She pretended to be exasperated, but he saw the smile tucked into the corner of her mouth.
They followed Mrs. Bramly out of the foyer and up a gleaming staircase. Raven absorbed every detail of wainscoting and gilded plaster molding as he moved from one archway to the next, their steps muffled on the runner. The scent of orange and clove pomanders tried to drive the mustiness away, but it hung on, clinging like damp shirtsleeves to the skin, impossible to ignore.
He looked around at all the polished candlesticks and gold-inlaid tables and pulled at his cravat. These long, narrow rooms were choking on fine furnishings, with little clocks and porcelain figurines on all the mantels. Each time his thigh bumped a marble table and nearly sent an oil lamp or a bit of bric-a-brac crashing to the floor he felt clumsy and closed in.
If it were up to him, he’d have opened these walls to make breathable spaces. A place where a man could think or read a book without suffocating to death.
In the back of his mind, he already knew this would be the only time he’d ever come.
The gents talking about Warrister’s return at Sterling’s had speculated that the earl was coming here to name Lord Herrington his heir, and to give his blessing at last. The more Raven thought about that, the more he knew he didn’t belong here.
He wasn’t educated or reared like an aristocrat. He wasn’t proper. And he never would be either, not with a past like his.
It was foolish to think that someone like him could just walk up to an earl and say, “Oh by the by, I think I’m your grandson.”
So what in the hell was he doing here touring the house in the first place?
“Jane, this was a mistake,” he said in her ear when they entered another long, narrow room. “Let’s go back to the carriage, hmm?”
He was fine with his life just the way it was.
Beside him, Jane stopped but didn’t respond. He squared his shoulders, preparing for her attempt to cajole him into finishing the tour.
But when he searched her face, he didn’t find stubbornness. Instead, he found tears gathering in her eyes as she stared fixedly toward the wall ahead.
Instinctively, he gathered her close, while a few steps away he heard Mrs. Bramly’s voice. “And this is the portrait gallery. Seven generations of the Northcott clan hang upon these walls . . .”
Slowly, Raven turned his head.
Then he stopped breathing. The pulse at his neck beat so fast that it caused a high-pitched ringing in his ears, like a wine-slicked finger sliding around the rim of a crystal goblet, over and over again.
All he could do was stare at the two figures in the portrait on the wall.
There was no need to read the engraved placard at the bottom of the frame. He knew who they were.
Edgar Northcott had been a tall, lean man with broad shoulders and a wealth of sandy brown hair that curled over his temples and brow. He had a hawklike nose and a hard-set jaw. His eyes were a periwinkle blue that seemed to glint with some unspoken secret, and an almost indiscernible smirk lifted one corner of his mouth.
And then there was Arabelle Northcott.
She wore a shimmering silver gown, with her hair piled high in an elaborate coiffure. Inky black ringlets cascaded down to frame the delicate features of her face—the fine arch of her brow, the slim line of her nose, and the angles of her cheeks, jaw and chin. She was beautiful.
But it was her eyes that arrested Raven. They were a soft, downy gray that seemed to reach out beyond the canvas and blanket him with their warmth.
He felt it in the center of his chest—a tender, burning ache. And suddenly he knew.
The breath fell out of him. The ringing in his ears turned into a deafening rush as his heart pounded in panicked beats inside his rib cage. Years of pain and longing and hope stormed through him all at once.
He looked to Jane but his vision was blurred, everything gray around the edges.
He needed to leave. Now.
Without a word, he left the gallery. He would apologize to Jane in a few moments when he could think. When he wasn’t so overwhelmed.
Yet in his haste to retrace the steps they had taken, he ended up in an unfamiliar corridor, facing a stained door, partially ajar. He growled in self-irritation. Stripping off his hat, he raked a hand through his hair. Why did there have to be so many bloody rooms?
Trying to orient himself, he pushed open the door to see if this was the one that led to the upper gallery and the stairs. But then he caught a scent that halted him in his tracks.
Before he could even blink to focus on where he stood, he knew he’d found the library—a room they hadn’t had a chance to tour.
The air was permeated with the familiar sweet fragrance of old books that calmed his straining lungs and even quieted the roaring in his head. And he simply stood there in the partially open doorway to collect his thoughts.
His gaze roamed from floor to ceiling, each inch filled with books. A light flickered over a multitude of leather-bound spines and he heard the faint crackle of a fire in an unseen hearth.
He nudged the door wider, the hinges screeching in protest. And Raven stopped abruptly on the threshold the instant he realized he wasn’t alone in this part of the house.
An elderly man sat in a wing-backed chair by the fire, wearing a burgundy velvet morning coat and a gray shawl draped over his lap. He seemed to be staring sightlessly into the flames, as if considering some great mystery of the ages.
Then he turned slowly toward the figure in the doorway. Without a start or a gasp, he merely said, “I thought you would come again.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” Raven said in self-defense, feeling like a child caught shimmying into the baker’s window. “But I’ve never been here before.”
The man eyed him shrewdly. “Not inside perhaps. But you startled my housekeeper on the pavement a sennight ago. She wrote to tell me she’d seen a ghost.”
Numbly, Raven absorbed this. He swallowed and could have sworn that the sound was loud enough to fill a theatre. “So then you are . . .”
“The one who owns this house.”
His mind whispered grandfather in a hushed awe as if anything louder would disturb this hallucination and Raven would find himself out on the pavement, none of it real.
“Come closer. The firelight is dim and my eyes are far too old to discern one apparition from another.”
Raven obliged and moved into the room.
“Uncanny,” the man murmured under his breath. “You even walk like him. He always had something of a swagger. ‘Proud and prowling,’ his mother used to say when he would come home from school, eager to fit the world in the palm of his hand.”
“Where did he go to school?” Raven heard himself ask, accepting this dream as reality. And that was only one of a thousand questions crowding on his tongue. What was he like? What were his interests? Did he read all these books? Can I read them, too?
“You don’t know?” The old man scoffed. “Surely, you’ve done your research. You’ve been to Hertfordshire, after all. Aye, the vicar wrote to me as well.”
“I didn’t want to know too much. And yet,” he said on a breath, feeling a need for complete honesty, “I wanted to know everything. That is the reason I startled your housekeeper on the pavement last week. I meant no harm, then or now. So, if you’d like me to go, you have but to say the word.”
“Stay,” he said without hesitation. “Sit by the fire if it’s not too warm for you. My bones are like ashes that can no longer support an ember. Tell me, what brings you here at this particular time in the winter of this old man’s life? Trickery? Deception?”