Page 48 of These Violet Delights
His brother’s expression puddled, his lip quivering. “What if I want you to believe me?”
Alasdair straightened, annoyed. But then he studied Freddie’s face a heartbeat longer, and for an instant, he recognized their father’s countenance in the young man.
“Yes, Freddie, I believe you, but I wish you had come to me with your concerns about Danforth, about the crate. I would have stood by your side.” Alasdair lowered the lantern, clasping him on the shoulder. “If it had been you, I would’ve stood by your side still, protected you however I could even while punishment arrived. I’d blunt the weapon, Freddie—any weapon—that fell upon you. Father died getting you and Mother out of Clafton. We aren’t made of cowardly stuff. We do what is right.”
“Well said,” Freddie whispered with the faintest smile. “I’ll give whatever testimony I must, even if I look stupid, to make sure Danforth is held accountable.”
Alasdair nodded. “Good lad.”
Through the open library door, they heard muffled voices. Alasdair hoisted the lantern again and stepped out into the sitting room to find Danforth returning to what he assumedwas still home. Eades looked to Alasdair. The yellow light in Alasdair’s hands bounced along the walls, finding its way to Danforth’s churlish smile. His eyes had always been black and piercing, but something intruded now, a darkness that made him uneasy. Alasdair recognized this darkness, knew it somehow.
“Ah. I will gather my things” was all Danforth said. His tone was hollow.
“Eades will stay and make certain that you do.” Alasdair passed the lantern to the butler, then gestured for Freddie to follow him.
“She won’t believe you,” Danforth called as they took the stairs. “I’m more of a son to her than you ever were.”
Alasdair ignored him, even if a quick slug to the bastard’s jaw was an incredibly enticing and deserved notion. Back in the house, Lady Edith sat in her preferred drawing room by the roaring fire, surrounded by the sculptures and paintings Alasdair had brought her from across Europe, a shawl tucked around her shoulders and a book of sermons in her lap. She wasn’t reading, exactly, but looking beyond the spine of the book to the window off to her right, gazing out into the gathering dark, her expression that of a person who had just forgotten something, searching for it on the tip of their tongue. It was an image worth preserving; in that moment, she wasn’t his mother, just a woman lost in thought. He stopped across the room from her, struck by the uncomfortable slap of premonition, knowing that what he had to say would likely cause her great harm.
His throat felt like it was being strangled by an invisible hand; that premonitory aura plunged him through time, and as he approached his mother, he wondered who had been the person that had come to tell her of their father’s passing in thefire. He felt a kinship with that messenger, the weight of it crushing down on his shoulders.
There would be his mother before this conversation and his mother after; Danforth was damn near like a child to her. And he wasn’t wrong; perhaps she had more affection for him than she had for Alasdair or Freddie. Again, that crushing weight, and the sense that this day would haunt him forever.
“At least she’s already sitting down,” Freddie murmured at his back.
Lady Edith turned toward them. There was fleeting surprise, then a softening of motherly tenderness around her lips that made Alasdair freeze with guilt. Adjusting his spectacles, he took a deep breath and started in. “We need to discuss Mr. Danforth.”
“Oh?” She lifted her chin, smiling.
Alasdair flinched. “He’s not the man you think he is. He’s dangerous, Mother, and never again can he darken our doorstep.”
Just as Danforth predicted, Alasdair’s loving mother did not believe him.
16
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May’s new-fangled shows,
But like of each thing that in season grows.
Love’s Labor’s Lost—Act 1, Scene 1
December
My Dear Sir,
I received your latest letter in great health, thank you for asking. In fact, I write in good health and in better cheer, for I have such a wily little proposition for you, and I know you will agree to it! Lillian and I will no longer be afflicted with her mother’s presence this Christmas, the details of which I couldn’t possibly bore you with, and so we find ourselves quite aimless in that regard. Or we did, until clever Lillian began extolling the virtues of Christmas in the countryside. You should have heard her! She was never a poet or even articulate, but it was amusing to us both. “Who has not longed for Christmas but to have it where the snow is crisp, and the trees look like sugared sweets.” Something along those lines, though doubtless I have improved it. And I know you are already scoffing, my friend,for snow would very much ruin your building plans at Clafton, but for Lillian’s sake, I do hope we are blithely dusted with the stuff.
Or rather, I do hope so if you agree to have us to Sampson Park. And I hear you scoffing again, ha! Yes, it is unforgivably impish of me to impose upon you and your family, but I suffer imagining you in that big house with no one to celebrate with but your brother and Lady Edith. You have never described your mother as a game kind of woman, and pardon me for saying so, but a man should not be dreary at this time of year. Admittedly, I miss you, old friend, for no one here can talk about art the way you do—Jasper tries, but there is something so desperate about him, it’s off-putting to say the least. The port has addled his wits, I wager, because he is constantly wrong. I simply cannot abide hearing him mistake Masaccio for Messina again, it might kill me even while the Yule log burns.
Say you will rescue us from this ugly fate! Say you will have us, and we will make such a merry little party that there will be talk of it for years to come. I await your generosity, and who knows? There may even be another Caravaggio—or something better! Ha!—in it for you.
Enduringly your friend,
Robert
If Alasdair was being honest with himself, he did dread the thought of spending Christmas alone with Freddie and his mother. They had each become miserable in their own way. Freddie listlessly continued his pursuit of the ecclesiastical profession, his heart decidedly not in it, and his attentiondecidedly and increasingly elsewhere, usually a bottle of cherry brandy in the library. He seemed disinterested in Alasdair’s speeches and guidance and was often found stone drunk, sleeping in front of their father’s portrait. All of his plans had come to nothing, and pursuing the living attached to Sampson Park had inspired Danforth’s crimes. He was without a mentor and without Emilia. Alasdair had tried to coax him into meeting the vicar in Cray Arches, Mr. Corner, to which his brother shrugged and made several noncommittal noises.
