But he’d lost his way in memories. “I haven’t been in this room since they were alive. I locked it up, and yet nothing is dusty. Everything is the same. The servants must keep it clean.” He cleared his throat. “When I walked in, I almost expected to see my mother standing there at the window. Expected to see my father striding in to hand her a bouquet of flowers fresh from the garden.” He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, they were clear, and his gaze snapped to Gwendolyn. “Everything here is in perfect order, the house immaculate, the garden thriving, and her… him… dead. Seems utterly wrong.”
He shook the mists of memory away and offered her a weak smile. “We have not come to tread the path of memory. We should keep looking.” A fever had entered into him to find the missing book. Before this morning, he’d not thought of it as much more than a randomly chosen goal to distract him from the pangs of the heart, inspired by the curve of a dented, golden pocket watch.
But he did love a good mystery. Surely it would be solved before noon.
“You’re right.” She tilted her head toward the bed. “Help me move it?”
He snorted. “Do you think it’s stuck behind the headboard?”
She stepped closer to the bed instead, wrapped her fingers around the bedpost.
He joined her at the foot of the bed on the other side. “One, two, three—” He broke the word off with a grunt and a heave. She added her own exertion as they both pulled, and the giant piece of furniture skid across the floor with an echoing scrape.
The bed moved perhaps six inches, and they moved to the head of it to peer behind.
“Nothing,” they said together.
“I don’t think we’ll find it here.” Jackson glanced over his shoulder at a door behind him. His father’s personal study. He’d often found his father there, rumpled but happy. Sometimes kissing Jackson’s mother. His father had helped him with sums there when he’d been a young boy, praised him there for this and that as he’d grown older.
Enter it?
Jackson’s feet turned to lead, and his legs went all wobbly, but he’d already done one thing he’d not thought he’d ever do today—walk into this room. He had time and space in his day for another impossibility. He took a deep breath and strode forward. “It’s not in this room. We’ll have to check in there next.”
Gwendolyn followed. “Is this the personal study you spoke of?”
Jackson threw the curtains open with a whoosh, drenching everything in light. He turned to survey the space. “It is. I—” His breath caught in his throat. A square of white paper winked up at him from the middle of his father’s slender writing desk. He had the paper, the letter, in his hands four steps later.
She rushed to his side. “Did you find it? That is… too small to be a book manuscript.”
He huffed a laugh. “Is it?”
She rolled her eyes. “Is that your handwriting?”
It was. Did his fingers tremble? “This is the last letter I wrote to my father.” At least his voice did not. “Telling him I planned to stay another month. At least. In Germany. I remember. I’d met a philosopher fellow and thrown myself into matters of the universe, of human morality and ethics and—” He snapped the sentence in two, crushing it. “Worthless, all of it.”
She rested a hand on his arm, slipped the paper from his ghost-light grip, and put it back on the desk. “Howdid they die?”
“A carriage accident. They were driving in the rain up north to view a castle said to be built around the same time as Seastorm.”
“I’m sorry.”
“If I had been here, with them, perhaps I could have done something.”
“You could not have controlled it.”
“I could have been with my brothers when it happened, offered them solace. They were only five years of age.” He walked to the window, placed a palm against the glass. “Look. They’re going out to the castle. Not too late for you to join them.”
She joined him, leaving a few inches of space between them and looked below to see what he did—Pansy and the twins running across the lawn, Lord and Lady Eaden, hands entwined, walking slowly behind the children.
“They are happy here,” he said. “Nicholas and Thomas.”
She nodded. “Truthfully, though, I’ve never seen them unhappy. That is a blessing you can be proud of.”
“It gladdens me to see them well. But also shames me. I did not appreciate what my parents had done for me in my youth, and I have not brought the boys here before now. I should have.”
She turned to face him and lifted a hand. With the light touch of a feather, her fingertips found his temple—stopping his heart and stealing his soul—and trailed down the outline of his face, his jaw, to the very point of his chin. “Too rigid, Mr. Cavendish.” Her hand caressed down the line of his throat, and over the slope of his shoulder. Everywhere she touched, he burned. “And shoulders like cliffs of self-flagellation.” She sighed, dropped her hand, and performed another quarter turn so she could lean the back of her hips against the window ledge. “You should not take so much guilt onto them. They’ll become brittle and crumble.”
He would take every bit of weight if he meant she’d touch him again.
