catalogue his various sins, the list getting longer and longer by the year. His absence on this difficult afternoon would be added to the litany, but he couldn’t help that. He needed air, and the sound of the sea, and the uncritical company of his favorite mare. He counted on these things to cleanse his mind, to sweep the sights and smells of death from his spirit.
He had, at least, spoken to Jermyn, ordered every guest’s horse fed and groomed, ready to be put into its shafts. He had taken formal leave of the relatives and friends who had come to mourn with the family, and he had sorted through the pile of sympathy cards, now addressed to him with his new title. In a way he had done his duty, but as his mother would remind him, many more duties lay ahead. Perhaps he could persuade her to understand his wish for this moment of solitude, perhaps empathize with his need for reflection. Or perhaps not. At the moment he didn’t care much either way.
He paused Breeze at High Point. There he gazed over her head to the sea tossing beneath the cliffs as he tried to comprehend how profoundly his father’s unexpected passing had changed his life. His years as Lord James Treadmoor were over. He had become, in the instant of his father’s death, James, Marquess of Rosefield, master of Seabeck Park and Rosefield Hall. He had always known it would happen one day, but not when he was twenty-one, in the midst of pursuing his passion for history and architecture, still working on growing up, still laboring through the insecurities and fears of his youth. Some men grew up fast, it seemed. They matured early. He was not one of them.
He loved Seabeck, and it had always been his plan to one day completely devote himself to its care and preservation. He had not expected that day to come so soon.
The funeral had been a misery. He envied the Catholics, sometimes, with their curated rituals and timeworn texts and hymns. In particular he loved their “In paradisum,” which was both moving and formal, refining grief and loss into a moment of pure crystal music.
He could have requested they use it in their own service, he supposed. It hadn’t occurred to him. Their service, at the chapel in Seabeck Village, had been one of raw emotion, sentimental hymns, and a somehow greedy devouring of this new stage of life, a marquess dead, a new marquess in place, a marchioness become a dowager in a stroke. There were changes ahead. There were frights afoot.
He would learn how bad the frights were when the will was read and the state of the Treadmoor finances, always held close to the old marquess’s vest, was revealed. His mother had been walking about with a face of stone, which meant she already knew the news was not good. She didn’t speak of it. James didn’t ask. She would simply have said, lips pinched in that chilly way that told him he should have known better than to press her, “Everything in its time,” and told him nothing.
Breeze tossed her head, making her wavy forelock lift in the wind. “You’re right,” he told her, lifting the reins. “We should go back and face it. But I’d rather run off, lass, wouldn’t you?” Her ears flicked back toward his voice, then forward again.
Despite his declaration, he held her in place a few moments longer, looking out to sea, watching the rising tide splash the sea stacks with foam. It didn’t show up on any map, but the locals had always referred to it as High Point. A cluster of boulders on the landward side of the road marked the spot, backed by a patchy copse of windblown trees. Sometimes James dismounted to sit on one of the big rocks to eat the sandwiches Cook packed for him.
There were no sandwiches today. He stayed in his saddle, letting the sea breeze pull at his hair and cool his face and neck. Behind him stretched the bit of land they called the High Point parcel, gentle hills rich with green grass. Before him the westering sun turned the waters of the English Channel the color of old emeralds, rather like a necklace his mother had but never wore.
He released a long breath as he turned his mare toward home. His mother might have to sell that necklace, and other old pieces. And how could he justify