Page 43

“No,” Victor said, resuming his exercise with renewed determination. “I inherited relatively recently.”

“From your father? My father died when I was four. Do you miss your father? I miss mine. Though, as I said, I don’t really remember him.”

Victor faltered slightly, the question striking closer to home than he cared to admit. “At times.”

“Mama says it’s all right to be sad about people who are gone, but that we must also live for those who are still here. That’s why she started the Athena Society after Papa… ah,left. Do you have a society too?”

“No.”

“Perhaps you should start one! I could help. I’m very good at organizing things! My collections are most carefully arranged!”

“What do you collect?” Victor found himself asking, immediately regretting the lapse.

Tristan’s face lit up. “Oh! Everything interesting. Feathers, unusual stones, interesting beetles—though Mama makes me keep those in the garden shed—and maps! I love maps most of all. Do you have maps of your naval travels? Were there sea monsters? Did you fight pirates?”

Victor couldn’t help but smile faintly at the boy’s enthusiasm. “I have some charts, yes. No sea monsters, I’m afraid, though there were… encounters with enemies.”

“Did you fight them with swords? Or cannons? Were you ever wounded? Do you have scars? Heroic ones, I mean.”

“Cannons primarily. And yes.” Victor touched his side unconsciously, where a French bullet had found its mark during a particularly brutal engagement.

“I knew it!” Tristan exclaimed excitedly. “You really are like the heroes in my books. Does the Marquess of Knightley have scars too?”

“Oh, Lord Knightley has his share,” Victor confirmed, thinking of his friend’s nightmares, the ones that still plagued them both.

The questions continued relentlessly as Victor completed his routine, ranging from inquiries about the estate’s gardens to detailed interrogations about naval vessels and the proper way to fence with cutlasses.

Surprisingly, Victor found himself responding more and more, his answers growing longer as Tristan’s genuine curiosity wore down his defenses.

When the promised twenty minutes elapsed, Victor checked his pocket watch. “Time’s up, boy.”

To his surprise, Tristan nodded without argument. “Thank you for letting me stay, Your Grace. And for answering my questions! Mama says I ask too many sometimes.”

“Your mother is a wise woman,” Victor replied, then immediately wished he hadn’t invoked the Dowager Countess.

Tristan bent to give Argus a final pat. “Goodbye, noble Argus. I shall visit again if His Grace permits it.”

The hopeful look he gave Victor was damnably hard to resist.

Victor inclined his head slightly. “Perhaps. With proper permission next time.”

“Yes, Sir! Thank you, Sir!” Tristan beamed, then turned to go. At the entrance to the clearing, he paused and looked back. “Your Grace? I think you would like Mama’s lakes.”

“Lakes?” Victor echoed, puzzled.

“The ones she paints. They’re all over her studio now!”

Before Victor could respond to that bewildering statement, the boy was gone, leaving him standing there by himself.

He rubbed his palm over his face. “Is this what I have to endure for the rest of my darned days?”

And, although it was a rhetorical question, he did not like the conclusion his mind gave him either.

* * *

“The heroine’s decision to flee in the middle of the night was nothing short of lunacy,” Annabelle declared, snapping the book shut with dramatic flair. “Ha! How ludicrous. Any woman with sense would have secured funds first!”

Emma hid a smile behind her teacup as the Athena Society erupted into an animated debate. The drawing room at Cuthbert Hall hummed with the passionate discourse of nine women, their collective intelligence a formidable force that would have stunned most of the gentlemen who dismissed their little club as mere female frivolity.