“Nay!” Kit burst out of the nightmare, coming upright in his bed as he did so. His heart pounded, his arms were outstretched into the inky darkness as if he could reach back through time and stop his brother’s destruction.
It never worked. He let his arms fall empty and useless into his blanketed lap. No matter how much he wished it he could never return to Nick what that childish trick had taken from him. Because of what Kit had done, Nick had never left their home to seek favor in the royal court and the monetary recompense that such favor brought with it. Without additional income to offset their grandsire’s debts Nick’s title had gone into abeyance.
There was no longer a lord at Graceton.
From the floor outside the open doorway to Kit’s bedchamber Herbert Babthorpe snorted and stirred on his cot. “Who comes! Where are you?” the servant demanded, his panicked voice yet thick with sleep. Kit could hear him scuffling around on the floor for his dagger.
“It’s only me, Bertie,” he called to his man.
Bertie huffed in relief then groaned as he stretched, his bedclothes rustling. “That dream of yours again, was it Master Kit? I should have expected as much,” the man said around a yawn as he settled back into sleep. “It’s always worse when we’re home.” His words faded into quiet.
That was an understatement. The nightmare kept Kit from returning to Graceton for any length of time. Each and every night of his stay the dream would awaken him at about the same hour, leaving in its wake an irresistible urge to visit the kitchen. So predictable was Kit’s torment that servants new to Graceton were warned against his midnight prowls.
Sighing, Kit leaned back against the bed’s head even as his feet itched to move. If he went right now, Bertie would pursue him, demanding that he return to bed. Bertie thought it unhealthy for his master to brood so over something that had happened almost a score of years ago.
But tonight Kit’s feet didn’t wish to take him to the kitchen. As always happened when he reached the lowest points in his life, he needed to see Nick. And that wasn’t anything he wished to share with Bertie.
Rain spattered against the room’s mullioned window. The wind gusted then moaned its way along what had once been the old castle’s outer defenses but was now the exterior of the house. Slowly, Bertie’s breathing reached the rhythmic pattern of sleep.
Kit thrust back the bed curtains and sat on the side of his mattress. With neither moon nor stars to offer up their silvered light, shadows cloaked what had once been his and Nick’s childhood room. Long habit led him across the chamber to the peg where his bed robe hung. Drawing that garment on over his shirt he stepped around Bertie as he left the bedchamber and crossed the small sitting room that was its antechamber to the door.
Slowly, carefully, he lifted the latch. There was a gentle creak as the door’s tenons swiveled in their mortises; the burly panel swung wide. Kit shot a glance behind him. Bertie remained a still dark mound in even darker surrounds.
Leaving the door ajar, Kit stepped out into the gallery.
Softened by time, the wood in this long hallway was smooth beneath his bare feet. Wide and tall, with windows lining one wall of its length, this massive hallway extended from one end of the house to the other. Meant to offer a sheltered place to walk on wet English days, it also provided access to the family’s private apartments.
Kit turned to his left, away from the apartment that was traditionally the lord’s chamber, making his way instead to their mother’s apartments, the ones in which Nick now resided. Light outlined its outer door, just bright enough to show him its arched form but not strong enough to illuminate the space beyond the opening. The nearby corners were as black as ink.
Something shifted in that darkness. Kit caught his breath. He had no wish to encounter Graceton’s ghost this night. He only breathed again when it was a man’s form, not a woman’s that appeared out of the shadows.
“Is that you, Kit?” asked Master James Wyatt. Jamie was Graceton’s steward as well as Nick’s closest friend, and the only servant Nick tolerated in his presence. So great was Nick’s unease over the damage done to his appearance that not even the Yuletide could bring him into the public areas of his own home.
Kit tensed at the sound of Jamie’s voice. Such was the consistency of his dream’s torment that Nick had known just when to send Jamie out to await him.
“Aye, Jamie,” Kit replied, battling resentment. Jamie presumed much on Nick’s affections.
“Nick was sorry to have slept through your arrival,” the steward said. “He says he cannot wait until the morrow to see you.”
Worry for his brother drove away all other emotion. “Jamie, he shouldn’t be about in the middle of the night. Nick won’t win out over what rattles in his lungs if he doesn’t get his rest.”
Jamie’s quiet laugh echoed down the stairs that led to the hall. “You’re right in that, he’ll not win out over what rattles in his lungs. Each bout weakens him. Someday it will take him.”
The man’s words were like a knife thrust to Kit’s heart. Nick couldn’t die; Kit refused to let him. “That’s not true,” he snapped, sorry he had nothing but a scold to wield against the man who should have been his inferior.
Just as Nick was not Graceton’s lord because of that tumble into the hearth, Kit had not advanced to the title of knight that should have been his. “Nick’s no weaker now than he was two years ago.”
“So you would say.” There was a shuffling then a scrape as Jamie caught up the stool he’d used while waiting for Kit’s all-too-predictable appearance.
“He should rest,” Kit protested again, even though he knew it was useless. “Tell him we can speak in the morning. There’s no need for me to leave at first light. I’m not expected in London for another few days.”
In the dark Kit could barely see Jamie as he shook his head. “Kit, you know how he gets when you refuse him. Agitation only makes matters worse.”
“Christ.” Aye, Kit knew just how bad things could get when he refused to do Nick’s will.
“Come then,” Jamie said, his footsteps echoing on the wooden floor as he went to open the door to Nick’s apartment.
Candlelight tumbled out of the portal to gleam golden against the plastered walls. Jamie’s dark red hair looked darker still as he leaned to set aside the stool. When he straightened, the light marked the straight line of the steward’s nose. Hollows hung beneath his pale eyes and tired lines marked his lean cheeks. That Nick’s steward yet wore his shirt and breeches, stockings and shoes, suggested he’d been sitting the night away at his master’s side.
Guilt again stabbed at Kit as he followed Jamie into the two rooms that now defined the limits of Nick’s existence. It should be Kit tending Nick in his many illnesses but that damned dream ever drove him away from his home and his brother.
Like all the apartments at Graceton, their mother’s old chambers included this spacious front room and two bedchambers behind it each accessed by a door set in the antechamber’s back wall. Nick liked clutter. There was little to be seen of the two long narrow tables that ran the room’s length. The first table, dressed in the fabulously expensive carpet that their father had called his prize possession, played host to a new globe. Strewn around its base were massive tomes, no doubt relating tales of the New World. What time Nick didn’t spend managing the remains of Graceton’s estate he squandered in study of these new lands, places that Kit’s childish trick had guaranteed Nick could never see.
Upon the other stood a massive candelabra, its base rising from a sea of new candles, pairs still joined by their shared wicks, two wick trimmers, one broken, and a scissor. Beyond that were a dozen tiny wooden boxes, bits of string, and the odd ribbon. A virtual goose’s worth of broken quills feathered the floor at the table’s far end.
All this mess made the detritus upon Nick’s desk look almost neat. Empty inkpots, fresh quills along with yet-bound sheaves of paper buried its fine wooden top.
The only thing missing from Nick’s sitting room was the wherewithal for anyone other than Nick and Jamie to sit.
“Is that you, Kit?” Nick called from his bedchamber, his voice hoarse and thready against the lung infection presently plaguing him.
“Aye, Nick,” Kit replied, striding into his brother’s inner sanctum with Jamie close upon his heels.
Nick’s bed cut across this, the smaller of the apartment’s two sleeping rooms, consuming most of the space within the chamber. Its frame was dark and heavy, and its mattress wide and long enough to accommodate four. The curtains, still bound open to the bedposts, were heavy brocade that gleamed blue-green in the fire’s light. With the draperies pulled aside Kit could see over the mattress to the hearth in the room’s river wall. The fire dancing within it this night offered up heat enough to make the chamber warm but its low flame gave off only limited shifting light. At either side of the hearth a tall south-facing window cut into the wall, giving Nick his only view of the outside world. Opposite the bed’s foot stood Nick’s private altar. Nick had hung the massive crucifix from Graceton’s chapel above it and filled the altar’s top with illegal candles. With every flicker they heralded his brother’s even more illegal Catholic prayers up to heaven.
Braced upright by a stack of pillows, Nick sat upon his mattress, papers strewn atop his blankets and a cup clutched in the bony remains of his hands. If the smell emanating from that cup was any indication, the concoction within it contained horehound. Because the nightmare never let Kit forget how Nick had looked before his burning it was all the harder to look upon the results of his trick that day. Scars webbed from the bridge of Nick’s nose across his cheeks, this second layer of skin so stiff it made talking a chore and smiling out of the question. Nick’s eyebrows and eyelashes, like the hair along his brow line and around his ears, had never returned.
Even in the dimness Kit could see the welcome that ever glowed from Nick’s green eyes when he visited. “I heard you shout for me in your dream, Kit,” his brother said in greeting as Jamie circled the bed for the hearth where he turned one of the two small chairs set before it toward the bed and sat, his expression looking even more hollow in the fire’s uncertain light.
Nick’s gentle tease tore into Kit’s heart as it always did each time Nick spilled it. Kit refused to stop him, simply grateful that his brother yet lived to say the words. He managed a smile. “Liar, I didn’t shout this time.” Kit replied.
If Nick’s mouth couldn’t do it, his eyes returned his brother’s smile. “Ah Kit, I know how difficult it is for you to come home, but glad I am you’re here. It’s good to see you.”
Would that Kit could say the same. “How are you, Nick?” he demanded gently.
“Me?” his brother replied as if surprised that anyone would inquire. “I’m well.”
Kit’s eyes narrowed. “Liar,” he repeated. “I hear you struggle for breath.”
A touch of irritation flashed in Nick’s eyes. “If you don’t like my answers then don’t ask me how I do. I said I’m well, now leave it be, Kit.”
“How can I,” Kit persisted, “when you dismissed the physician I sent you? He could have helped you, Nick.” No matter how Kit tried to return some of what he’d stolen from his brother Nick ever threw his gifts back into his face.
Nick sighed. “So that’s what brought you here. I should have guessed it wasn’t me you came to see.”
Stung that his brother should think this, Kit stepped closer to the bed and laid a hand on Nick’s shoulder. “That’s not true. You’re precisely who I came to see. Am I not seeing you now?”
“Nay,” his brother retorted with more irritation in his voice, “it’s my ghost you visit, not me. Look at me, Kit. Can’t you see it’s still me behind my scars?”
The question made Kit frown. “What are you talking about? Of course I see you.” How could he help but see the brother upon whom he’d laid these scars?
Nick sighed. “He still doesn’t see me, Jamie.”
“He cannot,” the steward replied from his darkened seat on the other side of the bed. “The past holds him.”
“What are you two talking about?” Kit demanded irritably, looking from one to the other. “All I asked is why you dismissed the physician.”
“Because your learned healer was a fool,” Nick retorted. “Everything he did left me weaker still. Only for your sake did I let him stay as long as he did.”
The scars on Nick’s face shifted into what passed for an expression of wry humor. “He was obsessed with my bowels when there’s nothing wrong with that part of me.”
“You cannot know how effective what he planned would be after only a week’s time,” Kit protested.
Nick opened his mouth to retort, but his breath caught as a coughing spasm overtook him. Clutching a hand to his chest, he bent against what wracked him. Kit took the cup from his brother’s hands then rubbed at Nick’s back until the spate passed.
“Ach, Nick,” he said, “all I want is for you to be well once more. I thought the man might help.”
Still struggling for breath, Nick leaned into his pillows. “What you want would take a miracle,” he managed, “and only God can offer that. Here, give me the cup.” He extended his hands. With most of the flesh burned off them, his fingers were skeletal and without flexibility.
Rather than give it to him, Kit lifted the container to his brother’s lips. Nick didn’t need a facial expression to let Kit know how he felt about this attempt at pampering. Resentment burned in his eyes.
“Give it to me,” he snapped, “then tell me why your creditors come tapping on our gate.”
Startled, Kit released the cup. Nick ably caught the container between his scarred palms, only a little of the thick, dark liquid sloshing over its rim.
“May God take those damn tradesmen,” Kit snarled. “How dare they come here.”
Nick sipped at his brew, watching his brother over the cup’s rim. “I suppose they dare because they want to be paid.”
“Well, they’ll wait,” Kit growled. His position as gentleman pensioner to England’s queen was compensated at a mere eighty pounds a year, hardly enough to cover his basic needs, much less pay his present debts. It certainly didn’t come close to the fortune he needed to see Nick’s title restored.