For All Eternity (The Black Rose Chronicles) (21 page)

His father spread one surprisingly strong hand behind his son’s head and pressed him close, into his shoulder. “Forgive me,” he pleaded again. “Forgive me for not being the man you are.”

In the next moment Calder felt the old man’s spirit leave his body like warm vapor rising into the air. It was as simple, and as complex, as that, and having witnessed the phenomenon a hundred times before did nothing to lessen its impact.

He drew back, looked into the familiar face, and saw empty, staring eyes. Gently, with practiced fingers, Calder lowered his father’s eyelids.

Regret filled him, regret that he had waited so long to face and accept the love he’d always borne for this man. He sat there for a long while, keeping a lonely vigil, and only when Prudence came in, sometime later, did Calder stand and move to the window where he stood staring out at the sunlit courtyard below.

“He’s gone,” he said quietly.

Prudence wept and wailed and began to pray, and it seemed to Calder that, for all her noisy suffering, she was better off than he was. She knew how to release her emotions, at least, while he’d carried his own around like the carcass of an albatross.

It was really no wonder, Calder thought numbly, that he’d lost everything and everyone who had ever mattered to him. He did not know how to love.

C
HAPTER 11

“You made his life miserable, you know,” William said in a wooden voice as he and Calder stood in the formal parlor that afternoon. The undertaker and his assistant were upstairs, in their father’s room, preparing the old man for viewing and subsequent burial.

Calder was still dazed, by his experiences in London with Maeve, by the death of his sire, and by the realization that he had indeed loved Bernard Holbrook, faults and all, despite his own utter conviction to the contrary. He squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and index finger. “Spare me the discourse on my shortcomings as a son,” he said wearily, looking out the window. “I’m well aware, believe me, that I might have been a little more tolerant.”

“
‘A little more tolerant’
?” William repeated furiously. The last time Calder had glanced in his direction, his half brother had been standing next to the mantel, brooding over a glass of bourbon. “You crucified him daily with your damnable contempt, your self-righteous assumption that he didn’t want to be better than he was. The man craved your respect and affection, God help him, every day of your life, and you withheld those very things!” Calder closed his eyes tightly, for nothing possessed the power to wound quite so deeply as the truth. While he regretted some of the choices he’d made, and bitterly, he’d dance with the devil before apologizing to William. “Are you through?” he inquired with biting politeness. He heard the musical explosion of glass shattering against stone and turned at last to see that William had flung his drink onto the hearth. “No,
God damn you,
I am not through! My father is dead, and his suffering was compounded by your arrogance and insensitivity!” “What do you expect me to do?” Calder asked reasonably, his voice as cold as his manner. “Resurrect him? Turn back the clock to the time he was driving my mother to despair, perhaps, and decide that it was all right for him to break her heart with his women? Declare that, after all, ‘boys will be boys’?”

William’s handsome if faintly ineffectual face went ruddy with anger. “You bastard! I want you to say you’re sorry.”

“Apologize to you?” Calder rubbed his chin, which was stubbly with a day’s beard-growth. “Never. I’ve done you no wrong, William.”

William’s features contorted. “Haven’t you? That’s my father lying up there with embalming fluid in his veins! If it hadn’t been for you, he might still be alive!”

“I won’t take the blame for his death,” Calder replied.

“He came down with pneumonia and couldn’t rally his strength. I had no part in that.”

“You
robbed
him of his strength!” William insisted, and Calder began to fear that if his half brother did not contain his temper, he would burst a blood vessel. “Papa expended all of it, worrying that you had finally vanished forever. He might have used that fervor to cling to life!” Calder shook his head and sighed, too weary and too stricken to be diplomatic. “Damn it, William, open your eyes—you just accused Father of wasting energy, yet your hatred for me and your petty jealousy are eating you alive!”

William turned away then, lowered his head onto the arm he’d braced against the mantel, and gave a choked sob.

Calder started toward him, realized there was nothing he could say that would give the other man comfort, and stopped himself. Nothing less than his younger brother’s complete humiliation would satisfy William, and Calder wasn’t willing to supply that.

Prudence rushed in just then, eyes swollen from weeping, carrying a broom and dustpan. She glared accusingly at Calder and William in turn, and bent to sweep up the shards of glass littering the hearth. “Land sakes,” she huffed. “A body’d think you two could keep civil tongues in your heads at a time like this, but no—here you are, bellowin’ at each other—and with a dead man in the house, too.”

William lifted his head, seething with abhorrence, and flung a scalding stare in Calder’s direction, at the same time straightening his perfectly tailored coat. If he’d heard Prudence’s admonition, or even taken note of her presence, he gave no indication. “You’ve destroyed this entire family,” he said. “How I wish your whore of a mother had died before ever giving birth to you!” Calder took a step toward his brother, his voice deceptively quiet. “I know you’re suffering, William, and I’ll abide your insults because of that. If you value your hide, however, you will not refer to my mother again, except in the politest of terms. Do you understand me?” Prudence stepped between the two of them, her great, warm girth quivering with outrage, a dustpan full of broken crystal in one hand and a broom in the other. “If I has to take a buggy whip to the both of you so’s you’ll behave respectful-like, that’s just what I’ll do! This ain’t no time to be workin’ out your brother troubles.” Despite Prudence’s words, which made a great deal of sense, Calder still wanted to slam his fist into William’s smug, haughty face, and he expected that his half brother was thinking similar thoughts about him. He breathed deeply, purposely relaxed his hands, and turned away, intending to return to the window and his private musings.

William made that impossible by spitting defiantly, “Stay out of this, old woman. This is my house now, and I’ll speak to this bitch’s whelp in any way I choose.” Calder crossed the space that separated him from his sibling in two strides. Ignoring Prudence’s fluttering fury, he grasped the lapels of William’s suit coat and hoisted him onto the balls of his feet. “Nothing will appease you but an opportunity to draw my blood, it would seem,” he hissed. “Well, then, so be it.” He flung his brother free, and William scrambled, his face purple with anger, to keep from losing his balance. “We’ll settle this out back,” Calder finished.

William nodded, spun on his heel, and headed for the door. Calder was right behind him, but Prudence waylaid him by gripping his elbow, with surprising strength, in one large black hand.

“That man up there didn’t deserve to have his only sons brawlin’ in the backyard like a pair of drunken field hands, no matter what his failin’s might have been!”

Calder’s head felt light, and he saw the familiar parlor and the woman who had comforted him from childhood through a shifting haze of red. “On the contrary,” he rasped, “my father pitted William and me against each other from the first.” He wrenched his elbow free of Prudence’s grasp. “This is
exactly
what dear Papa always wanted, to see the two of us fight like roosters until one left the other bleeding in the dust. And you know it as well as I do.”

Great tears welled in Prudence’s eyes. “Don’t do this,” she pleaded. “William’s hurtin’ something terrible, him bein’ so close to your papa, and he ain’t right in the head.”

Calder shoved splayed fingers through his rumpled hair. “I’m sorry, Pru,” he said gruffly. “I would do anything in the world for you, anything except run from my brother.”

He heard Prudence weeping as he moved along the hallway leading to the rear of the house and the yard beyond it.

William was standing in front of the summerhouse, waiting, his jaw hard with conviction, his eyes flashing. He’d already taken off his coat, draping it neatly over the back of a wrought-iron bench, and was in the process of rolling up his sleeves.

“I half expected you to disappear again, little brother,” he taunted.

Calder wore no coat, and no gold links bound his cuffs to his wrists. He pushed up his sleeves, one at a time, ashamed of the wicked joy he felt at the prospect of doubling up his fists and pummeling William into a whimpering pulp. “You knew better,” he said with a grim smile. “Of course, you can still save your worthless ass by taking back every rotten thing you’ve ever said about my mother. If you don’t, I’m going to stuff parts of you down every gopher hole on this property.”

William faltered slightly, but he didn’t relent. On the contrary, he poured salt into raw, gaping wounds. “Did you know she ran away with another man, the night she died, your sainted mama, just the way your wife did years later?”

Calder felt cold and sick, as though some evil creature, some dragon of the invisible realms, had opened its mouth and spewed forth its vile, frigid breath. “Enough,” he said, all but strangling on that single word.

His half brother smiled, resting his pale clerk’s hands on his hips. “Oh, no, Calder,” he said. “That wasn’t nearly enough. You’re going to hear the truth about your mother, the beautiful Marie, at long last. She was leaving Papa the night she died in that carriage accident, running away with a lover, just the way your wife left you. And, like Theresa, Marie was abandoning her child as well. She didn’t want you, Calder.”

Calder laughed, actually laughed, though bile scalded the back of his throat and he really believed, in that moment, that he could kill his half brother without compunction. “You’re lying, about all of it,” he said. “My mother died of a fever. And she would never have abandoned me—never. If you’re looking for a way to make my blood boil, brother, you’ll have to do better than that.”

William made a contemptuous sound. “Fool. They brought Marie home after the accident, and she never regained consciousness. Papa only told you she was suffering from a fever to save your precious feelings— ask old Dr. Blanchard if you don’t believe me. She’d broken every fragile bone in her body in the wreck, and they carried her here to die. The truth was, she’d been whoring with some second cousin of hers. They’d conceived a bastard, Marie and her sweetheart—she lost the poor little creature, of course, only hours before she passed on.” He sighed philosophically. “That was for the best, no doubt.”

Calder’s knees felt weak. In his mind he heard Marie Holbrook’s lilting voice singing a lullaby, felt her hands tucking the blankets in around him, knew again the brush of her lips across his forehead. “You’re a liar,” he said.

William went on as though Calder hadn’t spoken. “Personally I’ve always wondered if
you
weren’t the by-blow of one of Marie’s many admirers,” he said. “Papa was in his late forties when you came along, remember, and he hadn’t sired a second child by my mother or, to my knowledge, any of the paramours that came later.”

Because William’s assertions challenged some of his most basic beliefs about himself, because he sensed a grain of truth in them, Calder was shattered. “Suppose you’re right,” he said in a low, raw tone of voice. “Let’s assume my mother was indeed a tramp, and I was sired by one of her lovers. Why did you wait until now to say these things, when you’ve obviously hated me for so many years?”

William indulged in a slow smile, even though he had to know he was about to take a trouncing from a younger, stronger man. “Papa wanted to pretend you were his. You were everything he would have asked for in a son, you see. Isn’t that ironic? You, Calder, were the prodigal, always running off to some far country, or landing yourself in the middle of this damnable war. You tormented him, and he loved you for it,
cherished
you for it.” He paused, took a deep breath, and tilted his head back to search the azure sky for a few moments. “Obviously I couldn’t tell you the truth. I would have been disinherited for my trouble.”

Calder ran a hand over his face. The fight had not even begun, and William had already defeated him, already broken him. “Can you prove any of this?”

“Of course I can—if I hadn’t, you would be able to discount everything I’ve said on grounds of petty jealousy and spite. I have letters addressed to the lovely Marie, as well as some she’d written herself but never had a chance to post.”

“I want to see them,” Calder said. He was reeling inwardly, fighting for balance. He turned and moved away, toward the house.

William would not leave matters at that. Instead he came after Calder, grabbed him by one shoulder, whirled him around so that they stood face to face.

“You’ve already won,” Calder said grimly, shoving a hand through his hair again. “What more do you want?” William didn’t bother to answer, he just flung his right fist at Calder, who saw the blow coming and blocked it by raising one arm. He was baffled, for a few moments at least, by his brother’s insistence on provoking him, for
this
was truly a fight William couldn’t win. Then, in a blaze of revelation, Calder realized that William
wanted
the pain, needed it to expunge demons of his own.