Forever and a Day (27 page)

The duke lowered his gaze. “’Twas nothing,” he mumbled. “’Twas nothing but a damn…fabrication.”

Reopening his eyes, Roderick intently held his father’s gaze. “For something that you wished to burn every time you saw it, ’tis clearly more than a mere fabrication. What was it?” His throat burned in a desperate effort to keep his words and himself calm.

The duke half nodded and eventually murmured, “It pertained to her brother.”

Roderick’s brows rose. “I never knew she had siblings.”

“One. ’Twas a sad story, that.” His father shifted in his seat, adjusting his coat. “His name was Atwood. He and your mother were incredibly close. He was heir to the…Sumner estate and all but ten years old when he disappeared.”

Roderick held his father’s gaze. “What happened to him?”

The duke rubbed at his temple. “Your grandfather had whisked them all out of London and into New York back in…oh, I don’t know, 1800 or so, as he was negotiating investments. Shortly before they were set to return to London…he disappeared. That was the last they had ever seen of him.”

Roderick set a hand against his mouth in disbelief and asked through his hand, “Did they not find anything?”

“No. Not even a body. When they eventually returned to London without him, Atwood’s portraits and all of his belongings were stripped from the home. Your mother managed to confiscate a miniature of him from a servant and carried it with her at all times.… The whole thing…haunted me. It still does.”

His father shifted his jaw and leaned back against his chair. “Many, many years later, she appeared to me clinging Atwood’s portrait whilst I was at breakfast. She…she told me she had a dream about a parchment that had been torn into ten different pieces and that…when she had pieced them all together, it revealed a map of New York City bearing a circled area that showed his location. She claimed that in her dream, she knew without any doubt he was still, in fact, alive. As such, she demanded we purchase every map of New York City we could find that would best match it.”

The duke shook his head. “It was…
illogical
. She spent weeks replicating it. Right down to…tearing it into pieces. I kept telling her she was falling into the realm of superstitious hysteria. But it only got worse. She wouldn’t sleep, she wouldn’t…eat. And all she kept telling me was that she wouldn’t know peace until the matter was resolved. She was pregnant at the time with our third and I was worried. So I told her if she promised to eat and to sleep, that once she’d given birth, we would all go to New York and lay it to rest.” His father’s voice faded. He pressed his fingers against his stubbled chin and lowered his gaze. “Only she never survived the birth, damn her. She never survived. She…left me. She left us.”

Silence pulsed between them.

All of his poor mother’s pent-up hopes of finding her brother, whom she had yearned to love to the very end, had sat up in that damn garret untouched, unsolved and unloved. It was monstrous. “You knew what it meant to her,” he rasped, “and yet you never sought to look into the matter yourself? Even after she died?”

The duke glanced away, struggling to sit up in his chair. “’Twas nonsense I didn’t care to break my heart over. I had two boys left to raise on my own.”

“’Twas
nonsense?
” he echoed, stepping toward the desk. “How could anything that meant so much to her be considered nonsense?”

Roderick leaned toward him, slamming both hands on the smooth mahogany between them. “We are getting that damn map back, even if we have to buy out this bastard’s entire shop and all of New York. When did you dispose of those books?”

His father eyed him. “A few weeks ago.”

“Which means they can still be recovered.”

“If the man hasn’t already sold them all.”

“We’ll ensure he buys them all back. We’ll make it worth his while.” Roderick swiped a hand across his face. “Do you have a name? An address? Anything?”

The duke blew out a pained breath. He glanced up, his features tightening in an effort to remember. “Hatchet. He was this—this…stocky, boisterous fellow who owned a shop somewhere in…New York. Though I don’t remember much else. Your cousin Edwin would know more.”

Roderick pushed himself away from the desk and straightened. With his brother now gone, their family was tragically dwindling into nothingness. It was heart-wrenching. What if the map his mother had created did, in fact, lead to something? What if it led to Atwood? A part of their family would be restored and honored. “I’ll call on Edwin in the morning. The moment I have an address, I intend to leave on the next ship out and retrieve that map in person. I also intend to investigate whether or not the map is true. There must be clues investigators missed. For all we know that map might reopen the investigation into Atwood’s disappearance.”

His father jumped to his feet, sending the chair backward with a clatter. He swayed in an effort to stare him down. “Are you mad? Do you actually intend to run off to the other side of the world looking for clues based off of a…dream?”

Despite the flaring of his own nostrils, Roderick still managed to remain calm. “What if you’re wrong? What if that map leads us to something? Anything? Even a whisper of anything is more than
nothing
. We won’t know unless we put this to rest.”

“No. I am not about to—”

“If you go against me in this, Father, I will never forgive you for not loving your wife enough to oversee her last wish.”

The duke glanced away, his ragged features twisting. Sniffing hard, he glanced down at the empty decanter. A tear traced its way down his weathered cheek.

Setting his shoulders, his father cleared his throat. “You and Yardley were the only reason I survived her death.” The duke leaned heavily into the desk and pointed at him through tears and choked out, “You are all that remains of her. You are the
only
assurance I have that she was even real. You can’t be putting yourself in harm’s way. Because if anything happens to you…I won’t survive it. I will slit my bloody throat and
die
. Do you understand me?”

Reaching out over the desk, Roderick forcefully grabbed ahold of his father’s large hand and squeezed it hard, crushing it against his palm. “I understand you more than you think and I am touched to know I mean so much to you. You mean just as much to me.” Intently holding his father’s gaze, he offered in a choked tone, “But she entrusted that map to me, Father. I intend to uphold her honor as is my right as her son, and I wish to restore what little remains of our family.” Roderick leaned in closer and whispered, “I ask that we do this together. She would have wanted us to. Don’t you think?”

His father released his hand and turned away, stumbling away from the desk. He swiped a shaky hand across the back of his neck and lingered as if battling between a drunken mind and drunken heart.

Do not disappoint me, and above all, do not disappoint her,
Roderick inwardly chanted.
Love her. Love her this one last time.

The duke eventually swung back, his features tightening. “To hell with London and the…time and the…expense. We go. We go and put your mother’s soul to rest.”

It would seem Roderick had been blinded into never seeing the greatness of the man standing before him. Drunk though he was. “Do you still have that miniature? We will need a detailed description of what he looked like when he disappeared. We will need his likeness. At least his coloring, provided he will have aged.”

The duke lowered his gaze and shook his head. “I tucked it into your mother’s hand before she was buried. But I…I’ve seen it enough times. Black hair. Black brows. And blue eyes. Very striking eyes that were so unusually bright in color, they almost looked like…blue glass.”

“We need more than that,” Roderick insisted. “We will have to go to Grandpapa and Grandmama with this. They would be able to provide us a better description as well as any other details pertaining to his disappearance.”

The duke paused and leveled him with a warning gaze, slowly shaking his head from side to side. “No. No.
No
. I don’t want your grandfather involved in this. He must never know.
Never
.”

Roderick blinked and leaned toward him. “I would think he has the right to know. It involves his own son. He could help us.”

The duke continued to stare him down. “No.” He lowered his voice. “That man was responsible for Atwood’s disappearance.”

Roderick stared at him, his breath hitching. “
What?
How so?”

His father glanced away and shrugged. “It wasn’t anything your mother or I could ever prove, even though we repeatedly tried to involve the crown’s investigators throughout the years. They only…brushed it off and were convinced it had been American patriots who had committed the crime. Only it didn’t make sense. In my opinion…given what we are about to do…we tell no one. This way, nothing will impede the reopening of our investigation.”

Sagging both palms against his father’s desk, Roderick hissed out a breath. “God help us if any of this is true.”

“I know,” his father muttered. “Believe me, I know.”

It would seem a map based off of a dream and a rather sorry description of a ten-year-old boy who would no longer be ten
—if he were alive—
was all they had. It already appeared improbable that they were going to find anything. But then again…the boy had been old enough to have known who he had once been. Perhaps that boy was now a man who still remembered what had happened. Regardless, he and his father had money and time on their side.

Not even a day later, Roderick was fitted for a set of mourning bands. He donned one on his arm that day in honor of his brother, swearing it would never leave his arm again, except when he retired at night. With a heavy heart, for he knew it was best, he dismissed his Sophie, who he had dragged all the way over from Paris, and tucked a hundred pounds into her hand, thanking her for being a friend. She assured him he could always find her in Paris should he grow bored. No sooner had he kissed her hand goodbye than he called upon his cousin and had Mr. Hatchet’s shop address in hand. He and his father arranged to have everything packed and ready to leave on the next ship out of Liverpool.

The morning before he was to board the ship that would take them to New York, Roderick visited his brother’s crypt and ardently prayed before it for hours. Tears blinded not only his eyes but his soul. Nothing would change what had come to pass.

When he eventually returned home that afternoon, after having spent five torturous hours lingering before his brother’s crypt, he decided to get drunk along with his father, both of them swearing to each other they would never get drunk again as it solved nothing. But they had a good time doing it. By evening, when Roderick could barely stand, and his father had fallen asleep on a sofa, he called for his carriage and demanded it take him over to Margaret’s town house.

Despite it being long past respectable calling hours, he was admitted the moment he’d given his name and was even asked to wait in the study, as opposed to the drawing room. Whilst waiting for Margaret to appear, he staggered toward his brother’s desk. Gripping the outside edge, he leaned against it and willed himself to stay focused on why he was there.

“Tremayne?”

He stiffened and swiveled toward the direction of Margaret’s choked tone. A slim figure draped in a bombazine gown stood in the shadows, the hallway beyond much too dark to reveal a face. She drifted into the room with determined grace and poise, the golden glow of the candlelight revealing the soft, delicate face of a woman he remembered all too achingly well.