At the very front of the group was a gentleman who rivaled Philip’s flair for colorful and dandified fashions, the brightness of his attire marred only slightly by the black armband he wore. Another was dressed in the more somber tones Harold preferred. One of them put Charlie firmly in mind of a few of the dons at Cambridge. The remaining two were a study in contrasts: large scale with an aura of authority and a shorter, thinner gentleman one might be excused for not noticing. An odd grouping, to be sure, made even stranger by the fact that Charlie could not begin to identify any of them.
The fashionable one at the front spoke two words. “Our Julia.”
Mater spun about. She pressed her hand to her mouth, and tears began immediately.
“Why is she crying?” Charlie asked, ready to rush to her defense. “They’ve made her cry.”
“Calm yourself, Tadpole,” Philip said. “Those are happy tears.”
Charlie used to be known amongst his brothers as Tadpole. They didn’t call him that often any longer.
Mater leapt from her chair and ran like a young girl across the room. The men embraced her on the instant. They all spoke at once. Charlie couldn’t make out a single word. Mater affectionately touched each of their faces in turn. They were clearly not unknown toher.
“Who are they?” Charlie asked Philip.
With a grin, he said, “The Gents. Father’s best friends.”
That was, apparently, all the explanation Charlie was to receive. Philip abandoned him and crossed to the group of new arrivals. The men greeted him with handshakes, and he offered words of welcome. Mater remained among them, slipping from one friendly embrace to another. It was the highest her spirits had been since Charlie’s arrival at Lampton Park.
Father’s best friends, and Charlie didn’t know a single one of them. Was there no end to the ways his father was a stranger to him?
Mater waved him over. “Come offer your greetings, dear.” To the gentlemen around her, she said, “You all, of course, remember Charlie.”
“This can’t be little Charlie,” the bespectacled, professor-like gentleman said.
“He can, indeed,” Mater said. “He’s grown now. And married, if you can believe that.”
The subdued gentleman chimed in. “He looks like Stanley.”
Mater nodded. “I think that every time I see him lately.”
Charlie couldn’t make heads nor tails of that declaration. “I don’t lookthatmuch like him.”
“Notyourbrother Stanley,” Mater said. “Mybrother, Stanley.”
“You all knew Uncle Stanley?” Charlie had only ever heard stories of his aunts and uncles. All of Mater’s and Father’s siblings had died by the time the two of them were married.
“And your grandparents,” one of them answered.
These gentlemen knew more about Charlie’s family than he did.
The fashionable Gent put an arm about Mater’s shoulders, but he spoke to Philip. “The lot of us intend to steal away your mother for a time. Don’t waste your breath arguing; you know you’ll never emerge victorious.”
Philip held up a hand in a show of innocent denial. “Arguing creates wrinkles. I’d not risk this”—he motioned to his face—“over a futile disagreement.”
The dandified one dipped his head regally. And quick as that, Father’s friends whisked Mater away.
Charlie swallowed back the temptation to call her back again. Had he not matured in the least since his early years at Eton when he’d cried and cried every time Mater had left him there?
“Thank the heavens they came,” Philip said with a tense sigh. “She needs them here.”
“They’ll be kind to her?” Charlie pressed. “Can you absolutely guarantee they will?”
With a firmness that would have shocked anyone who knew him as the dandified Earl of Lampton, Philip said, “If I couldn’t guarantee it, I’d have thrown every last one of them out of the house, personally and violently. I would do as much and more to anyone who dared to mistreat Mater.”
“And all of us would help you.”
Nothing stoked the flames of the Jonquil brothers’ fury as quickly and thoroughly as unkindness directed at their mother. Mater was the thread holding all of them together. She’d sewn up the wounds of this family’s grief again and again. If not for her, Father’s death would have fractured them all.
