He crossed to the window and stared out. He would ask her tomorrow. After they’d galloped along the clifftops, when they were windswept and laughing. He felt the words on his tongue, heard them in his ears: Marry me, Georgie.
Should he tell her how long he’d loved her? Why he loved her?
Should he mention Hubert?
Alexander considered this for several minutes. No, he wouldn’t mention Hubert, not while asking Georgiana to marry him.
He stared out the window and imagined it: Tomorrow afternoon on the clifftops, sunshine, a salty breeze, the thunder of the horses’s hooves as they galloped, and then afterwards . . .
He’d wait until they’d both caught their breath and then he’d say, Georgie, will you please marry me? And then he’d tell her all the reasons why he loved her.
A maid came to light the candles before dusk. When she’d gone, Alexander sat at his desk and glanced at the bailiff’s report, but he was too preoccupied by thought of tomorrow to pay it the careful attention it needed.
His gaze drifted to his father’s diaries, stacked on the corner of the desk. What should he do with them?
He picked one up and flicked through the pages, remembering his father’s voice, his dry laugh. And then he remembered holding his father’s hand while the old man died. Alexander’s throat closed for a moment. He blinked several times and turned to the very beginning. There was an inscription on the first page: Leonard Aubrey St. Clare, Duke of Vickery. And underneath that: To be burned in the event of my death.
Alexander had a flash of memory so strong that he almost smelled his father’s deathbed—the camphor, the lavender, the beeswax candles. For a fleeting moment he could have sworn he felt his father’s hand in his: the cooling skin, the lifeless fingers. His throat closed again. He needed to blink a few more times, and then he gathered up the diaries and crossed to the hearth. A fire was laid there, but not lit; it had been a warm September.
He kindled the fire, watched the flames take hold—and found himself unable to burn the diaries. His father had been dead for two years, but this felt like a second burial; these pages held his father’s thoughts and emotions and experiences.
Alexander examined the diaries. The calfskin was scuffed in places, shiny in others, worn by his father’s hands. What could it hurt to read one entry? The day of his birth, nothing more. An entry that bound him to his father. And then he’d burn the diaries and lay the old man to rest again.
He lowered himself into the leather armchair by the fire and thumbed through the diaries until he found the right one, but the entry for January 25, 1785, didn’t mention his birth. In fact, it appeared that his father had been in London, not at his wife’s bedside in Kent.
Alexander turned the page. On January 26, squeezed between an account of a visit to a perruquier and some jotted notes about improvements to make on the Wiltshire estate, were three sentences: An express came from Kent. Lucretia has delivered a child. A boy, thank God. And that was it. A disconcertingly short three sentences.
Alexander turned the page, and discovered that his father had traveled to Kent on the twenty-seventh. The boy looks healthy, his father had written, but he has the oddest eyes. As diary entries went, it was even shorter and more disconcerting.
There was no further mention of his birth. On January 29 his father had gone back to London, where he’d remained until halfway through February, when he’d visited the estates in Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, and Wiltshire. In May he’d returned to Kent and stayed only long enough to see his son christened before heading back to London.
Alexander frowned at the diary. The writing was his father’s, but the man who’d written the entries wasn’t the father he remembered.
He flicked further ahead. His father wrote about his estates, about politics, about the war with America, about the latest on-dits, but only rarely about his wife, and even more rarely about his son. Every two weeks came an entry that said: A letter from Kent. Occasionally an extra sentence was appended. Lucretia says that Alexander’s first tooth has come through. Lucretia says that Alexander is crawling.
Alexander thumbed through the pages, skimming. As far as he could tell, in the first two years of his life his father had seen him only five times. Five times? In two years?
He put the diary aside, disturbed, and got up to pour himself a glass of brandy. He frowned at the fire while he sipped, frowned at the stack of leather-bound diaries. He didn’t know the man the diaries described. Didn’t know him at all.
Perhaps he changed when Mother died?
Alexander found the diary for 1788. His father had been in Leicestershire. An express from Kent. Lucretia is dead. She fell down the stairs and broke her neck. Alexander turned the page and read further. His father had traveled posthaste back to Kent, seen to his wife’s burial, hired a second nurserymaid for his three-year-old son, and gone to Wiltshire.
What? My mother died and you didn’t stay with me? You left me with nurserymaids?
Alexander squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead. He’d loved his father—but he didn’t like the man who’d written the diaries.
He opened his eyes and stared at the fire for a moment, and then raised his gaze to the candelabrum on the mantelpiece, where three candles shed golden light. There was a candelabrum on the sideboard, too, alongside the decanters, and another one on his desk. Candles everywhere in the study. Candles and light.
The maid would have lit all the candles in the corridors, too, and the candles in the dining room, the library, the drawing room, the billiard room—any room that he might conceivably wish to enter tonight. It was a huge extravagance, but it was also a necessity. Because he found it difficult to breathe in the dark.
He’d found it difficult to breathe in the dark ever since he’d been five years old.
Alexander looked at the candles on the mantelpiece—and knew the exact day his father had changed.
He drained the brandy glass, put it to one side, and picked up the diaries again. There was a hard, sick knot in his stomach. He found 1789. Found May. Found June.
Alexander turned the pages reluctantly. June 8. June 14. His throat was tight, his shoulders were tight, his chest was tight. He forced himself to inhale, to exhale, to turn the page.
June 20, 1789. An express from Kent. Alexander is missing. The nurserymaids took him into the woods for a picnic and he was abducted by gypsies.
Alexander’s heart was beating too fast. There was sweat on his upper lip. He wiped it away and turned the page and read of his father’s hasty journey to Kent, read of men searching the woods and scouring the nearby villages. I’ve dismissed the nurserymaids, his father had written. How dare they take Alexander into the woods without my permission? And then an anguished: Where is my son?
Alexander thumbed hastily through the next few months, skipping over the details: the advertisements in the newspapers, the posters and the flyers, the search widening beyond Kent into Sussex, into London, into Hampshire.
November, December, January. And there it was:
February 14, 1790. An express from Exeter. One of my men thinks he’s found Alexander in the employ of a chimney sweep.
Alexander released the breath he’d been holding and turned the page. His father had covered the two hundred miles from London to Exeter in two days. It’s Alexander, he’d written on February 16. There can be no doubt. Those eyes. But he’s shockingly thin. His cheeks are quite hollow and he has bruises where he’s been beaten. He hasn’t said a word yet. Not one. He flinches whenever anyone touches him, even me. He doesn’t recognize me as his father, but how could he? It’s been almost a year since I last saw him, and then only for five minutes. I wouldn’t recognize him myself, but for those eyes.