Edgar turned his gaze toward the fire. “I don’t see what this—”
“I talked about it with Geoffrey Blackwell. He has an interest in illnesses of the brain.” Charles looked his brother full in the face. “Geoffrey says there are a number of people who show symptoms similar to those of Mother and my friend at Oxford. He thinks it’s something organic that goes on in the mind. She was probably born with it.”
Edgar looked back at him, his eyes wary. “And if she was?”
“We’ll never understand the demons she battled. We’ll never understand what finally pushed her over the edge. But it isn’t your fault she put that gun to her temple.”
Edgar pushed himself to his feet. “Who says I think it is?”
“You do, brother. By your very silence.”
Edgar moved to the table where the coffee and cold collation Lady Frances had insisted on serving were laid out. “You’re being unusually melodramatic, Charles.” His voice had the bite of sleety air. “I admit being there when Mother killed herself was particularly unpleasant. I admit to thinking I should have been able to stop it, especially in those first hellish days. Later I realized no one could control Mother when she set her mind to something. It hasn’t warped my life, I assure you.”
“It’s warped your relations with me.”
“Has it?” Edgar poured a cup of coffee, picked up a fork, and stared down at the plate of cold beef and sliced Double Gloucester. “Perhaps I haven’t the imagination to see it properly, but I think you and Aunt Frances exaggerate. We’ve grown apart as we grew older. It happens to most siblings. We get on better than a score of brothers I could name.”
“Oh, yes, we ride together, we play catch with Colin and Jessica, you and Lydia dine with Melanie and me. But when was the last time the two of us had a talk that was more than superficial?”
Edgar speared a piece of beef. “You like chess, I like roulette. You loved Oxford, I couldn’t wait to be gone from the place. You have a perfect marriage, I—made rather a mull of mine.” He added three pieces of cheese to the plate and picked up a jar of chutney. “I’m a soldier in the British army. Half the time you don’t even seem to be sure what country you belong to.”
The last was like a fist to the face in the midst of a fencing match. “What?” Charles said.
Edgar frowned down at the plate of food he’d assembled, then lifted his gaze to Charles. “I know Carevalo’s blackmailing you to find the ring, but you’d go against British policy in Spain in a heartbeat, don’t deny it.”
“I won’t.” Charles fell back on the even voice he’d use to answer such questions in the House of Commons. “Just because I disagree with our current government’s foreign policy doesn’t make me less British. We live in a parliamentary system, or had you forgotten?”
Edgar fixed him with a gaze as hot and hard as the coals burning in the fireplace. “Only last month you said you thought France might be better off today if we hadn’t won at Waterloo.”
Charles pushed his fingers through his hair. “Did I? When?”
“One night at Brooks’s when you’d drunk enough whisky that it even went to your head.”
“Well, I don’t deny I’ve thought it.” On more than one occasion. But the words had a strange resonance now that he knew his wife had been working to bring about just that outcome.
“My God, Charles, our whole way of life was at stake.”
“I seriously doubt that. Though it might have been a very good thing if it had been.”
“Men fought and died—”
Charles looked at his brother and found himself answering as he knew Melanie would have done. “Men fought and died on both sides, Edgar.”
Edgar shook his head. “I can’t even begin to understand how you could think that way. But that’s the difference between us.” He turned from the table without touching the food and paced the carpet, hands clasped behind his back. “You like pulling ideas apart and twisting them and looking at them upside down. I can’t imagine anything more uncomfortable. I like to know where I stand. I need to know where I stand.”
“And if it turns out you’re standing in a mire?”
“You see?” Edgar whirled round and faced him down the book-lined length of the library. “That’s exactly what I mean. Sometimes I’m not sure you’d admit there’s such a thing as good and evil.”
“I’m not sure I would.”
“Even after what’s happened to Colin?”
Fear squeezed Charles’s chest, but he held his gaze steady. “Even then.”
Dust motes danced in the gray light between them. “Do you even believe in God?” Edgar demanded.
“Not even before I witnessed war firsthand.”
Something flared in Edgar’s clear blue eyes. One might have called it a sense of betrayal. “Damn it, Charles, do you believe in anything at all?”
“Humanity,” Charles said after a moment. “Though I must confess to being disappointed more often than I would care to admit.”
Edgar shook his head and turned away. Charles realized how far they had moved from the original conversation. Belatedly, he recognized Edgar’s gambit as the smokescreen it was. “You’re better at this than I credited, brother.”
Edgar walked back to the table and picked up his coffee. “Better at what?”
“Diverting the conversation.” Charles spread his fingers on the blue velvet of the chair back. “Melanie thinks you were in love with Kitty.”
Edgar laughed, but the five-second pause before he spoke told volumes. “Women, even Melanie, like to romanticize things.”
“I’m sorry,” Charles said. “I didn’t realize.”
Edgar stared at him. “Hell, Charles, don’t you ever miss anything?”
“In this case I was singularly blind. It was Melanie who noticed and even then I wasn’t sure.” He hesitated, searching for the right words. “It can’t have been easy learning I was her lover. I’m sorry.”
“Most men were a little in love with Kitty Ashford. Truth to tell, I didn’t have the faintest idea you’d been more than a friend to her until the gossip after her death.” Edgar’s mouth twisted. “She seemed to me to be the purest of women.”
“I don’t excuse my own behavior, but you can hardly blame Kitty. Ashford had forfeited any right to fidelity.”
“He was her husband.”
“He was a rutting bastard who couldn’t keep his hands off the local women.”
Edgar thunked the coffee cup back onto the table. “It wasn’t Kitty who changed things between us. It goes back far longer.”
Charles fixed his gaze on the cream-and-gold patch of carpet in front of him. “When I got word of Mother’s death, I wanted nothing so much as to talk to you. By the time I got home the house was full of relatives and mourning rituals and there was no chance for private conversation. I got through it knowing that as soon as the house settled down for the night we could have one of our midnight conferences.”
The late-night conferences in one or the other of their bedchambers had been a tradition from the time they left the nursery. They would sit talking half the night on the hearth rug, toasting slices of bread with the poker and warming pans of chocolate over the spirit lamp. “But when I knocked at your room, you didn’t answer. You’d bolted the door. We never had a midnight conference again.” Charles looked up at his brother. “You can’t tell me that was because you’d suddenly discovered we view the world through different lenses.”
Edgar walked to the window that overlooked the back garden. He stared at the silvery trunk of a birch tree, though he seemed to be seeing beyond it. “Why does it matter to you so much?”
Charles crossed to the window and put his hands on Edgar’s shoulders. “Because I love you, brother mine. As it happens, there are only a handful of people on this planet I would say that to.” One of whom was held hostage and in danger of losing his life. Another of whom had lied to him from the moment he met her.
Edgar stared down at Charles’s hands on the blue cloth of his coat. A look crossed his face that seemed to Charles to echo his own sense of loss. “Charles—”
“We saw a boy killed today, Edgar. If Giles hadn’t flung himself into the fray, it would have been me. If we’d got tangled up differently, it easily could have been you. God knows what we have facing us when we get back to London. It’s no time to let things fester.”
