Page 7

“You do not truly think that,” Angelo said.

Lorenzo took up his pacing again. Boots struck the carpet in an agitated beat. “I no longer know what to think. I crossed to this country with such speranza … hope! I was sure that here, on the ground where Matteo ended his days, some trace of his gift would surface. England has given me fog and disappointment and newlyweds who cannot cease staring at one another across the breakfast plates.”

In spite of the strain, laughter rose in Angelo’s chest. He tried to hold it. He failed. It escaped in a strangled snort that made Lorenzo and Nicholas both turn.

“I beg your pardon,” he managed, wiping his eyes. “But you must allow, the picture of Molly and Marco toccandosi … touching. Over the kippers. It has its comedy.”

“It is grotesque,” Lorenzo insisted. The corner of his mouth betrayed him.

“It is nauseating,” Nicholas agreed, and for once no venom rode the words. He sounded almost, just almost, amused.

Angelo caught the lift in the air and held it. “We are three scapoli … bachelors. Joined in our horror at matrimonial excess. Surely that makes us brothers of a kind.”

“I would rather be bound to a mad dog,” Nicholas muttered, but without heat.

“Incantevole. Charming,” Lorenzo said dryly. “With a friend such as this, Angelo, who needs foes?”

Angelo grinned and threw his arms wide in a flourish he knew was too much and could not stop. It was how he was made. Large. Open. Unable to fold his feelings into the tight English hush that came so easily to men like Nicholas. His Italian blood would not permit it.

“You are both fond of me. Say it.”

“I say nothing,” Nicholas said.

“I say only that you make bearable company when you are not being impossible with cheer,” Lorenzo amended.

The moment hung, thin as spun glass, and something in Angelo’s chest loosened. This was not so far from Florence, in truth. The farmacia had been full of hard heads. Uncles and cousins who snapped and teased and still loved one another without stint. Perhaps he could build the same here. Perhaps this house could become home, given time.

Then the moment broke, and his arms fell.

“I feel …” The words tumbled before he could catch them, driven by the restlessness that had been stacking for weeks. “I feel ridondante. Redundant. Like a … a … What is a decent metafora? Like the fifth wheel on a coach! Where would one put it? What work would it do?”

Nicholas gave a rude snort at the fancy. They were of an age, he and Nicholas, yet the other man ran to belligerence. Sour as old wine. Angelo guessed his uncle lived with a constant ache from the damaged leg. It might also have been temper. He did not know him well enough to sort one from the other. The poison his late mother had left in her journals would not have sweetened any of it.

Lorenzo cocked his head, frowning, but at least his interest was sincere, unlike the glooming presence of Nicholas, who remained in the library only to belittle Angelo, he was certain.

Is glooming a word?

It should be, he decided. Nicholas is the embodiment of it.

“It is not like you to be pessimistic, mi amico,” Lorenzo chided.

Angelo jumped to his feet, waving his hands in the manner of his people. His Italian people, not his new British familia like the glooming Nicholas.

“I am bored! I thought Marco and I would find a grand adventure in this green and pleasant land, but now Marco minds the baron’s affairs and—” He stopped, fingers twitching in the air, unable to name the rest. The other men grimaced. Marco and Molly’s calf-eyed devotion sat ill with bachelors. And it was constant. If there was not a child by summer, Angelo would eat his cravat.

He dropped back into the chair. The flare of energy died as fast as it had risen. He felt foolish of a sudden, exposed. These were not worries he had meant to air, and never with such theater. Yet they had been pressing against his ribs for weeks, and now they hung between the three of them like a charge.

Lorenzo left the window and came to perch on the arm of Angelo’s chair with the easy closeness of old friendship. He set a hand on Angelo’s shoulder and squeezed once.

“You are not redundant, amico. You are only … between purposes. It will not last.”

“Temporary,” Angelo echoed, hollow. “As being temporarily alive. In the end, one is dead.”

“Santo cielo, you have caught Nicholas’s gloom like a fever,” Lorenzo said, and shot the other man an accusing look. “Stop infecting my friend with your English malinconia.”

Nicholas turned a page. “I have done nothing but sit in the same room. If Angelo cannot bear nearness to what is real, that is his weakness, not mine.”

“What is real,” Angelo muttered, “is that I crossed the Channel hungry for adventure and have found only … this.” His hand sketched the library, the fire, the washed-out world beyond the glass. “Marco has a barony to run. You, Nicholas, have your treatments and your labor of becoming less of a villano. Lorenzo has his quest. And I have what? The honor of grinding herbs that any shop on Bond Street will sell cheaper?”