Page 122 of The Duke Undone

He didn’t move, but something tore inside him. There could only be a physiological explanation for this feeling: his organs were sliding out of their casings.

He looked at Jephson and saw the fear on his face. Not the fear of a man whose career has suddenly careened off track, who comprehends the abstraction of a reputation and a livelihood gone to ashes—animal fear. The fear of a lamb that scents a wolf in the fold.

He realized his teeth were bared, his hands in fists. Lucy placed a palm against his chest, as though she knew only the gentlest pressure could hold him back.

He relaxed his hands, touched her fingers, breathing through his nose until he could look at Jephson without lunging.

“Take me to my sister,” he said. He would give the orders now.

Don’t let it be too late.

Moments later, as the door to her room swung open, he could envision it, the sight he’d never beheld, replicated, his sister hanging from the bedpost. Imagination was a blessing and a curse.

He found her sitting at the window. She was singing to herself, quietly in a minor key, his mother’s haunting melody. Could he have heard her from such a distance, walking across the grounds? Or had the same memory visited both of them? What did you call such a visitation?

Looking at his sister, alive, frail but whole, as she turned from the window to look at him, he knew he was seeing a ghost, the ghost of his love for his mother, seeing it made flesh. It wasn’t too late to love, to live now.

And then she was hurtling toward him, and he was wrapping her in his arms. He kept an arm around her as they walked down the hall, Lucy clinging to his other hand. The hall had filled with nurses, orderlies, and alienists, but as he glared they parted to let him pass. As well they should.

Goddamn it, he was the Duke of Weston. His money funded this blasted place.

He was leaving, with whomever he chose to take with him.

He paused when he reached Jephson. “Don’t worry about contacting the police. There are several breaches I want to investigate. I’ll contact the police myself.”

“Not now,” murmured Effie.

“Where’s Kate?” Lucy demanded of the gaunt alienist.

Anthony let his sister tug him forward.

“You’ll be hearing from them,” he promised Jephson. “And from me.”

But Effie was right. First, he needed to pluck her out of this hell.

And so they walked on, the alienist scurrying to show them the way to Kate’s cell, and then they were stepping out of the asylum, all four of them walking down the hill in the afternoon sun.

• • •

When the torrent of words slowed and Anthony and Effie paused for breath on the leather settee in Uncle Peter’s study, both of their faces were wet with tears. She’d sworn she wasn’t crying for their father, and Anthony believed her. Lucy had told them in the coach that he wasn’t the one who’d had her taken to Putney, but this realization, and the realization that Robert Yardley had exerted a powerful influence on his behavior at the end of his life—perhaps even hastened that end—didn’t unknot his twisted legacy. The hurt they felt was too warped for the conventional releases—sobs or speeches. They’d have to sit with it, not just today, but for years of days, before they came to the end of it. At least now they’d sit with it together.

Anthony kissed Effie’s brow, chucked her beneath the chin, which made her screw up her face with annoyance, just as he’d hoped. God, he’d missed that expression. Her voice had begun to scratch, and his throat was raw, but there was still so much left to say. About George, about Charlie Nixon, about the long road from Maiwand to Kandahar, about the Putney Asylum. About Lucy. But they would have time, decades, a whole lifetime. All the time they needed to rebuild their family, and make new families.

They walked together into the parlor, which smelled of honey, cinnamon, and powdered sugar. Sofia leapt up to tug Effie down onto the sofa beside her. The resemblance between them was not so marked, not anymore. Effie’s face and figure had changed, seasoned into a different, darker loveliness.

“Your favorite.” Aunt Helen put a honey-dipped cookie on a plate and handed it to her.

“I could eat a thousand of these.” Effie smiled, a breathtaking smile, but even that smile seemed a dazzling surface ripple that left some fathomless well within untouched.

Aunt Helen noticed it. She looked at Anthony, an assuring look. Patience, that look seemed to urge. Too much had happened, too much had changed, to compass all at once.

“I’ve eaten at least a dozen,” declared Lucy, dusting powdered sugar from her dress, lifting her head. “Although I can’t say they’re my favorite because I haven’t tried the others.”

“Those are good,” said Sofia, pointing to another biscuit. “But you have to dip them in your tea for fifteen minutes or they’ll break your teeth. That’s how Yiayia broke her tooth, our grandmother.”

“It is not,” Effie said, laughing. “She told you that to make you slow down so there’d be cookies left for her.”

“How did Yiayia break her tooth?” Sofia asked her mother, and Aunt Helen began to tell the story of Yiayia as a young woman in Pylos biting an ancient Greek coin she took for a lead-plugged counterfeit.