“You remember I said all that?” Jessie said, a dark red eyebrow cocked up.
“Certainly. I remember every word you’ve ever uttered, my sweet.”
Jessie made a gagging sound that reduced her four children to giggles.
James felt both immense sadness and joy in that moment. Evidently Jason had finally come to grips with the past.
“Uncle Jason is prettier than Aunt Glenda,” Constance said and grinned, showing a missing front tooth. “When she’s not staring at him, she’s looking in the mirror, trying to figure out how to make herself look more like him. I told her once to give up. She threw her hairbrush at me.”
James cleared his throat. “You’ll make your uncle Jason blush, Connie, so let’s move along. Marcus and the duchess were here last year, and North and Caroline Nightingale the year before. Yes, it’s our turn to go to England and visit with everyone, your family included, Jase. I want to see if my wife swoons when she meets your twin, and you’ve told the children so many stories about Hollis, I know they’re expecting him to deliver stone tablets to them. Ah, and your father and mother, of course.”
“But they talk funny there,” said Benjamin. “Like Uncle Jason. I don’t want to go to this place.”
“Think of it as an adventure,” said his mother.
“Yes, that’s it exactly, Ben,” said Jason. He was thinking it would be an adventure for him as well as he sat back in his chair and laced his fingers over his lean belly. “All my family will welcome you as you welcomed me.” He paused, looked at James and Jessie, shrugged. “I want to go home. I’ll be thirty years old next January.”
“That’s still only twenty-nine so you’re not that old, Uncle Jason,” Benjamin said. “When you’re as old as Papa, then you can go back there.”
“Your father is only thirty-nine, not all that great an age,” Jessie said, then paused and blinked. “I’m nearly thirty-one, more than a year older than you, Jason. Good heavens, how the time leaps away from one.”
Jason said, “Do you know I have a pair of twin nephews nearly three years old now, and I’ve never seen them?”
“Yes,” Jessie said. “They look like their father, which means they look like you too.”
Jason nodded. “My brother wrote that meant yet another generation looked like my aunt Melissande.” James had written so amusingly about how it drove their father mad, that Jason easily pictured his twin’s smile and his father’s face as well. So many letters over the years, and he’d only begun really answering three years before. For the first two years he’d been here, he’d written acknowledgments, nothing important, nothing that really meant anything, if indeed anything did mean anything back then. But things had slowly begun to change. He’d begun to see behind the words in the letters that arrived weekly from his family, begun to feel again what they meant to him, and his letters had grown longer and, perhaps, richer, because he himself was now in them.
“Yes,” Jessie said. “We know. I feel we know all of your family very well indeed. It will be like seeing dear friends.”
Jason hadn’t realized that he’d spoken about his family all that much.
Alice said, “But none of your family have ever come here, Uncle Jathon. Why haven’t they come? Don’t they like you? Did they thend you away?”
“No, Alice, they all wanted to come to visit me. The truth is, I asked them not to come. And no, no one sent me away.” He paused a moment. “The truth is, I sent myself away.”
“But why?” Jonathan asked, sitting forward, hands on the table since he had no more bacon to slip to Old Corker.
Jason said slowly, “Some very bad things happened five years ago, Jon, and I was responsible for them. Only me.”
“You killed a man in a duel, Uncle Jason?” Ben asked, eyes shining, nearly ready to leap out of his chair.
“Sorry, Ben, no. What I did was worse. I brought evil to my family, and that evil nearly destroyed them.”
“You brought the Devil home, Uncle Jathon?”
“That’s close enough, Alice. Fact was, I couldn’t stay, couldn’t bring myself to find anything good in my life there. I couldn’t face all the people I’d endangered, and so I asked your parents if I could come here and learn all about running a stud farm.”
Jessie knew the children didn’t understand-not that she understood all that much herself-and, knowing they had a dozen questions to fire at him, she said quickly, “You’ve helped us more than we’ve taught you. And even though James and I have tried our best to fill up this blasted house”-she paused a moment, waving her hand to encompass her four children-“there was more than enough room for you.”
“Oh no,” Jason said. You’ve taught me endlessly.”
“Don’t be a dolt,” James said, then raised his hand when he saw that all four children wanted to speak at once. “No, no, children, be quiet. No more arguments to try to make your uncle Jason feel guilty about leaving you. He’s obviously made up his mind, and we will all respect his decision. You will not ask him any more questions. No, Jon, I see that busy brain of yours working hard. Let me repeat, you won’t ask questions and you won’t make him feel guilty about leaving.” He paused a moment, smiled toward Jason. “Besides, we’ll visit him in England. And you want to know something else? He’ll come back for visits. He won’t be able to help himself-he has to try again to beat your mother in a race.”
“But why didn’t you want your family to come thee you, Uncle Jathon?” Alice asked. She was sitting on a pile of six books so she could reach the table, the top one being a huge volume that held an article by Jason’s brother, James, Lord Hammersmith, on a huge orange ball of gasses that had glowed brightly in Venus’s acrid northern hemisphere three nights running the previous April.
Alice ’s father opened his mouth to scold her, but Jason said quickly, “No, it’s all right, James. That’s a good question, Alice, and I want to answer it. I want all of you to understand that my family didn’t want me to leave. They didn’t blame me for what happened. They should have, but they didn’t.”
“What did happen?” Jonathan asked and James Wyndham rolled his eyes.
“Just know that it was bad, Jon, that my father, Hollis, and my twin could have been killed, and that it was all my fault. Now, they all wanted to come, but you see…” He paused a moment, trying to find the right words. “The thing was, I wasn’t ready to see them. To look at them was to see my own blindness, I suppose.” Badly said, but close enough.
James said, “No more, children. No more.”
Jessie rose from her chair and clapped her hands. “That’s right, you will now hold your tongues, as impossible as I know that is. Uncle Jason has made up his mind. Leave him alone about this. All of you know what you’re supposed to do after breakfast, so go do it and no complaints, if you please. James, Jason, if you two gentlemen will come with me into the parlor.”
Jessie Wyndham faced her husband and the young man she’d come to love like a brother. “Now, Jason, it will be all right. I doubt the children will leave you alone, but feel free to tell them to shut their traps. That’s up to you. Now, it’s April the fourth. It will take you two weeks to get home. We will come to England to visit you in August. What do you think of that, James? Can we get away then?”
James nodded. “August it is. Funny how both your twin and I share the same name.”
Jason nodded. “It made me feel quite odd for a good six months saying my brother’s name to another man’s face.” He searched both their faces now, faces that had become so dear to him over the years. “I don’t know if I’ve really told you how very much you mean to me, you and the children. I am of no blood relation to you, but you didn’t hesitate to make me part of your family, to teach me. And you, Jessie, to beat the dirt off my heels in racing, laughing merrily all the while, no concern at all to the continued bruising of my fragile male self.”
“That’s because James has the biggest fragile male self in all of Baltimore, and yours is paltry in comparison.”
James said, “We won’t talk about huge female selves. Now, Jason, you became part of the family very quickly, but the rest of that is nonsense. Everything we had to teach you, you learned in the first year. You are magic with horses, they respond to you on an almost human level. It’s as if they know you’re there for them, that you will do whatever they need.” James shrugged. “It’s difficult to put into words, but I know any horse racing or breeding you do in England will be a success.”
Jason stared at him, nonplussed.
“That’s right, Jason,” Jessie said. “Now, when you go back, where do you plan to settle?”
“Near Eastbourne, near my father’s home, Northcliffe Hall. Since my father forced my grandmother to move into the Dower House five years ago, James and Corrie and their twins stayed on at Northcliffe.” He paused a
