Page 5

Too much. Anthony’s jaw hardened. He stood and Forbes rose as well, straining upward in an effort to appear taller than he was. It made no difference. Anthony topped him by several inches. He looked down his nose.

“My women are willing,” he said. “Always.”

“I knew Stowe, don’t forget.” Forbes raised his chin. “I saw the two of you together. Nothing too debased. Drugs weren’t the half of it. You recall that time at the Rose and Myrtle, in the flagellation room?”

Anthony said nothing. His brother, George, the Marquess of Stowe, had been picked up by the constabulary with a saddle on his back. His flanks were bloodied from zealous grooming with a gold-handled currycomb. The gossip columnists had outdone themselves with double entendre. That spring—Anthony’s first in the army—the talk was of nothing else.

“And that whore that washed up with him when he died? They said she was a child.”

“Ah.” Anthony stepped back to put himself out of neck-wringing range. The satisfaction he’d derive from the feel of Forbes’s windpipe collapsing beneath his thumbs would be fleeting, the consequences lasting. He took three slow breaths.

That poor young woman—she hadn’t been a child, but at the brothel she had often dressed in schoolgirl frocks.

He still cursed his brother for his colossal stupidity. His monumental selfishness. Had he gone to his doom laughing as though death were his last and best lark?

The Pall Mall Gazette had run article after article detailing the accident. So had the Telegraph, the Times, the Illustrated London News. The list went on. The scandal had reverberated to the ends of the earth. Even locked in the garrison jail at Kandahar, Anthony had heard the rumors before he received official notification.

Suddenly, staring into Forbes’s mottled, furious face, he wanted to laugh. Trouble had a way of finding him.

“I am not my brother.” He composed his own face into a mask. “A shame. Mrs. Forbes might have preferred him.”

“I’ll kill you,” Forbes exploded.

At that moment came the knock. Anthony put his back to Forbes, casually, making his unconcern into a fresh affront. The door opened. Collins had sent a footman with a tray. Someone to check that Forbes still breathed. The footman’s eyes darted to Forbes again and again as he set down the tray on the desk. He didn’t look at Anthony, a stroke of good fortune. Even so, Anthony sidled to the left, hiding the bandage as best he could.

Such foolishness.

As soon as the footman had departed, he turned and lifted the bottle from the tray, filled two glasses. The liquid was thick as syrup and stank of sugar. It made Anthony’s stomach revolt. His father had drunk lemonade by the gallon. Enemies in Parliament had called him the lemonade lord and made mockery of his anti-vice campaigns. He had succumbed to only one reckless passion in his life, for the woman he married, an unsuitable choice, the mad daughter of Greek immigrants. A mistake that had yielded three more mistakes.

George. Anthony. Euphemia.

You children are my ruination. How many times had he said it?

Enough times to make it true.

“Lemonade?” Anthony pushed a glass into Forbes’s damp hand. Forbes sniffed it sullenly, nose wrinkling.

Per the codicil to his father’s will, there wasn’t a drop of sherry, brandy, whiskey, rum, wine, or beer in Weston Hall. The whole house—dry from cellar to dome. If Anthony swallowed so much as a mouthful of liquor, Yardley’s trusteeship would continue beyond his thirtieth birthday.

Thank you, Father, for all the trust you put in me.

With this mocking, silent toast, he tipped back his own glass and sweetness rippled down his throat. The taste of decay. He poured himself more. He could see his distorted features reflected on the curved surface of the bottle, stretched out, goblin-like.

Afghanistan had shaken his faith in heaven and hell. In that rugged, beautiful country, he’d glimpsed the heavens and also seen with his own eyes the inferno that men can make on earth.

He wished that he still believed in an afterlife. Anthony wanted his father watching when he turned thirty, shed all legal fetters, and assumed control of the dukedom. Watching when he spent one hundred thousand pounds on champagne, when he went to the Derby and hazarded the country house in Somerset on a single horse. He wanted his father watching when he hired two dozen private investigators.

Ransack the city, he’d tell them. Find my sister. Find Effie and bring her home.

His thirtieth birthday was only weeks away. He had to lie low, quash distractions. He had to focus. He incurred too much risk as it was, stealing out his window at night, haunting the streets of the Old Nichol, of Shoreditch, Stepney, Bethnal Green, restless, looking for Effie, or for annihilation. Forbes’s crazed, inexplicable mistake was one too many.

Time to end this violent interview. Quietly.

“You’re confused,” he began. “I’m willing to forget—”

Forbes cut him off.

“I’m not confused,” he said thickly. He returned his glass of lemonade to the tray, forcefully, so the contents sloshed. “Your Grace”—he spit the words—“I have the proof at home.”