He’d had no idea Freddie was capable of swearing, either.

Freddie stopped, his breaths hard and heavy.

“I’m sorry, Freddie.” Vere could not meet his eyes. He stared at the desk behind Freddie’s back. “I’m sorry.”

“You are sorry? I used to cry like a frigging fountain whenever I thought of you. Did you ever think of that? Did you even care about the people who loved you?”

His words were shards of glass in Vere’s heart. He had tried to spend as much time away from Freddie as possible in the months following his accident, but there had been no mistaking Freddie’s devastation, the tentative hope at the beginning of each new meeting fracturing into splinters of despair.

And now the moment of reckoning had come. Now Freddie saw him for what he truly was.

“And I have never let anyone call you an idiot,” Freddie snarled. “I almost came to blows with Wessex over that. But my God, you are. You are such a sodding idiot.”

He was. God, he was. A sodding idiot and a selfish bastard.

“It was as if you had died. The person who was you was gone. And I had all this grief that I couldn’t even speak of, except maybe to Lady Jane or Angelica, because everyone kept telling me that I should be thankful you were still alive. And I was, and then I would look at this stranger who had your face and your voice and miss you desperately.”

Fresh tears rolled down Vere’s face.

“I’m sorry. I was fixated on Mater’s murder and Pater’s guilt and I was furious you didn’t tell me anything—”

Freddie clamped his hand on Vere’s arm. “How do you know about them?”

“I heard Pater on his deathbed, trying to bully the rector to absolve him of the murder.”

Freddie’s expression changed. He walked away, poured himself a full glass of cognac, and emptied half the glass in one gulp. “For a moment I thought Lady Jane or Angelica told you.”

“Angelica knows too?”

“I would have told only Angelica, but she was away that summer with her family.” Freddie thrust his hand into his hair. “But I don’t understand. What does your knowing what happened to Mater have to do with your act?”

“I’ve been an investigative agent for the Crown, as Lady Jane had been in her day. I thought that was how I would be able to find a measure of peace. And the idiocy was a guise, so nobody would take me seriously.”

Freddie spun around. “My God! So when you saw Mr. Hudson injecting Lady Haysleigh with the chloral, you didn’t stumble upon it by accident.”

“No.”

“And Mr. Douglas, you were investigating him too?”

“Yes.”

Freddie emptied the rest of his cognac. “You could have told me. I would have taken your secret to my grave. And I would have been so proud of you.”

“I should’ve. But I was still seething at you for not telling me—for depriving me of any chance I had to punish Pater.” Vere cringed at the rampant immaturity his words revealed—and the narrowness of his views. Anger and obsession had been for him the only acceptable reactions to the truth. “I seethed for weeks. Maybe months. And when I’d finally calmed down some it seemed that you’d already made your peace with the new me.”

Most of the angry red had faded from Freddie’s cheeks. He shook his head slowly. “I never completely made my peace with the not-you. And I wish you’d come to me; then I could have told you that Pater didn’t need you to punish him: He was in hell already. You should have heard him that night. He begged for three hours, cowering under his counterpane all the while. I had to sit down because I got so tired of standing.”

“But he never showed the slightest remorse.”

“It was his tragedy: He stewed in so much fear without the least understanding that he could and should repent. That he even brought this up with the rector tells me he was terrified of eternal damnation. I pity him.”

Vere braced his hand against the side of a bookcase. “Did you know that I envied you, Freddie? You were able to move on, whereas I wouldn’t and couldn’t let go. I’ve always prided myself on my cleverness—but it is an empty cleverness. How I wish I had some of your wisdom instead.”

Freddie sighed. When he looked at Vere again, there was a deep sympathy in his eyes. Vere almost had to look away; he didn’t deserve Freddie’s sympathy.

“What has it been like for you all these years, Penny?”

Vere blinked back further tears. “It’s been all right and it’s been terrible.”

Freddie was about to say something, then he started. “My God, does Lady Vere know?”

“She does now.”

“And does she still like you?”

The anxiety in Freddie’s voice made Vere’s throat tighten once more. He didn’t deserve Freddie’s concern either.

“I can only hope.”

“I think she will,” said Freddie, his eyes once again shining with that clear earnestness Vere loved so well.

Vere caught his brother in an embrace. “Thank you, Freddie.”

He didn’t deserve Freddie’s forgiveness today, but one day he hoped to. One day he would make himself equal to it.

* * *

Mrs. Douglas sent Elissande telegrams. She dispatched one upon arriving at each new destination to assure Elissande of her well-being. An enthusiastic paragraph arrived after Vere took her to the Savoy Theatre to watch a comic opera called The Yeomen of the Guard, which she adored even though she was strong enough to sit through only half of the first act. And one very brief cable simply said, Mrs. Green allowed me a spoonful of ice cream. I had forgotten how divine it is.

Her telegrams also brought news. The first significant piece of news came after she and Vere had met with Douglas’s solicitors. In a will that dated to the beginning of the decade, Douglas had left nothing to his wife and his niece and had instead bequeathed everything to the Church. Elissande had chuckled. Truly, he was nothing if not consistent in his spite.

A companion cable came from Vere, explaining that not inheriting Douglas’s estate might be a blessing in disguise—Douglas had borrowed heavily against the worth of the diamond mine and could prove to have nothing but debts to bequeath. The Church’s lawyers would have a trying time with this particular gift horse.

A cable the next day was much more jubilant: Vere had located the jewels that Charlotte Edgerton had bequeathed to Mrs. Douglas, but which Douglas had immediately confiscated. A thousand pounds’ worth of jewels.

Elissande reread the cable several times. A thousand pounds.

The morning after Exeter, when she woke up, both Douglas’s diary and the chest were gone from her room. Where the chest had been, there was an elegant ebony box, in which the mementos from Charlotte and Andrew Edgerton were neatly stowed. In her dressing gown, Elissande had stood before the box, her fingertip grazing its edges, and hoped that the gift of the box meant what she wanted it to mean. But her husband had left soon thereafter, with only a solemn word to her to look after herself.

She had not been able to do much in the two days since his departure, except to try to come to terms with the fact that he had not changed his mind. The last time she had been furious; this time she only grieved. She did not want to lose the man who had held her hand when she most needed him.

There were ways she could justify remaining longer at Pierce House: She herself first must recover; then the news must be broken very gently to her mother; after that they must take their time and choose where to go.

But she had already begun to turn on those reasons. If she must leave—and she must—this was as good a time as any, with you are a diamond of the first water still echoing faintly in her ears, rather than tarrying until they wore out their welcome.

Now, with a thousand pounds at her disposal, they could ponder their eventual destination from anywhere—an inn, a house for let, the Savoy Hotel itself, if they were so inclined. And there was no gentle way of breaking it to her mother, was there? No matter how long she beat about the bushes, the truth of the matter would not dismay Mrs. Douglas any less.

She directed the maids to pack their belongings—it was less painful to delegate the task—while she tried to cheer herself. A new place, new people, and a brand-new life—those were the things that would have thrilled her during her captive days at Highgate Court. But one look out of the window to the fading but still beautiful garden and her heart would pinch with how much she loved this place, this life, and this man who had taken her mother to see The Yeomen of the Guard at the Savoy Theatre.

Without quite thinking, she left the house and walked to the spot above the River Dart where she had come across her husband on his long hike. She supposed when they were long gone, he would still walk these acres of rolling countryside, still stop occasionally on a slope to gaze down at the river, his hat by his side, leather patches on the sleeves of his tweed coat.

And she ached for his long miles of loneliness.

* * *

When she returned to the house, she went to her husband’s study.

Within the first few days of her arrival in Devon, she had seen a book in the study entitled How Women May Earn a Living. Then it had seemed a bizarre tome to come across among the collection of a man who never needed to earn a living; now she’d become accustomed to the broad, deep, and eclectic compilation of knowledge he had at his fingertips.

As she searched the shelves for the book, her eyes landed on the corner of a postcard that had become wedged between two books. She pulled out the postcard and gasped. The sepia-toned image was all pounding ocean and high cliffs. Capri, her mind immediately decided, before she saw the words at the bottom left corner of the postcard: Exmoor Coast.