“Hello, Dad.”
The large, broad-shouldered man filled the doorway, and his head almost touched the top of the frame. The bright light of the lamp behind him silhouetted his father against the dark.
“Would ya like a nice cup o’ tea? I just put the kettle on,” Layton’s father said impassively. Then he turned away.
Layton followed. The second he set foot in the cottage, a feeling of great relief and happiness swept over him. He was home!
The room’s plastered walls, flagstone floor, and large, open fireplace embraced him with a great, welcoming warmth, like pulling a thick blanket over his body on a cold winter’s night. The wooden staircase in the corner still wound its way up to the bedrooms on the second floor. To his right, he saw the extra room his parents had added for his widowed grandmother.
An unfamiliar smile swept across Layton’s face. He saw before him the essence of his boyhood, a time when he had no troubles or concerns. If only he could snap his fingers and—just like that—be a boy again, living in this cottage, listening to his grandmother’s stories, and playing with his lead soldiers in front of the hearth.
Thomas Layton pulled a cup and saucer from a cabinet and placed it on the blue-and-red-striped tablecloth of the dining table. Layton took the high-backed oak chair as his father began to pour the tea. They sat in silence, looking at each other for a long moment.
“I’m sorry I never visited you at Mulcaster, Douglas. I just couldn’t do it.”
Layton didn’t reply. He just waited, absorbing his father’s Dorset accent, which he hadn’t heard in years. The sound brought back a flood of warm memories: long days spent sitting in this room, talking to his mother; the clamor of his many relatives. Was his own speech still tinged with that distinctive sound? He’d worked doggedly to get rid of it.
“I understand, Dad.”
His father blinked at him with watery eyes. “That sad business of yers, coming on top of Raymond getting killed…” He shook his head.
Raymond. Three weeks before the theatre disaster, Layton’s older brother had died in South Africa, killed in the Second Boer War. As a sergeant-major in the British Army, Raymond had spent twenty years fighting battles in the farthest outskirts of the British Empire: the Sudan, Afghanistan, Egypt. In the Battle of Omdurman in Khartoum, he’d received the Victoria Cross, Britain’s highest decoration for valor. General Kitchener himself had pinned the medal to his chest. Thomas Layton had worshipped his soldier son.
When Layton turned toward the fireplace, he saw Raymond’s photo on the mantel. In his dress uniform, smiling that wonderful ear-to-ear grin topped by a handlebar mustache.
There were no photos of Layton on the mantel. Though his father was a master mason who appreciated architecture, soldiering for queen and country was far manlier than sitting at a draughting table. Compared to a soldier with a VC, an architect seemed a poof. No matter how many impressive buildings Layton designed or how many upper-class clients he had, Raymond’s achievements mattered more, for Raymond was an empire builder.
Once, when he was just starting out as an architect on his own, Layton had invited his father to a dedication of a library he’d designed in Bournemouth on the coast of Dorset. Because of his charade, he’d had no contact with his family, but in the very brief letter about the new library, he had let his dad know that he’d set up a practice and was doing well but revealed no other details of his life. Like most sons, Layton probably still had the need for his father’s approval, and that’s why he had wanted him to come. But Thomas Layton had declined, claiming a business emergency. Layton never invited—or contacted—him again. Raymond’s feats, he knew, had trumped him once more.
He was ashamed to admit it, but down deep, he had been relieved that his father had refused. The key to maintaining his charade had been never revealing to anyone—including his wife—his true background, which meant her family never meeting his family. In England, that revelation would be the kiss of death to one’s position. Lord Litton would have looked at his father’s rough mason’s hands and ill-fitting clothes and snorted in disapproval. What had his beloved Edwina married? So his family wasn’t at his wedding, because he never told them about it. Nor was he at his brother’s funeral.
Growing up, his father had been stern but kind, and he was proud of Layton’s academic successes. But every time Raymond had come home on leave and walked through the door in his uniform, Thomas Layton had almost levitated with excitement. After so many colonial battles conquered by Raymond, his father had come to believe his son invulnerable. A sergeant-major was the most important of the noncommissioned officers, relied upon by the regiment for leadership in the thick of fighting. So when the news came, Layton knew that his father’s whole being had been pulverized to dust.
And when his father read in the papers about the theatre accident, the shame of it must have been overwhelming. Because Layton was a native son, Dorset gossiped constantly about the tragedy. His father must have felt like digging a hole and burying himself.
“It’s all right, Dad,” he said softly. “I understand.”
But his father must have heard his stomach growling. “I have some leftover mutton and suet pudding in the larder if yer hungry.”
When the food was set on the table, Layton had to prevent himself from devouring it like a wild animal. He ate slowly and drank a tankard of ale. His father watched silently. Layton set down his fork, about to speak, and felt something at his leg. A solid black cat, purring and rubbing against him. He smiled and picked it up, setting it in his lap, where it curled into a ball.
“Midnight still remembers ya,” said his father.
Petting the cat’s head, Layton looked across the table.
“It’s quite terrifying to face life all by oneself. I had no other place to go, Dad,” he said in a low, quivering voice.
“I knew ya was gettin’ out soon. ’ow long have ya been out?”
“Two days.”
“You’ll never get work around ’ere, people knowing who you are.” His father was never one to sugarcoat reality.
A harsh voice broke across their quiet conversation.
“Blimey. The black sheep of the family has returned to the fold.”
Leaning forward on the thick oak railing of the staircase landing was his older brother, Roger, a tall and gangly man with a shock of sandy-blond hair. He skipped down the rest of the stairs like a seven-year-old.
“Hello, Roger,” Layton said tersely.
“I won’t bother to ask how things are with you, Little Brother. I can tell by lookin’ at yer face.” Roger sat down across from Layton, a cruel smile fixed on his face. “You look so different. Thinner, almost like a bloody skeleton. I’m surprised. I ’eard they give you a pound of raw meat every day in prison, like animals in the zoo.”
Layton closed his eyes, let the abuse wash over him. Roger had always resented his ability to rise above his station. Now, he wondered if his brother had taken pleasure in his misfortunes too. It wasn’t as if he had anything to complain about. Roger was a master carpenter and greatly admired for his skill. People across England hired him to build cabinetry, stairs, and millwork for mansions and other important buildings. And yet. While Roger had a true gift, Layton had never referred any work to him for fear of revealing his family connections. In doing so, perhaps he had hurt Roger more than he knew.
“Douglas here is lookin’ for work,” Thomas said, turning to Roger, who let out a harsh bark of a laugh.
“Oh, for sure, people’ll be bangin’ the door down to give Britain’s most famous murderer a job.”
“Don’t take that tone, boy, or I’ll thump ya,” growled Thomas.
“What? None of your high-and-mighty friends were waitin’ outside Mulcaster to give ya a job? Lord and Lady Bentham didn’t have their carriage at your disposal? I’m shocked.” Their father was glowering, but Roger continued, undaunted. “You know, we can’t blame ’em, Dad, for never coming back to visit. It must have been bloody awkward for our Dougie to associate with his social inferiors.”
He leaned over the table and looked straight into Layton’s eyes. “But now you’re an ex-convict. You’re everyone’s social inferior, mate.”
Layton looked straight ahead and continued petting Midnight. Only the crackling of the fire broke the silence in the room.
“You look peaky, Doug. Maybe you should go upstairs and have a lie down in Raymond’s room,” said Thomas. His tone of voice wasn’t compassionate but practical, as if he were telling a drenched man to come in out of the rain.
Layton set the cat on the floor and slowly stood. Like a weary old man, he trudged up the stairs. His torso still ached.
“At least you don’t have to share a room anymore—or get buggered,” Roger called after him.
“Shut yer mouth, boy,” Layton heard his father growl.
The lamp on the nightstand threw out a warm glow, illuminating the many objects attached to the walls, the trinkets and trophies of war that Raymond had brought home for Layton, who worshiped his soldier brother as a hero. A Dervish spear, a Zulu shield almost six feet tall, a jeweled saber from his posting on India’s northwest frontier. These strange, exotic objects had fascinated Layton. He had looked forward to Raymond’s leaves, to being beguiled by stories of adventures in far-off lands.
Many photographs of Raymond’s regiment hung on the walls. Layton could find his brother instantly in every one. Raymond had called the Second Boer War a quick colonial skirmish; the British were expected to march into South Africa and easily whip the Boer farmers in a week. The Dutch-speaking settlers had accepted British rule but refused to let their republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal, be annexed when diamonds and gold were discovered within their bounds. To the shock of the world, they had soundly licked the British.
The public had been furious. That mere farmers could beat the best army on the planet! The Boers had used hit-and-run tactics that were deemed cowardly. “Why don’t they come out in the open and fight fair?” people had written in letters to the Daily Mail.
Reading the Times one morning at breakfast, Layton had learned to his horror that Raymond had been cut down in an ambush while leading a night patrol. One Boer bullet to the head ended his bright life. In the photograph of the regiment Raymond had sent his father from South Africa, Layton found his brother, seated in the second row, third from the left, looking confident and proud.
It was the last photo of his brother ever taken.