Sherbrooke Twins

“Lemon seed cake, I hope. It’s my favorite.”

She looked down at her boots, then up again, but not at his face, over his left shoulder. “Thank you, but I must go home. Good-bye, James.” And she dashed out the doors. He watched her run into the gardens. There were paths leading out; surely she wouldn’t explore; surely she wouldn’t find the statues.

JAMES FOUND HIS father in his bedchamber, alone, bandaging his arm.

“What happened, Father?”

Douglas jerked around, then heaved a sigh of relief. “James. I thought it was your mother. It’s nothing really, an idiot shot me in the arm, nothing more.”

James’s fear sliced right through to his belly. He swallowed, but the fear just kept bubbling up. “This isn’t good,” he said. “Papa, I really don’t like this. Where’s Peabody?”

James hadn’t called him Papa for many years now. Douglas tied off the strip of linen that he’d ripped from his shirt, pulled it tight with his teeth, then turned and managed a smile. “I’m all right, James.” Then because James looked afraid, Douglas walked to him, and pulled his precious boy against him. “I am just fine, it’s just a bit of a sting, nothing to worry you or me or anyone, particularly your mother who will never find out about this.”

James felt his father’s strength and was comforted. He also realized that he was now as large as his father, this man he’d looked up to all his life, seen as a god, an omnipotent being, and now they were the same size? He said against his father’s ear, “Did you see who it was?”

Douglas took James’s arms in his hands and stepped back. “I was riding Henry out on the downs. There was a single shot and Henry knows an opportunity when he sees it, and, of course, he threw me. I’d swear that damned horse was laughing down at me lying there in the bushes where I landed, luckily. I looked afterward, but the fellow had left no signs. It could have easily been a poacher, James, an accident, pure and simple.”

“No.” He looked his father right in the eye. “The Virgin Bride was right. There is trouble here. Where’s Peabody?”

“I got rid of him right away, sent him to Eastbourne to fetch some special pomade for me, I made up a name-Foley’s Special Hair Restorer.”

“But you have lots of hair.”

“No matter. It’ll drive Peabody quite frantic when he doesn’t locate the pomade, something he deserves since he’s always sticking his long nose in my business.”

James drew a deep breath. “I want to look at your arm, Father. Jason is right as well-someone is after you. We have to do something. But first I want to see for myself that the wound isn’t bad.”

Douglas raised a dark brow at his son, saw the fear in James’s eyes, and knew James had to see for himself that the wound was nothing.

“Very well,” he said, and let James untie the linen he’d just wrapped around it.

James studied the angry red slash that had torn through his father’s flesh. “It’s nearly stopped bleeding. I want to wash it, then I want Hollis to see it. He will have some salve to put on it.”

Of course Hollis had exactly the right nasty mixture. He also insisted, under James’s watchful eye, on smearing it over the gash himself. “Hmmm,” he said. “Hand me the clean bandage, Master James.”

James handed him the clean linen. The old man’s hands shook. From fear for his father? No, Hollis never was afraid of anything. “Hollis, how old are you?”

“Master James?”

“Er, if you don’t mind my asking your age?”

“I am the very same age as your esteemed grandmother, my lord, well, perhaps she is a year older, but one hesitates to speak bluntly about such things, particularly when it involves a lady who is also one’s mistress.”

“That means,” Douglas said, laughing, “that Hollis is older than those Greek statues in the west gardens.”

“It does indeed,” Hollis said. “There, my lord, you’re tied up right and tight. Would you care for a tetch of laudanum?”

His arm throbbed, but who cared? He raised a haughty brow, looked disgusted, and said, “No I would not, Hollis. Are the two of you happy now?”

The door opened and Jason walked in, turned white, and blurted out, “I knew it. I just knew it was something bad.”

James looked at the blood in the basin of water, swallowed, and told his brother what had happened.

“You know, sir,” Jason said before the three of them went downstairs, “Mother will know there’s something wrong when she sees the bandage on your arm.”

“She won’t see it.”

“But you and Mother always sleep together,” James said. “Surely she’ll see it. I heard her say once that you never wore a nightshirt.”

James said quickly, “She didn’t know we were listening.”

“Hmmm,” Douglas said. “I’ll think about that.”

“We don’t wear nightshirts either,” Jason said, “once we heard that you didn’t. What were we, James, about twelve?”

“Something like that,” James said.

Douglas felt a lurch in his chest. He looked at his boys-his boys-and the throbbing in his arm became nothing at all.

Of course Alexandra found out quickly enough, not later than five o’clock that afternoon. Her maid, Phyllis, told her what the laundry girl-who’d washed a bloody linen strip-had told Mrs. Wilbur, the Sherbrooke housekeeper, who had rightfully passed it along to Hollis, who’d told her sharply to close her lips over her teeth, which, naturally, Mrs. Wilbur hadn’t, and thus it had come to Phyllis’s sharp ears over a cup of tea in Mrs. Wilbur’s parlor.

“A bloody cloth?” Alexandra said, swiveling about on her dressing chair to stare up at Phyllis, who had mossy green eyes and a lovely thin nose that constantly dripped, necessitating a handkerchief in her right hand most of the time.

“Yes, my lady, a bloody cloth. From his lordship’s bedchamber.”

Alexandra raced out of the bedchamber and through the adjoining door to confront her husband, to run her hands all over his body, to even check the teeth in his mouth. Curse him-he wasn’t there. And she knew when she confronted him, he would look down his elegant nose at her, call her a twit, and tell her it was all a tale invented by some silly girl in the laundry room.

Even though it was five o’clock in the afternoon, Alexandra hurried downstairs to the butler’s pantry, a lovely airy room with black and white marble tiles on the floor. The only problem was, Hollis wasn’t alone. Indeed, he was in the embrace of a woman. A woman she’d never seen before. Alexandra stared, then retreated, step by step, until she quietly closed the door.

Hollis hugging and kissing a strange woman? It seemed suddenly that everything was flying out of control. She forgot about nailing down proof so Douglas couldn’t look down his nose at her, and burst into the estate room where her husband was in conversation with the twins. She looked at them all with new eyes. The twins were in on it, whatever it was. The three of them were in a secret conversation, she knew it, one that excluded her. She wanted to shoot all of them. Instead, she said, “Hollis is kissing a strange woman in the butler’s pantry.”