks striving in Tom’s hand. Afterwards, when they stood leaning into each other, panting, the urge to cry would come again, but he always managed to hold it back.
During those moments in the folly the aching sense of loss, of amputation, went away, and even though it returned afterwards, it was never as bad as it had been. Lucas found it easier to smile and pretend that all was well. Robert stopped watching him so worriedly and Almeria no longer glanced at him every ten minutes. Robert’s sons came home from Eton for a few days and spent most of their time sliding down the banisters. Tom joined in. “Come on, Lu!” he cried, as he swooped past. So Lucas did. By the time he reached the bottom, he was laughing.
It was the first time he’d laughed in sixteen months. It felt good.
More of his relatives arrived—brothers, sisters, cousins, nephews, nieces—gathering for the annual Kemp house party. Whiteoaks became busier, noisier. October became November. Tom’s general wrote to say that the inquiry was finally starting, but it would be some weeks before his testimony was required.
“Guess who’s arriving today,” Tom said one afternoon, when they stood in the ruined tower looking down at the grassy courtyard.
Lucas leaned against the stone wall, feeling sated and relaxed. “Tish?”
“No, worse luck. Bernard.”
Lucas groaned. Bernard Trentham. His second least favorite cousin. “Please tell me Caroline’s not coming.”
“She’s not.”
“Thank God for small mercies.” If Bernard was his second least favorite cousin, Bernard’s sister Caroline was his least favorite.
“Tish gets here next week.”
“Good.” He felt a pang of grief, because Tish and Julia had been best friends, and thinking of Tish always made him think of Julia. But at least I have Tom, and he shifted his weight so that his shoulder pressed against Tom’s, and took comfort in his nearness, his warmth.
“Lu . . . you remember George Trentham?”
“Uncle George? My mother’s brother? Of course I remember him.”
“He never married.”
“No.”
“And he wasn’t in the petticoat line, was he?”
Lucas shrugged. “Not that I ever heard.”
“I remember he had a great friend, always traveled with him.”
“John Wallace? Lord, yes, they were as close as brothers. Did everything together. Even shared the same townhouse in London. Never saw one without the other.”
“Lu . . . do you think they were lovers?”
“Uncle George?” Lucas recoiled. “Of course not!”
Tom laughed, and shook his head. “If you could see your face, Lu.” He leaned close and kissed Lucas’s cheek. “You are so straitlaced.”
Lucas flushed. “Uncle George was not a gentleman of the back door,” he said stiffly.
Tom looked amused. “How do you know?”
“He was a respectable man. They both were! Everyone liked them!”
“So?”
Lucas turned his head away. He frowned down at the little courtyard below, with its grass and its tumbled blocks of stone and the crumbling wall on the far side with its huge gothic arch. For a moment, he saw Uncle George in his mind’s eye—the round apple-red cheeks, the bristling white eyebrows, the twinkling eyes—and heard his deep, rich chuckle. Uncle George had been a good man, generous and kind and jovial.
Which doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a back door usher, a little voice pointed out at the back of his head.
Lucas rejected this thought, but it kept nibbling away inside his skull until he had to look at it squarely. Had Uncle George and John Wallace been lovers?
The more he thought about it, the more he thought that Tom was right. Uncle George had been a bachelor his whole life. So had John Wallace. They’d done everything together, even shared a house together.
“They might have been,” Lucas said finally, grudgingly, and he glanced at Tom and found he was looking at him. “Maybe,” he said, and then after a moment, even more grudgingly, “Probably.”
Tom smiled a faint, unreadable smile, but said nothing.
They stood there in silence, and then Tom laughed, and said, “If Bernard knew—”
“He’d have an apoplexy.”
Mischief lit Tom’s face. “What a marvelous thought. I must tell him.”
“Don’t you dare!” Lucas said—and realized Tom was teasing him. “You’re a damned loose screw,” he said severely.
Tom grinned. “And you’re a nodcock.” He leaned in and kissed Lucas lightly—and Lucas kissed him back—and then the afternoon dissolved into bone-melting pleasure again, and he was happy, purely happy.
And after that, they rode back to Whiteoaks and discovered that Bernard Trentham had arrived.