Today's Reading
Heart thundering in his chest, Jon clung to hope as the surgeon felt for a pulse and placed a mirror over Morris's parted lips.
Then the doctor lifted a saddened gaze to them. "I'm sorry, gentlemen. There's no breath and no pulse. He's gone."
Gone. The word sucked Jon's bones dry, leaving an ache so deep he didn't know how to assuage it. Until this moment, he hadn't realized how closely his life had been tethered to his mentor's. Now that the tether was severed, casting him adrift with the other casualties of war, he found himself left to his own devices in wildly uncertain circumstances.
And he had only himself to blame.
CHAPTER ONE
Falcon House, London
June 1814
When the hackney carriage from the coaching inn drew up before the London residence of the Duke of Falconridge near dusk, what Jon saw took him aback. Between the scaffolding and scurrying workmen, he couldn't tell if the house was being torn down, renovated, or repaired. And the funerary hatchment over the front door plus the black ribbon tied to the door handle struck terror to his heart.
It couldn't be for his father, who'd died years ago. His half brothers and sister were surely too young, but Mother...
A chill skittered down his spine, making him stiffen. She couldn't be dead. He wouldn't believe it. Why, the ribbon and hatchment could be for anyone—an uncle, a cousin, a great-aunt. The place might even belong to someone other than his family by now.
No, the house couldn't be sold—it was entailed upon his eldest half brother. But it wouldn't be the same household to him, regardless. Once upon a time, he'd been the apple of his mother's eye and the indulged youngest son of his aging father. As a child, he'd lolled about on the worn old sofa in his mother's dressing room. He'd spent hours in Father's library, poring over gilt volumes that spoke of adventures in foreign lands with unusual names like Zanzibar and Malaya.
That boy was gone. All that was left was the man with an ever-burdensome guilt and no place he belonged anymore.
So, even the fresh yellow drapes in the windows couldn't cheer him. The iron door knocker of a fierce lion had been replaced with a gleaming brass one of a Greek goddess, and the door itself had been painted a bright turquoise, but that was all just appearances—it didn't change the fact that here in this part of London, nothing was quite as it had once been.
His father was dead, his half brothers, Alban and Aubrey, were in charge and probably still bullying Jon's mother—their stepmother—and he would have to figure out if he could find a place in this odd England with its gleaming new buildings, freshly laid roads, fancy equipages, and unfamiliar sounds.
He only had two promises to fulfill: the one he'd made to Morris concerning the man's family and the one he'd made to himself the day they'd been recaptured and sent to Bitche—that he would find out who'd betrayed them and would make sure the villain or villainess paid for it. After that, he would do his best to get on with his life, such as it was.
Stifling a sigh, he stepped down and paid the hackney coachman from his small store of coin. Like most détenus, he'd had to go into debt in France just to find a way home. Unlike many of them, however, he intended to pay his debts once he gained access to his allowance. Surely, he still had some sort of allowance.
A footboy in Falconridge livery went running by with what looked like wrapped sandwiches for the workmen, and Jon hailed him with a word.
Jon asked the most pressing question first, "Who is being mourned here?"
The boy gaped at him. "Do ye not know, sir? It was in all the papers at the time. The duke hisself and his brother died near six months past."
The duke himself? "You're speaking of the Duke of Falconridge and his brother, Aubrey?"
"Aye. Who else?"
Both of his half brothers dead. Jon could hardly fathom it. "How did they die?"
"Drowned in the Thames when the ice broke at the Frost Fair."
This sounded more fantastical by the moment. "Frost Fair! What the bloody hell is a Frost Fair?"
The footboy blinked at his profanity. "When the Thames froze."
...
