Taking a deep breath, she straightened her shoulders and adjusted her mask.
The club’s policy was to be open every week. Perhaps the buccaneer would return then. Perhaps she might see him once more, and they could talk, as they had tonight.
Her breath came faster.
In all her time here, he was the only guest who ever truly caught her attention, the only guest she’d wanted for her own selfish pleasure.
Doesn’t matter. Flirtation is all we can ever share. The establishment—and the profits it generated—was too important to her to throw anything away on a casual encounter.
Drawing herself up straight, she continued on with the rest of her night. There were responsibilities that needed tending—keeping the refreshments circulating, ensuring the staff’s well-being and the guests’ safety, maintaining the club’s spotlessness—a hundred tiny tasks she had to supervise. Yet, like a child sneaking tastes of her parents’ wine, she permitted herself brief thoughts of the buccaneer.
It would be a struggle not to grow drunk on him.
One year later
Tom waited at the foot of the back stairs, his body both heavy with grief and impelled into motion.
For six weeks, he’d kept vigil at his father’s bedside, barely sleeping, eating only when forcibly urged to by the physician, and hardly stirring from the ducal bedchamber. But for all that, for all the physician had bled Father and applied every technique that modern medical science had devised . . . the old duke had died anyway.
Tom could still hear the rattle and rasp of his father’s breath stopping. It was that dreadful silence that heralded the end. The man that had both berated and coddled Tom had departed the earth, leaving behind a chasm that might never be filled. That chasm yawned open within Tom. Its emptiness threatened to devour him whole.
Feeling his shoulders bow beneath the weight of grief, he struggled to straighten them. Today was for Maeve, and he had to have strength for both of them.
Only that morning, news of his father’s death had been printed in the pages of the Times and Hawk’s Eye, revealing to the world the loss of one of England’s most staunch defenders of traditional values. They had said nothing about how the late duke preferred roast potatoes every Tuesday, or that, despite the fact that he continually bemoaned his son’s carousing and wildness, he used to give Tom books of adventure stories on his birthdays, even into adulthood. On Tom’s bookshelf in his private study, he had a copy of Guy Mannering, with a typically terse “To My Son on His 32nd Birthday—Yr Father” inscribed on the inside cover.
None of that had been in the papers. There were aspects of the Duke of Northfield that no one but those closest to him would ever know.
But in the Times, there had been a paragraph that, hours later, Tom could recite from memory. It had burned itself into his mind, and into his heart.
We cannot help but speculate whether or not the new duke will take up his late father’s ideology and principles. His Grace, the previous duke, has left a sizable void in the nation’s political landscape. Further, it is a known truth that the younger gentleman in question has led a somewhat undisciplined existence. Many await his next steps with bated breath. Shall he continue in his riotousness, or will he take up the mantle left behind by his father, and preserve England’s established institutions?
We cannot foretell.
God above, but if that wasn’t a burden to carry. The eyes of the country were on him. And all he wanted to do was run.
But now that he was duke, he could use his might in the advancement of progressive causes, as he’d longed to do when he was only the heir. Others might expect him to be a duplicate of his father, but he didn’t have to be. He could be his own man with his own beliefs, his own goals.
A step quietly creaked. He glanced up, and saw Maeve, dressed in mourning black bombazine with a jet broach at her throat, a veil covering her face and a black handkerchief twisted in her fingers.
His heart plunged to see his sister, a girl of just nineteen, so somberly garbed. She ought to be dressed in bright, springtime green or the yellow of daffodils, with a coral necklace about her neck and her pretty face rosy from the heat of a ballroom.
He smoothed a hand over the dark band encircling his arm and ran his finger along the length of his black neckcloth. Unlike Maeve, his mourning was limited to smaller signifiers—in every way.
Ballrooms were forbidden to her, as were color and joy. As if she, or Tom, could ever feel joy again in the wake of their father’s death.
Maeve’s steps were slow as she descended the stairs. When she reached the bottom, she paused, holding the newel post. Her veil stirred as she let out a long exhale.
“Are you certain about this?” Tom asked. “You don’t need to tax yourself.”
“I need to go,” his sister said. Her words were steadier than her gait. “I need to see him.”
“As you like.” But Tom wrapped a sheltering arm around her shoulders as he guided her toward the back door.
Tenderness and protectiveness rose up within him when she leaned against him. He was rocketed back to when he’d been a lad of thirteen, cradling his newborn sister in his arms, frozen with terror that he might drop the delicate thing and have her shatter into tiny fragments at his gangly feet.
His mother hadn’t been able to keep any other baby she’d conceived. All his siblings had either died in utero or within a day of their births. No one had been certain whether or not Maeve would join her departed siblings in the churchyard. Yet she’d made it through the first week, and when Tom had finally been allowed to see and hold her, he’d vowed then—just as he vowed now—that he would safeguard her for the rest of his days.
They reached the door that opened to a narrow, walled yard, and Tom pushed it open to escort Maeve out. Thick gray clouds smeared across the sky, and a cutting wind blew into the yard.
Maeve tilted her head back and inhaled deeply. “I missed this.”
“The dreadful weather?”
“Being outside. I haven’t set foot outside the house in three weeks and five days.”
He’d had to report back to her about the funeral and burial, as she and their mother had been obliged by the rules of polite society that such a sorrowful ordeal would tax their fragile emotions overmuch.
A corner of Tom’s mouth lifted in a humorless smile. He had been the one who could barely stand beside the open grave as the casket had been lowered. He had swallowed countless tears, trying to manfully force them back rather than permit himself the luxury of open grief. His throat still burned with gulping back sobs. Maeve and their mother, Deirdre, were free to show their sorrow—so long as they did so within the confines of Northfield House. Open displays of anyone’s emotions, be they male or female, were distressing and gauche.
No one seemed permitted to indicate that they had feelings, especially not messy, complicated feelings that threatened to rip one apart from the inside out.
But he had to be strong. For Maeve, for their mother.
“How does it feel to be in the open air again?” he asked.
She was silent for a moment. “Cold.”
“We can go back.”
She shook her head. “I don’t mind. It proves that I’m still alive.”
The unspoken words but he isn’t hung in the air.