elderly pair spoke at the same time.
“You remember.”
“He remembers.”
They scrabbled for each other’s hands. Dare had said too much. He resisted the urge to squirm.
The pair clung to one another and leaned in, touching their brows, forgetting the scolding they’d just given Lady Kinsley about showing emotion.
He glanced about, wondering at his other sibling’s absence. Was it resentment at being forced to give up that which he’d inherited? Either way, why should you expect he would have wanted to see you? Why, when your own parents were better off without you?
“It doesn’t mean anything that he remembers Perry,” Lady Kinsley pointed out. “He might be making it up.”
Aye, with that healthy mistrust, mayhap they were siblings, after all.
Her grandparents turned sharp glares on her.
“That Darius is our grandson and your brother has never been in doubt. He was just a boy when he was taken from us, not some babe where anyone might have been passed off for him, as in those other cases,” the duke said sharply. “He is your brother, as much as Perry was.”
Was. The past tense which bespoke only the finality of death.
Lady Kinsley’s throat moved quickly, and she glanced away, but not before Dare detected the gleam of tears in the young woman’s eyes.
“He is dead, then?” Dare asked when no one confirmed with words the fate his . . . brother had met.
The duchess, breaking her own rules, began weeping.
“He is,” the duke murmured, stroking his wife’s back in an unexpected display for a peer.
He is.
Perry, three years his junior, was dead, then.
Perhaps had Dare come home long, long ago, certainly had he never left, there would have been a crushing weight of grief. There was, however, only a profound regret and . . . a sadness for the brother whom time had made a stranger of. And it only cemented what he’d learned at his mentor-turned-partner Avery Bryant’s side: how much greater that pain would have been had Dare been fully a part of Perry’s life.
The irony was not lost on him, however; where Dare had been the one to live out on the streets of East London, Perry had remained ensconced in the secure, comfortable family folds in Mayfair—only to be the one to perish.
“Perrin died just two years ago,” His Grace murmured.
Dare did the quick math. Perrin would have been only twenty-five years of age. With the spare who’d become the heir gone, it made sense why Dare’s family had finally begun looking for him.
“Dropsy,” Kinsley spat. “My God, you couldn’t even ask what happened to him?”
“Would it have changed anything?” Dare asked quietly without malice, but there may as well have been elements of it there for the hatred brimming in the young lady’s eyes.
There was only one history that mattered to Dare—his time in East London. The rest was a fanciful fairy tale that may as well have belonged to another, as farcical as it was. He nodded to Heron. “Get on with it.”
Tripping and stumbling over his words, Mr. Heron resumed the recitation of his history lesson.
“Following the Napoleonic Wars, the country fell into an economic depression . . .”
These people knew nothing. Dare and his people in the streets had gone without long before that war ended.
“Your father’s estates began to suffer mightily, as did so many.”
Your father . . .
Dare’s entire body tensed. For years, he’d not allowed himself to think of the man who’d sired him, or of the woman who’d given him birth. As such, there was . . . a peculiar detachedness at the servant’s labeling of that man whom Dare had spent more years away from than with.
Before the man-of-affairs could resume his drawn-out breakdown of England’s finances, Dare cut him off. “And this matters because?”
Heron adjusted his spectacles. “Yes, my lord, I am coming to that.”
Dare rather doubted that. The man was incapable of directness.
“However,” Heron was saying, “this period proved short-lived. The depression struck, and weavers and spinners were all hit hard.” He paused. A thick tension fell over the room. It was the same feeling that had dogged him moments before capture—the knife about to fall. “As were your family’s investments.”
Dare went absolutely motionless. “What are you saying?” he asked carefully, measuring his words. Modulating his tone.
Heron removed his spectacles. “I am saying there is little left.”
Little left . . . ? “How little?”
“In terms of actual monies?” The other man removed a kerchief and mopped at his suddenly damp brow.
Oh, bloody hell. This was bad.
“Many avowals have been