It didn’t matter. If you were a bull and you happened to find yourself in a china shop, there was nothing to do but head for the exit and try not to knock over any of the displays on your way out. Amanda had understood that years ago, and nothing had changed since then.
“I will,” Amanda said.
It wasn’t precisely a lie. She was sure that Free would send another package one day, that Amanda would be forced to return.
And Miss Johnson and Mrs. Marshall would likely get a good day’s worth of gossip abusing her manners afterward, so it was a fair trade for all the broken china. She might have been able to shrug it off.
But there was one small thing that made this all more than humiliating. Miss Johnson smiled as if she had meant her invitation. Her flaxen hair shone in the morning sun, and her lips were perfectly pink as she said her good-byes.
Things would be bad enough as they were. But it was just Amanda’s bad luck that she had a taste for porcelain dolls.
SEVERAL WEEKS AGO, EDWARD had visited his brother. Tonight, he returned to James’s office once more. The room was almost precisely as it had been when last he’d come. Papers were strewn across the desk; volumes on land care and finance sat on the bookshelves lining the walls. The day’s newspapers had been stuffed in the rubbish bin.
This time though, he found James already in their father’s place at the desk. His brother opened the glassed door to the outside with a suspicious frown and gestured for Edward to sit across from him. “Why are you here, Ned?” he asked skeptically.
“I still prefer Edward,” Edward managed mildly. “But never mind that. I haven’t come back to bicker. I realized that I owe you an apology.”
If anything, that made James more suspicious. His nose wrinkled in obvious distrust. But what he said instead was, “Nonsense. Water under the bridge and all that, surely.”
“No.” Edward put on his best false earnestness. “It’s not nonsense. I assumed that you’d not want to see or hear from me based on your actions seven years ago. But I feel I have misjudged you. I never gave you a chance to tell me why you did what you did. That was unfair. Unbrotherly, even. I assumed the worst of you, but I can see now that I was mistaken.”
His brother was still suspicious; Edward could tell from the set of his jaw, the flare of his nostrils. But James was too rooted in the rules of polite conversation to accuse Edward of lying, and that meant he responded to his words at face value. Good. Making a man speak a lie was the first step toward making him believe a lie.
“Right.” James blinked. “Yes.” His words came reluctantly. “Of course I never wanted you…harmed. Ahem.” He steepled his fingers. “It was for your good, you understand? It was only for your good. You sent that urgent letter stating that there was an army marching on the scene, that you needed our assistance to get away. And Father had sent you there for punishment, right? You hadn’t come around yet. That was all that was on my mind. I promise, I never, absolutely never, intended you to perish.”
The hell of it was, Edward suspected James was telling something that looked suspiciously like the truth. He had no doubt studiously told himself that he didn’t intend for his brother to die. He’d justified it all to himself—saying that Edward, by refusing to bow to their father, had essentially made himself an outcast. He was just like an impostor.
No doubt he’d justified his lie to the consul a hundred times over the years. The fact that Edward could have died, and James stood to inherit the viscountcy as a result… No doubt, he’d told himself that those things did not matter to him.
It was a lie, of course. But men lied to themselves all the time, telling themselves they were far better than they were.
Edward tried not to fall into that same trap.
“I understand that,” Edward said with what he hoped was an approximation of brotherly warmth.
“I wept when you could not be recovered,” James told him.
Edward was sure that was true, too. James would no doubt have felt very sorry. If he hadn’t, he would have been forced to admit he was a vile betrayer who’d secretly hoped his brother would die. No man saw himself as a villain. James had done what he’d needed to do, and then he’d lied to himself about his actions.
“I haven’t been fair to you.” Edward reached across the table and clasped his brother’s hand in his. James’s hands were bare; Edward hadn’t removed his glove, and the contrast of pale skin against black leather, of bumbling incompetence against smooth, slick falsehoods, seemed to set the mood for what was to come.
“I realized my mistake,” Edward said, “when I read about Stephen Shaughnessy in the paper.”
His brother’s mouth twitched slightly.
“You really did have a plan for him. But you went to all that trouble to undo it, just for me. Because I asked.”
Edward knew that James had done nothing to undo his plans. James knew that James had done nothing. But James didn’t know that Edward knew. It took James all of three seconds, spent blinking wide-eyed at that canard, to swallow up the bait.
“Why, yes,” James said. “Yes, I did.”
Lies worked best when you could invest the target in the lie itself. James wanted to believe he was a good person. He wanted to believe he could be forgiven for abandoning Edward on the eve of war. He wanted to believe himself an honorable fellow who would never welsh on an agreement—and so when Edward handed him the chance to believe it, he grasped hold of the possibility.
But telling oneself lies was a dangerous business. One started to believe them. In James’s case, believing that Edward was his brother in anything but blood would be the most foolish lie of all.
“It was difficult,” James said. “You and the Shaughnessys… I always felt that they stole my older brother from me.” That was said so bitterly that Edward suspected it was true. “Giving up on my plans for Stephen was difficult. But if it would bring my brother back, well, there’s a pleasant symmetry to it, eh?”
There was no symmetry, pleasant or otherwise. Even if James had been telling the truth, he’d have acted because he wished to keep Edward away and take what should have been his birthright.
But Edward smiled and pretended to be touched. “That means a great deal to me, James. A great deal. I’ve not been fair to you. Listen to me now—all these years spent apart, and I never even asked after your situation. I hope my absence hasn’t posed too many problems for you.”