He leaned over James’s desk—his desk, now, though he didn’t deserve it—and cradled his head in his hands, fighting to breathe through a throat that felt swollen shut. Images darted through his mind—dark imaginings too easy to conjure of gigantic waves, splintering wood and the screams of drowning men. He squeezed his eyes shut, then pushed back suddenly from the desk, springing to his feet, turning toward the fire.
Bates’s knock sounded at the door.
Nick stared into the flames. “Come in,” he said woodenly.
“Lady Ramsey has arrived, your lordship.”
“Send her in.”
The rustle of yards of fabric and lace preceded Honoria into the study. “Snuffboxes, Nicholas!” his sister declared as she entered the room. “They’re hawking snuffboxes with his likeness on the lid!”
“Oh, for God’s sake.” He gripped the mantel and dropped his head to his forearm. There would be no such thing as a private mourning.
“Is there nothing we can do to preserve the family’s dignity?”
“I’m little match for the adoration of the masses,” Nick said.
“A pox on the masses! James hates snuff.” Her skirts swooshed as she walked up behind him. He felt his sister’s hand on his back, smelled her familiar perfume. “La, Nicholas,” she whispered. “I don’t know how I can survive it.”
He wanted to turn into her arms, but if he did, despair would open a chasm inside him and he would be lost. He returned to the desk instead. “Been all day with Fortescue,” he said. “Nothing’s changed. Not one damned thing.”
She followed him to the desk, all powder and jewels and black lace. Modest, by Honoria’s standards. Grief had dampened her usual high spirits and killed her quick laugh. “I keep having to remind myself it’s really true,” she said quietly. “With him at sea nearly all of the time, everything seems so...usual.”
It did. But it shouldn’t. They’d all been so close, once— God, it had been ages ago. He, James, Robert, riding hell-bent through the countryside, staging mock battles on the lawn, enraging Honoria with their merciless teasing.
Two brothers dead, and they’d all grown so far apart it was as if nothing had changed. “It’s very hard terms for a title,” he spat.
Honoria reached across the desk and took his hand. “Tell me Fortescue had a solution for your problem, at least.”
“Oh, certainly. It’s not as though there isn’t a solution. But I can’t burden the Croston estate with my debts.”
“It’s your estate now. You can do with it as you wish.”
“Indeed. Just as I’ve done with Taggart.” His own barony sat mortgaged to the tune of over forty thousand pounds—an act of desperation as one after another of his shipping investments met with disaster, and that would have been worse were it not for insurance, but that hardly made a difference now. He’d become Bertrand Holliswell’s puppet, and the fact of it made him sick.
“Tempests are not your fault,” Honoria said sternly. “Nor pirates, nor any of the other disasters that befell your ships. La, Nicholas, will you blame yourself next for—” She broke off abruptly.
James’s death. That’s what she’d been about to say. No, at least he was not to blame for that.
He exhaled and looked at the papers on the desk as though they held some kind of answer. “I’ve got to get that bill through, but it looks like the bloody thing has been put off indefinitely.”
“For heaven’s sake, I cannot abide the idea that you’re willing to throw that poor girl to the dogs to satisfy a debt that could be paid with the stroke of a pen.”
“Poor girl?” He stared at her in disbelief. “The woman is practically a pirate.”
“Don’t you remember her at that garden party at Lolly’s, pining after McCutcheon like a lost puppy? No, of course you wouldn’t. Such a spectacle, but then, we were young. We all gave our hearts recklessly at that age.” Honoria sighed. “Poor thing.”
“Poor thing?” Incredulous, Nick put his hands on the desk. “She took a corsair prize!”
“Defending the Barbary reign of terror, brother dear?” She arched a brow at him. “She freed twenty English captives, which is a good deal more exciting than anything I’ve done this season.”
“Will you join your dear friend Lady Pennington aboard that pirate ship? Oh, yes, I can just imagine you with a mop in those dainty hands, swabbing decks.”
“I highly doubt Philomena is swabbing decks. And it is not a pirate ship. The last letter I had from her told of glorious adventure—which, though I’m not well-versed in the law, I know to be perfectly legal.” Her green eyes turned worried. “I only hope the tempest that caught our James did not find them, as well.” She pried one of Nick’s hands off the desk and held it in her own, and he felt like a cad for picking a fight with her—the only sibling he had left. “When the only person standing with you is Yost,” she said, “it’s a good sign you’re going the wrong direction.”
“They’ll come around.”
“Lord Dunscore was well loved.”
He didn’t need her to tell him that. He pulled his hand free and paced back to the fire. “I think he even befriended the parliamentary rats with stray crumbs,” he said in disgust. The terrible thing was Nick had liked him, too. Always ready with a laugh, always up for a night of drink and debauchery, always offering use of his horses, carriage, houses—the man would have done anything for anybody. Poor fellow had tried like hell to ransom his daughter out of Morocco after her capture, but the dey had given her as a gift to a cousin in Algiers who had not been interested in ransom money. It was only when a handful of captives she’d rescued had come home with their tale of a Scottish virago sea captain that anyone knew she had escaped captivity. Lord Dunscore had disappeared up north for months drowning his sorrows. “She broke his heart not coming home,” Nick added.
“But he didn’t disinherit her.”
“In England she never would have inherited in the first place.”
“Be that as it may, the estate is in Scotland, and harridan though she may be, she has inherited. As a matter of principle, it’s not the House of Lords’ place to interfere.”
The irony of Honoria calling someone else a harridan was almost too much. “This has nothing to do with principle. Only with satisfying Holliswell.”
“And marrying his daughter, although you already know my opinion on that.”
“Yes. And I’ll thank you not to repeat it.” It wasn’t enough that Holliswell held Nick’s debt. Holliswell’s daughter held his heart. The moment Nick had set eyes on her, it was clear that the lovely, gentle Clarissa Holliswell was a helpless pawn in Holliswell’s lustful quest for connections. Holliswell wanted the Dunscore title for himself, yes—but failing that, he’d made it clear he would marry Clarissa to even the oldest, most licentious beard splitter in England if the man had the right title.
Baron, Nick had already discovered, was not the right title.
“If this business is keeping you from happiness,” she said, “it has everything to do with principle.”
Dear Honoria, loyal to a fault and impervious to shortcomings. He smiled a little, only to have the rudimentary curve shrivel on his lips. Happiness. It was a ravenous beast, insatiable, incapable of satisfaction no matter how much one fed it.
“Just use the money from the Croston estate,” she said sadly. “The title belongs to you now, and it’s what James would have wanted.”
It was out of the question. “I incurred this debt of my own doing, and I shall discharge it the same way.”