Page 72 of His Wife, the Spy
Annabel set a cup of tea on the nearest table.
“Thank you, dear girl,” his mother said. “I am so glad you’re here.”
So was he. Just as he’d been glad to have Annabel across from him in the coach last night and meeting with tenants this morning.
“Are we planning the funeral for here?” Jasper asked. “Or did he make arrangements for a crypt at Warwick?”
Mother looked past him toward the other end of the room, to Kit. It took Jasper back to his father’s death, when Mother had looked over the girls’ bowed heads and sought his input, when he’d navigated the swamp of grief to give the answers everyone expected. Six months ago, after Grandfather’s death, everyone had stood in this room and waited for him to do it again.
Kit had stopped pacing and now stood in front of the desk, facing them, his hands behind his back and his chin held high, as though he was meeting a firing squad. Mother, her mouth in a firm line and her blue eyes like ice, could easily pull the trigger.
“Edgar wanted to be buried in Warwick’s churchyard.” Kit pulled an envelope from his coat pocket. “No crypt, simple stone.”
Jasper’s father had kept a similar envelope in his safe. So had Grandfather. They’d shown him where to find it and what it meant.
Heirs were told those things.
Heirs…
Kit’s nod was short and quick.
“Leave us.” Jasper cast a glance at his mother and his wife. Sending Annabel from the room was like losing a lifeline through the maze in his head, but he needed to ask some very rude, very direct, questions.
The door clicked closed.
“Jasper.”
Ignoring Kit, he walked to the liquor cabinet and poured two shots of Cousin Amelia’s best whiskey. He delivered one to the man he’d considered a brother, if not by blood then by experience. The boy he’d fought beside in the schoolyard. The friend he’d worried over during the war. The man he’d trusted with his secrets and his life. “Cousin.”
Kit’s stare was wary over the rim of his glass. Ever vigilant, his friend. No one read a situation better, whether it was a rowdy crowd in a pub or one man in a library. He could always find the easiest way out, the surest plan of attack, the information that was needed.
“How long have you known?” Jasper asked.
“Since Mum’s death.” Kit stepped back so he could lean against the desk.
Kit had lost his mother during their third year at Eton. “That long?”
“Da told me, but only because he was foxed and miserable.” Kit pulled his body into the shape of a man who spent far toomuch time stooped in a mine and then slouched on a stool in his favorite pub. “You will always be my boy, even if in the eyes of the law you’re a bastard.” He straightened his spine and sighed. “As though I needed to be told either thing. It was plain the old man loved me, and just as obvious that I looked nothing like him.”
“That’s hardly proof that—”
“Mum had a letter from Edgar in the trunk at the end of her bed, agreeing to pay for my education but nothing else.”
The boys at Eton had teased Kit mercilessly over two things: his Welsh accent and the identity of his benefactor. The larger the crowd, the wilder the guesses, until Kit lashed out. Jasper had fought next to him every time. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Honestly?” Kit shrugged. “I thought you knew.”
“You thought Iknew?” Jasper raked his hand through his hair, struggling to keep his temper in check and his brain clear enough to follow Kit’s reasoning. “And simply didn’t mention it for twenty years.”
Kit tilted his glass, first to one side and then the other, as he stared over his shoulder and out the window. “I know how Society is about bastard children.”
Jasper ground his back teeth together to silence his protest. This story was not about him. “How did you get fromnothing elseto knowing where Edgar kept his will?”
“I never expected to hear from him, but when I enlisted, he sent an invitation to Warwick. I was curious, so I went.”
Edgar had never invited anyone to the country house he’d once referred to as his own personal Elba.
“Big house, garden full of flowers I couldn’t pronounce. Awkward silences. He did say he’d been sad to learn of Mum’s death, which was kind, and then he offered to pay for my commission. Said he thought Mum would want him to dowhatever it took to keep me safe, which was true. I took it for her.”
