Page 59 of Her Heart's Rightful Earl
Daybreak had crept up, unannounced, and—being so immersed in the revelations of the journal and the emotions it had provoked—neither of them had noticed.
They sat on the dusty floor, huddled together, Alexander’s arms cradling Arabella as his mind raced.
They suddenly heard a chaotic racket of clattering and footsteps. Arabella instantly recognized the sounds as Marcus moving around the house; he never did so quietly. By the noise of his movement, he was charging down the stairs at an excitable rate, and they heard his calls.
“Good morning, household! What a beautiful morning it is! We must all arise and wake to face the day! Come, come!”
Alexander frowned as he listened, and Arabella realized that he was not accustomed, as she was, to the erratic enthusiasm of Marcus’s disordered conduct.
A myriad of emotions crossed Alexander’s face, and Arabella watched him as he first reacted with a semblance of hope and warm familiarity at hearing his younger brother’s voice for the first time in years.
This was rapidly followed by a frown of confusion at his agitated tone. Sadness and pity set in and then were replaced by a stern, fixed, serious grimace, and Arabella could guess at the thoughts of contempt with which Alexander must now consider his brother.
Arabella squeezed his hand to demonstrate that she was there for him throughout this harrowing circumstance.
“Mother! Mother!” Marcus’s strangled voice rang out, echoing down the halls of the house.
Alexander’s eyes darted to Arabella’s, and they shifted apart, recognizing their now precarious position, needing Alexander to escape back to invisibility without being noticed by anybody.
Before Arabella stood, Alexander clutched her hand more tightly, brought his face close to hers, and urgently whispered:
“My brother, whom I love …”
Arabella blinked at him.
“I have to stop him, don’t I?”
Arabella nodded sadly and kissed him once more, knowing that their lives were about to change all over again.
Chapter 20
In his childhood, Alexander had never been one for hiding away from difficult situations. If a bully had been unkind to his younger brother, he would confront them; if his father wished to admonish him for riding his horse too fast, he would attend promptly to face the discomfort, in a bid to move through it and onward.
Living in exile had conditioned him to hiding away, and it had become an unfortunate facet of his internal fabric. He stayed in the abandoned mill all day, ruminating over his failures.
Every other day since he had ventured back to England, Alexander had risen before the sun to launch into whatever mission the day proposed. Today, though, he slept until well after the birds had begun to sing. He was yet to splash his face with water or find something to eat. He simply sat and stared.
How wrong he had been. About everything. Alexander prided himself on being a well-adjusted, good citizen, a loyal son, and a supportive, nurturing soul, cultivating a young brother who would be the same.
Yet how far this particular rotten apple had fallen from the tree. Alexander battled with his participation in the matter,wondering what he might have done differently to secure a better outcome.
Did I protect him so much that he became entitled?
Was I too much in the good favour of our father, that Marcus’s jealousy caused him this unprecedented rage?
There were so many potential reasons Marcus had swayed so far from the orthodox compliant route, but Alexander could find none that justified the killing of his father and cousin.
Alexander paced up and down in the mill as he tried to reconcile where his source of rage lay.
Am I angrier at Marcus for committing such atrocities?
Or am I angrier at myself for defending him so long that I afforded him bounteous opportunities to commit further crimes?
Failing to answer any of the demands his tortured conscience threw at him, Alexander grabbed Edmund’s journal and sat down in the dust, where a slat in the wall of the mill shed a column of daylight so he was able to read from the book.
Opening at one of the later entries in Edmund’s handwriting, Alexander’s eyes lit upon words he had not read yesterday.
…Alexander’s dagger. The witness I shall not name—but who is a member of the household staff within the Wellwood residence—saw Marcus exiting his older brother’s bedroom on the day of my uncle’s murder, holding a long object within a sheath. It appears to me that Marcus was framing his older brother, Alexander—the favourite son—to look as though it was he who killed his father, with the supposed motive of expediting his inheritance of the title of earl …
