Of Moths and Butterflies (60 page)

“You’ll never see a penny of it, Wyndham,” Archer said to him. “I can promise you that. Not a single farthing.”

“You count yourself heir apparent, do you? It’s yours whatever happens? I think not. I have leverage. You think I’m bluffing, but I have the letter, remember. And I have the family bible, too. I have everything I need to prove—”

“What it proves is that you don’t know when to leave well enough alone,” Sir Edmund said, his temper no longer quite under control. “You haven’t a clue what is going on here, nor is it likely you ever will. You’ve so far failed to notice that your ‘proof’ is missing a few pages. Take it. Do what you want with it. It’s not likely to help you. Nor will I, for that matter. What you’ve gotten so far, from me, from her, it’s all you’re likely to see for some time. You’ve got your own mandates to fulfil, if you remember. And I expect you to see to them!”

Wyndham remained for a moment. Clearly the interview had not produced the results he’d expected.

“I want Charlie gone, do you hear? Today. Tomorrow at the latest. And you can be sure your whore is next. Now go!”

Never had Archer seen a more dangerous look on his cousin’s face as he turned from the room, leaving the doors standing wide. Archer moved to close them, and, securing them, he turned back to his uncle.

“You remain?” Sir Edmund demanded of him.

“Yes.”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“I disagree. I want some answers.”

“Answers?” Sir Edmund echoed. “Your trip did not provide you sufficiently?”

“Hardly.”

Silence followed.

“Well then?”

“My name is not Hamilton?”

Sir Edmund, his gaze piercing but unmoved, did not answer.

“My parents weren’t married. How can my name be—”

“She was with child. I thought I’d do the right thing and make an honest woman of her.”

There was only silence as Archer tried to comprehend this. It wasn’t possible. It made no sense. If it was so, then he wouldn’t have been considered, all these years, the illegitimate nephew. He wouldn’t have been a nephew at all, not by law, at any rate. He would be—

“I don’t believe you,” Archer said—nearly shouted. “There’s no record of your marriage. To anyone. Not ever.” And then it occurred to him. “Those missing pages… Is that what—”

“It was all done very quietly. We went to Scotland. She was not quite well. She didn’t want anyone to know—in case…”

“She was ashamed of you?”

“She was ashamed of herself, dammit! Didn’t you hear me? She was with child!”

Archer turned from his uncle, his hand raking his hair, then turned back. “Why is it you’ve never told me this?”

“My past is none of your business.”

“None of my business? I truly do not understand you. You were married to my mother. My whole life I’ve had a right to your name. Only you’ve never given me that privilege. Instead, I’ve lived with her shame branded upon me. The whispers, the rumours, the leering looks. I’ve born it all, for a quarter of a century. And I bore it unnecessarily. How can you say it’s none of my business?”

“I sacrificed my own comfort to provide for yours, not once but a hundred times, and don’t you forget it!”

“Do you think I’m comfortable now, having contracted a marriage in a name that’s not my own?”

“Easily remedied.”

“How?”

“The very way I’ve been persuading you to do these past weeks. There is no risk, after all, if the marriage is consummated. Wyndham may try to dispute your right yet. But it will not stand if you properly secure her to you. And if you had done so already there might be something to show for it. If your marriage is contestable, it’s as much your fault as my own.”

Archer blinked hard and went on. “And the discrepancy in the documents?”

“What good is a family lawyer, after all, if not to protect the interests of the family? It’s a simple matter.”

“And if she would choose not to have the amendment made?”

“You don’t tell her.”

“So I am to continue the lie by maintaining a name that’s not my own?”

“Change it.”

“I think you fail to see the point, sir.”

Sir Edmund ignored this.

“Were you in love with my mother?” Archer asked him now.

“I thought we’d done with that.”

“You may have finished, sir, but I haven’t. I want to know if you loved her. If you were kind to her. Or if you treated her as you treat—”

“That’s enough!” Sir Edmund said, taking up his portfolio and slamming it down onto the desk.

Archer, frustrated, stood for a moment in silence. “Wyndham is your son?” he asked at last.

“Yes.”

“You were not married to his mother.”

“No, and that’s an end of the history lesson!” The fiery look his uncle cast upon him warned him he had best not press further.

Defeated, disappointed, Archer moved to go.

“You will make a success of tomorrow’s evening?” Sir Edmund called after him.

Archer stopped just within the doorway. “And you will do your part? You will behave with dignity? You will show her the respect she deserves?”

“Are we bargaining?”

“There’s no more bargaining. You will behave as you ought.”

“I will be the essence of gentility. You have my word.”

Archer, doubtful, and all the more so for Sir Edmund’s spiteful tone, bowed and left the library the way he had come, through cold and fog-laden darkness.

RCHER RETURNED TO
his room to find Imogen no longer where he had left her. He withdrew his watch and checked the time. He had made her wait far too long. Standing before the fire, he removed his coat, necktie and waistcoat and threw them on the chair beside the fire. He was loosening the buttons of his now untucked shirt when he stopped again, his attention suddenly arrested by the unfamiliar sound of rustling. He turned to see Imogen ensconced upon his bed, where she had evidently fallen asleep. Though he was surprised, he said nothing, but turned again toward the fire and, taking up the poker, contemplated the addition of a few more coals.

“Are you cold?” she asked him, sleep heavy in her voice.

“No,” he answered. “Not particularly.”

“Then you’d better come to bed.”

He turned to her curiously, questioningly. In response, she arose from where she had been laying and stood, drawing her shawl quite tightly about her shoulders.

“Are
you
cold?”

She shook her head.

Evidently her wrappings were not so much to protect her from chill as from something else—him, presumably. And yet she remained. The look she offered him was a strange one, a mixture of humility and uncertainty, but there was warmth there too. He sat down to remove his boots and met her gaze with a look of his own that changed gradually from one of wonder to one that dared her to remain where she was. Still dressed in his shirt and trousers, he laid down atop the covers, and with his arms folded behind his head, he closed his eyes. His anger spent, he was suddenly exhausted, and the effects of the alcohol, which still remained, conspired to put him to sleep. And at the most inconvenient of times. Were she not in his room, where he’d dreamt of having her a hundred thousand times before, he might have drifted off then and there. But no. No, not yet. Still his eyes remained closed until her movement persuaded him to open them again. She had sat down at the foot of his bed.

“It was Wyndham?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said firmly but quietly, as if she were some fragile insect and any louder noise might scare her off.

“What was he doing?”

He paused a moment before replying, uncertain what to say. “Acting the fool,” was the answer he gave at last. “Trying to get my attention, I think. Or yours. You have seen him there before?”

“Yes. I’m sorry. All this time I thought it was you.”

“You did not tell me he had been in the house. Or that you had spoken with him.”

“Oh,” she said.

“That’s it? ‘Oh’?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want an apology, Gina,” he said sitting up. “I want to know why you didn’t mention that you had spoken to Wyndham during my absence.”

“Well, I hardly had the chance, did I?”

“I suppose not,” he said with a great breath and leaning back against the headboard.

“Will you tell me?” she asked him at last. “What you learned from Sir Edmund? And from your trip into Town? Roger told me your intentions. I do wish you’d spoken of them to me before you’d gone.”

“What would have been the point?”

She blinked with this question but did not answer it.

“You would have told me not to go, not to trouble myself, whether or not you wanted it.”

She looked away from him, toward the covered insects, and from them toward the fire.

They were silent for a moment or two.

“And?” she asked at last and quietly. “Is it possible…to divide yourself?”

“If we walk away, we do it with nothing but what we can carry. I don’t know–” he continued and shook his head. “I don’t know if I can ask you to do it. I don’t know if I can give you the kind of life you deserve. I’ve not made the necessary preparations. Nor have I fostered the connections I ought. I have Claire, but…” And he shook his head again. “I should have done more to prepare. If it were not for the thought that–”

“What?”

“Wyndham.”

“You cannot give up all you might have to him?”

“No, Gina. I cannot give up all that
you
should have to him. All that is rightly yours that I, in my single-minded selfishness, in my negligence, have stolen from you.”

Imogen turned to face him squarely. “Don’t think of that,” she said. “You can’t think of that. I never wanted it, remember.”

“Because I was not man enough, I’ve lost it to my uncle. I might have it again, for you. For us. I might fight for it.”

“No. Don’t think of it. Please.”

No. He had known her answer already. Still, he regretted it. “To see Wyndham get it, though, it’s as much as to say he had married you in my stead, and I cannot–” He stopped and cleared his throat. The thought of it, the very idea… He contemplated the room. So far he had told her nothing, and still she sat there waiting for the answer to her question. He was not yet sure he had the answers to his own. To look at her, just sitting there. And within arm’s reach. Were he to take her now… But if she would not have chosen this—if she would not choose it for herself, was he not then trapping her all over again? How had it come to this? He, once the moth to her flame. She, now his specimen in glass. He looked away, toward that forgotten corner of his room, where sat a not quite forgotten collection. He saw them, uncovered, the Atlas moth propped against the wall and watching him.

“You found them,” he said, his voice not quite as steady as he would like it.

“Yes. I found them.” She nodded toward the Blue Morpho, resting now on the table beside his bed.

Lifting it from its place beside him, he examined it. He prized it more for the association it held with her than for anything else.

Leaning forward, Imogen took the butterfly from his hand. She laid it down, the brown side facing up, and he wondered at her purpose. He looked at it, and found that he could not take his eyes from it. It had quite suddenly occurred to him, that, for all the hope he had placed in himself, there had been far more in his heart for her. If she had failed to realise that hope, was it not his fault?

“I’m afraid our way will be difficult, whatever we decide to do,” he said, at last finding the courage to speak.

“Yes.”

“If you tell me you wish to do this thing, that you wish for me to separate myself from my uncle, then I’ll do it. For you, Imogen, I think I would do anything. But it is a risk, and possibly a greater one than I can ask you to make. It must be your decision. Yet there is, at this point, just as much risk in staying, I fear. At the very least we will have to contend with my uncle’s enduring capriciousness and resentment. And we will have to be mindful of Wyndham.”

“He’s Sir Edmund’s son.”

“Yes,” he answered, surprised. “How did you know?”

She didn’t answer right away, but looked a trifle nervous.

“He told you, I suppose.”

“It was the only explanation I could come to, Archer. He’s always about. Sir Edmund doesn’t seem overly fond of him, yet there is an air of intimate familiarity in their relationship. Then, when I found him in Sir Edmund’s room... I don’t know. He said you were not the undisputed heir, and so—”

“Yes, I see,” he said, leaning back once more against the headboard.

“And you?” she asked.

The tremor in her voice stirred that familiar gnawing. He understood her real question, the one she dared not ask outright. He answered her the only way he could think to do.

“I’m to inherit a title,” he said. “More than anything else, Sir Edmund wishes to preserve it. The money, the house, the rest of it, Wyndham may dispute. He believes he has the right. At least he has the power to force Sir Edmund’s hand. The title, though… It is to go to me.” He shook his head to indicate his own disbelief.

“Sir Edmund is your—”

“He was married to my mother.”

“He is your father.”

“He’s not my father!” he said, flinging the words at her. He flung himself from the bed as well, and taking up the butterfly, moved to replace it on the table from whence she had taken it.

“But—”

He rounded on her. “What!”

She did not speak.

“What, Imogen?” he said in a tone only slightly more amiable.

“It doesn’t make sense. If he married her, then why aren’t you—”

“It
doesn’t
make sense! It never has and it never will! I am his bastard of a nephew and nothing more! He could have claimed me as his son and he didn’t!” And in an uncharacteristic display of violence, he threw the butterfly, which fell and smashed upon the floor just before the fireplace.

Silence reigned in the aftermath of shattered glass and raised voices. He dared to look at her. He had expected to see her teary eyed and frightened. She was pale; this was worse. But she did not appear to be afraid of him. Not now when he was nearly beyond his own control. He turned away and examined himself in the mirror.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said at last. And then, after another long silence: “Tell me what to do.” He turned to look at her, to receive her answer.

It was nothing more than a whisper. “I can’t.”

“Can’t you? This is your life, too, now.”

“But as you said, I would not tell you to break your ties, from your responsibility, from all you stand to inherit, whether I wanted you to do it or not.”

“And do you?”

“To be honest with you, I don’t know.”

“Great day, what a mess this is!” He turned from her again and began to pace the floor before her. “If I could do this all over...”

“You regret?” she asked, and she felt her heart constrict.

“From beginning to end, Gina, I regret the whole bloody thing.”

That was it, then. The end of hope. What use was there fighting for that which he wished had never happened? And how could she tell him her secret now? She couldn’t. She would not give him one more thing to be sorry of.

“Tell me,” he said, facing her squarely but not quite looking at her. “I have used you, I have made demands of you, I captured you, as you said, with no will of your own, trapped you as some hopeless, helpless animal. Because I knew that’s what you were.”

These words stung like accusations, but she knew he had not yet finished.

“But I told myself I was doing the right thing. I convinced myself that if I would not comply, Sir Edmund might try it upon another.”

“Another?”

“He had threatened as much. I could not bear the idea.”

She waited for the explanation. At last it came.

“Wyndham was as willing as I, after all.”

“Wyndham?” she demanded. “I would never have accepted him. No one could ever have made me. How can you think it?” She paused then, but he had no answer. “How can you think it for a moment?”

“But he was not my only incentive, was he? Barrett did not deserve you. I was determined to keep you from him. And yet you trust him, love him as perhaps you have loved no other. He understood you like I can never hope to do. I was wrong on that point. Perhaps he might have become the reformed rake. The Galahad you so desire.”

“I never said that. You know I never said that.”