Page 5

“No, no.” Angelo cut her off and waved the kindness away with what he hoped looked like cheer. “Do not trouble yourself. I am felice … glad. It does me good to see Marco so content.”

And it did. That much was true.

He was also choking in this room, sinking in their joy, feeling more spare by the minute.

Lorenzo, bless him, chose that instant to stand. His chair scraped the boards. “Well,” he announced to the room at large, “the library calls. Letters will not answer themselves.”

Angelo was on his feet with a speed that shamed him. “I shall come. I have been meaning to … to …” Think, fool. “To look over my notes on herbal preparations. Yes. Pressing work. It cannot wait.”

He knew he sounded cracked. He did not care. Anything to leave a room where affection hung so thick a man might have cut it, shimmering the way heat rose off Florentine stones in July.

“Do enjoy your day,” he told Marco and Molly, cheer still forced. “And Uncle.” He nodded to the baron, who was already taking more coffee from a footman.

Then he and Lorenzo all but bolted, keeping their faces straight until the passage received them. There, they shared a look that needed no Italian and no English.

“Insopportabile …” Lorenzo muttered. “Unbearable.”

“They are in love,” Angelo said, as much for his own ears as for Lorenzo’s. “It is the way of things.”

“It turns the stomach. I have never seen Marco carry on so. He used to be serio … serious. A man of books. Now he weighs wallpapers as if they were great canvases.”

Angelo could not stop the laugh that broke out of him, sharp and a little wild. “Did you mark his face when she asked about the damask?”

“As if she had put the Sphinx’s riddle to him.” Lorenzo shook his head. “That is what marriage does. It turns men into … into …”

“Fools in love?”

“Just so.”

They walked toward the library without hurry. Their steps sank into the thick Aubusson runner. The house was quiet at this hour. Servants moved through their morning work with no fuss. The family was only beginning the day.

Florence rose in Angelo with an ache he had not expected. Not only the city, though he missed the sun and the ochre and burnt sienna of the walls and the Arno in morning light. He missed the slap of shutters opening. The shout of a vendor under his window. The family shop with its familiar breath of herbs and beeswax. His uncles arguing over everything and nothing, voices bouncing off tiled walls until the jars rattled. Travelers who came for remedies and left charmed by his talk. His own name spoken as if it belonged to the work.

Here, what was he? How had he become the spare to an heir? A curiosity. An Italian graft that had not quite taken.

They reached the library. Lorenzo pushed the door wide without a knock. The room beyond was everything the breakfast parlor was not. Dark. Male. Easy in its worn edges, claret paper on the walls. Shelves to the ceiling stuffed with books. Leather chairs rubbed soft by years. A fire that burned with real appetite instead of polite glow.

In one of those chairs, injured leg raised on an ottoman, sat Nicholas Scott.

Angelo’s uncle lifted his eyes from the volume he was only pretending to study. Disdain sat on him like a well-cut coat. Blue eyes took them in and read the matching wreckage on their faces.

“That bad, is it?” Nicholas asked, darkly amused.

“Worse,” Lorenzo said, dropping into the chair nearest the fire. “They held hands. Over breakfast.”

“And argued the merits of paper,” Angelo added, going to pour coffee from a pot some kind soul had left on the side table. Lukewarm. He did not mind. He needed his hands occupied. “Marco has views on paper now.”

Nicholas’s mouth twitched, the threat of a rare smile. “Molly used to hold a proper conversation. Now she chatters about fabrics and whether his cravat ought to be Oriental or Mathematical. A tragedy worthy of the Bard.”

“Thank you,” Lorenzo said with feeling. “At least one man in this house sees it.”

Angelo took the last free chair and cupped the indifferent coffee as if it might save him. The library smelled of leather and old vellum, with a thin bite of coal smoke under it. Not Florence. Nothing here was Florence. Close enough, all the same, to ease him a fraction.

Home, he thought, and then doubted it. Was this home now? This fine London estate with its damp and its gray skies? Or did home still wait across the Channel, in a city where the sun bothered to shine and nobody found his warmth strange?

The spare to the heir. Extra weight.

Nicholas, who had been the spare himself before Marco and Angelo arrived, watched them with that sardonic look he wore like plate armor. “I have hidden here since first light,” he announced, “on purpose, to miss their breakfast theater. I take it my plan was sound?”