Thorne Brothers: With All My Heart Part 39

"She's you," Colin said. "Or she could be. My memory can't be playing me so false."

"The thing of it is, Greydon," said Decker, "you should have been a girl. You were the prettiest baby. Mama and Papa both thought so. They remarked on it often enough."

Berkeley laughed as Grey flushed deeply. "I think you'll have to get used to your brother teasing you," she said. "I imagine he intends to do quite a lot of it during his stay." She reached for Rhea, but Colin shook his head and held the baby closer. He couldn't look away, and he couldn't release her. It could have been Greydon in his arms.

"No," he said. "Let me have her just a bit longer. You can't know what thisa"" He broke off before his voice broke. He bent his head and his face hovered about Rhea's. She stared up at him, her blue-gray eyes at once curious and trusting. When a single tear splashed her face she accepted it without a murmur.

Decker stared at the floor and blinked hard. Berkeley's own tears fell quite freely while her beatific smile never faltered. She went to Grey and took the hand he extended to her. She allowed herself to be pulled onto the bed beside him. His arm slipped around her shoulder and he gave her one corner of the coverlet to dry her eyes. Her watery smile deepened because he made no effort to do the same to his own.

The solemn silence was itself distracting to Rhea. She filled it with an abandoned little gurgle that was not meant to be ignored. Colin smiled as the vibration of the tiny bundle in his arms tickled him. Rhea squealed with delight and punctuated it with a hiccup. Decker chuckled at the abrupt quiet and surprise on her face. In turn that brought another peal of Rhea's infectious and bright baby laughter.

In the end they all succ.u.mbed. This time the tears had a different flavor.

Colin caught his breath first. He carried Rhea to her mother and pa.s.sed her over, then he picked up his gla.s.s and raised it toward his brothers. Grey and Decker extended their tumblers in a silent toast.

Berkeley touched the tip of her daughter's nose. "They're going to get pie-faced," she said. "All three of them. Your father and your uncles. And they'll be no closer to sorting things out by morning. Just see if I'm not right."

It more or less turned out that she was.

Epilogue.

Berkeley slipped into bed beside her husband, careful not to jostle the splint that protected his leg. She laid her hand lightly on his naked chest. His skin was warm. Berkeley snuggled closer, resting her head in the crook of his shoulder. She yawned hugely.

Grey chuckled.

"You're awake," she said, startled. "I vaguely recall your brothers sneaking out through the sitting room sometime ago. I tried to come back here, but I couldn't lift my head then."

"And not now either," Grey said, judging by the weight of it against him. "I think there are times that you're not at all sorry I'm virtually bedbound."

She raised herself up, kissed him on the mouth, and immediately resumed her position. "That's an awful thing to say. And why does your mouth taste like peppermint? I expected to be pie-faced myself just from kissing you good night."

"Colin gave me a handful of mints. He said you'd be appreciative."

Berkeley pressed another kiss against his skin. "He was right. Perhaps you have a smart brother after all. Did Decker give you anything?"

"As a matter of facta" Grey eased Berkeley up so he could reach across to the bedside table. He felt around on the top until he had what he wanted. "These are for you. Hold out your hand."

Berkeley's first reaction was to obey blindly but at the last moment she realized what he might be ready to drop into her hand. Her ringers folded convulsively, and the heirloom earrings glanced off her knuckles and fell harmlessly on the coverlet. Moonlight turned the gold to silver and made the pearls appear translucent. "Oh, Grey," she said, touched and saddened at the same time. "I thought Decker would know I can never wear them."

"He remembered, but when I wouldn't accept Rosefield, he said I should take these."

Berkeley peered closer into Grey's face. She searched his eyes. As far as she could make out they appeared quite clear. His speech wasn't slurred, even if he didn't make any sense. "I don't understand," she said. "Rosefield is Colin's property. He's the earl."

"He has the t.i.tle and a portion of the estate, but the manor itself he arranged for Decker to take. It seems Decker's been waiting to hand it over to me. He has no use for it living in Boston with Jonna. I'm not certain I understand his reasoning, but then things got a little muddled after midnight."

Berkeley c.o.c.ked one eyebrow and gave him a knowing look. "The earrings are the only inheritance he's ever cared about," she said. "Give them back to him and accept Rosefield graciously."

"You want to live in England?"

"No. Or at least I've never thought about it. But it's your heritage, Grey. Your true heritage. And Rhea's. You've built something here for Nat, for all of us. But don't deny Rhea a glimpse of your past, even if you would deny yourself."

Grey was quiet. He picked up the earrings and turned them over in his palm. "I hadn't thought of that," he said at last.

"As you said, things got a little muddled." She watched him put the earrings aside and was grateful for the arm he slipped around her again.

"You should have made them leave instead of falling asleep on the settee with Rhea. They felt very bad about that."

"I wanted you to have time together." She stifled a yawn. "It's odd how it turned out, isn't it? You've been afraid you could never convince them you were their brother, and they recognized it before you told them anything at all."

Grey pressed his lips to the pale crown of Berkeley's hair. "That's because you had the foresight to give me a daughter who apparently looks just like I did."

Berkeley smiled. Beneath the covers she found his palm and absently ran her thumb across the base of it. "Grey?"

"Hmmm?"

"Was it your letter that brought them here? It's been so longa I wondered if they might have heard froma""

"It was the letter. Not Anderson or Garret." He turned carefully on his side and propped his head in one hand. He let Berkeley keep the other. "You need to know, Berkeley. They're both dead."

"What?"

Grey waited for her to absorb the truth of what he said before he went on. "I was telling them about Anderson and Garret. They told me about the Albany. It went down in a storm near Tierra del Fuego. Word of the wreck reached Boston before Decker and Colin left. They didn't realize then that they knew anyone aboard. The ship was splintered between twenty-five-foot waves and the rocky coast. There were no survivors, Berkeley."

"Oh, G.o.d." She closed her eyes, squeezed them shut really, and tried to block out her last vision of the Albany in San Francis...o...b..y. Dizzying sparks of color replaced the outline of the ship against the sky and its reflection in the water. She felt a pa.s.sing sadness for the souls lost, save two. For the man who had been both stepfather and husband, and the one who had been her half brother, there was no sense of loss. Word of their deaths brought a measure of relief, and for that she felt guilty. "Then Anderson was never able to spread his lies."

"No," Grey said. "They died with him and with anyone he told on board."

It struck her then that Grey had been as worried about Anderson's next move as she. "You thought he would tell Decker and Jonna about us, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"You never said anything to me."

"Neither did you."

Berkeley opened her eyes and tilted her head up at him. "I can't be sorry that he's gone," she said in a rush. "I can't feel anything for Garret's pa.s.sing either."

"It's all right." He ran his fingers through her silky hair. The gesture slowly calmed her. "It's not so different for me. Anderson was determined to separate us. Garret, too, in his own way. They both meant us harm. I'm not sorry they can't try any longer."

"It's ironic, don't you think? Anderson wasn't satisfied that what he told me on the dock would hurt us enough, so he paid the Ducks to ruin us. The firea""

"Ruin us?" Grey interrupted. "He meant for us to die in that fire."

"But it gave you back your life insteada and mine."

As he dangled above Portsmouth Square, holding on to Rhea's smoldering wooden tresses, Grey's memories broke through to his consciousness. Before he hit the ground and darkness overtook him again, he knew that most of what Anderson Shaw told Berkeley was a carefully constructed lie. Grey said, "I'm sure Anderson died perfectly satisfied that he had succeeded in all things."

"Well, I hope someone tells him how it turned out. That will be h.e.l.l for him."

Laughter rumbled low at the back of Grey's throat. "I had no idea you could be so vengeful. I'll keep that in mind."

She wondered if her arch look was lost in the shadows. "You should," she added for emphasis. Her features took on a more solemn cast. "What did you tell your brothers about him?"

Grey squeezed her hand. "Only what they needed to know. Nothing at all that he said the day he left on the Albany. I told them instead what I had come to remember and knew to be the truth: that I was the adopted son of James and Evaline Denison."

He could say the words now without the depth of hurt he had known when he had first heard them some eleven years earlier. At twenty they had felled him with the force of a physical blow. It no longer seemed that he knew himself, knew his parents, or his brother. Even his dear grandmother was suddenly a stranger to him.

Perhaps if he had been older or younger when he had learned the truth, he told himself. Perhaps that would have made a difference. All he knew now was that at twenty he wasn't prepared.

Over time he had shared all of it with Berkeley. Long days and nights spent in bed were good for reflecting on the past. His crushed leg, only in a splint now, had once been fastened to weights and pulleys to keep it from knitting shorter than the one that had only a simple fracture. His arm had been released from its splint and sling two months ago, and his ribs had slowly healed so that he could draw a breath without cursing the pain. Then there were daily exercises and sometimes unendurable ma.s.sages to make certain his muscles stayed toned and supple. Grey was the first one to admit that at no time was he a good or grateful patient.

Berkeley was his eyes and ears and legs, running the hotel and supervising his interests, yet it seemed to Grey that she rarely left his side. When her time came she gave birth to Rhea in the adjoining dressing room, and when it was over she insisted on being carried into their bedchamber. It was only then that Grey was glad he was confined to the bed. The doctor wouldn't have allowed him to share it with Berkeley in any other circ.u.mstance. She put their beautiful, red-faced and wrin-kled baby girl on his chest, and he cradled Rhea against his sling, just as if it were there for only that purpose.

At night, lying so carefully beside him, Berkeley would listen as he talked about his youth and recovered some new piece of his past at Beau Rivage.

He had never had any suspicion that he did not properly belong to Beau Rivage, but he had always known he didn't quite fit in. Of course there were times when he believed his younger brother was given special consideration or privilege, but he recognized the roots of these uncharitable thoughts as his own jealousy and tried to put them aside. Garret received more because he asked for it. He never questioned, as Grey did, if he was deserving. Almost from the moment of his birth, Garret proved himself to be the charming, amiable brother, and it was generally accepted that while the two boys looked a great deal alike, their temperaments could not have been more different.

It was the summer Grey returned to Beau Rivage from Harvard that he learned more about the differences between himself and Garret. He had not intended to listen to the argument between his mother and father, but when he heard his name he stood rooted to the floor outside his mother's room, knowing somehow that he had already heard too much.

His mother was having one of her spells. That was the polite term the family used to describe Evaline's bouts of melancholy and subsequent confinement to her room. Grey had been home three days, and, except for a brief audience upon his arrival, he had yet to spend any time with her. Armed with a book and a cup of tea he had gone to her room, determined to break through her self-imposed isolation.

Standing in the hall outside her door, listening to the raised voices, Grey remembered that when he was quite young he had known with certainty that his father loved his mother. That feeling had long since pa.s.sed. What his father had once indulged, he now only tolerated.

The argument could have started about anything. With no parameters for the partic.i.p.ants, with no subjects placed off-limits, it had rapidly deteriorated into an argument about past slights and hurtful actions that had never been resolved. Hadn't he tried every method at his disposal to please her? his father was asking. Had she forgotten it was her fear of humiliation that he had responded to when it seemed she could not conceive? Hadn't he arranged their trip to London for one purpose alone? To find a child they could present at Beau Rivage as their own.

There was a great deal more said about it then, but Grey only heard disjointed bits though he never left his place by the door. It was over that entire summer that he pieced together the whole of the story. What he discovered was that he was the last in his own family to know.

When Evaline, against all expectations, found herself pregnant after the visit to London, she felt compelled to apologize to her in-laws for her deception. Although not eager to do so, James was forced to admit to his parents that the child he presented as his own was, in fact, a foundling plucked from a London workhouse. Even Garret had been eventually made privy to the truth some years earlier.

Grey came to realize the Denisons had a family secret, and the most d.a.m.ning evidence that he was not part of the family was that they kept it from him. Just as hurtful was Grey's realization that they maintained the secret not to spare his feelings, but to spare their own. With the sole exception of his grandmother, Grey sensed his family was embarra.s.sed by his existence. His grandfather hated the idea that Beau Rivage would pa.s.s to someone not of his own blood. To his mother he was a reminder of the panic and humiliation she experienced when she had not been able to conceive. His presence reinforced his father's decision not to indulge Evaline's every whim, and, as she withdrew, so did he. A succession of mistressesa"Berkeley's mother among thema"kept him away. Somehow, even the responsibility for those infidelities was laid at Grey's door.

It was no different to Garret. To Garret he was not a brother, but an obstacle.

The secret of Grey's birth could not be properly kept from society if he did not inherit Beau Rivage, but if he was to be disowned, there would have to be a reason.

Grey decided to give them one. It only took some time for the plan to unfold.

He had never given a great deal of thought about the slaves that his family owned. They had always been there, field hands and house servants, quartered in a row of shanties that could be seen from his bedroom if he cared to notice. He didn't, not often anyway. He grew up alongside black children, played with them and worked with them, and had never once questioned the premises that mandated that one of them would be the owner and the others would be owned.

Education north of the Mason-Dixon Line opened his eyes to another way of life. The ideas that accompanied it were revolutionary. In his first year at Harvard Grey did not embrace what the abolitionist movement in Boston was preaching. He needed the summer away from the fanatics at Faneuil Hall to think more about it. When he returned to cla.s.ses in the fall he was still uncertain what he thought about slavery, but he was absolutely certain what his family thought.

There was no better way to disgrace himself with the Deni-sons than to get involved with the Underground Railroad.

First he made himself a scapegrace. He rebelled in small ways. He quietly voiced unpopular opinions at the dinner table. He drank more than he could properly tolerate. He visited brothels in Charleston and lost money at the gaming tables. His three-year engagement to Alys was abruptly ended, and he accepted the blame for its dissolution. He never revealed to anyone that she hadn't left him because of the change in his behavior, but because he had explained the change to her. She left him because he had confided in the woman he loved. She left him because she wanted to marry a Denison.

Alys Franklin made it clear that she could accept his drinking and gaming and whoring, that she, like so many of her friends, had been raised to accept those intemperate and self-indulgent traits in their husbands. What she could not accept was that she would not be getting a Denison in exchange for her sacrifice.

The pain of that betrayal left Grey numb. His only solace was that he had not confided the whole of his plan to her. Alys became as much the focus of his revenge as his own family. The first slave he freed came from Alys's plantation at Westerly. Her name was Cristobel, and she was Alys's personal maid.

Grey was suddenly aware that Berkeley was watching him. In the shaft of moonlight that glanced off her hair, her eyes were very nearly black. Their focus was intense. He smiled a shade guiltily.

"Tell me," she said.

He shook his head. "You've heard it before."

"I don't mind. I like the sound of your voice. Tell me where you went just then, what you were thinking."

Grey sighed, but he was relieved not to be able to refuse her. He wanted, no, he needed to talk about it. "Did you mind very much discovering I was not Falconer?"

"No." Berkeley ran her fingers back and forth lightly along his collarbone. She remembered that Grey had never accepted that the name had belonged to him. Even before his memory was returned he had somehow sensed his connection to Falconer wasn't what others thought. "You took the name and the credita"and the d.a.m.nation in some quartersa"to protect Decker's secret. He and Jonna couldn't have continued their work on the Underground if you hadn't identified yourself as Falconer. And it's not as though you hadn't been engaged in the very same work for years. You might never have met Decker if you hadn't been a conductor with the Railroad. Why should I think less of you because you're not the one they called Falconer?" Her fingers stopped their tracing motion. "Do you think less of yourself?''

"It's not that precisely. I suppose it's more of a regret that my involvement wasn't because of an ideal. I remember that Jonna once characterized my actions as n.o.ble. It made me uncomfortable, knowing as I did that my behavior was motivated by revenge."

"Someone told me that great change is not always prompted by a high-minded, heroic code. Sometimes it only takes a profound act of selfishness."

Grey's smile was wry. "I told you that."

"So you did." Berkeley raised her hand and touched his mouth, silencing him gently. "And I say it's not so simple as that. It began one way for you and finished another. In the end you embraced an idea that you hadn't always believed in. If that weren't true, you wouldn't have hidden your activities from your family as long as you did. You let them believe you were a self-indulgent wastrel, that you were no better than your own bad blood would allow you to be. You encouraged them not to bear any responsibility for raising you badly, only for choosing badly. You could have allowed them to see through your charade at any time, and yet you didn't. Not after the first slave you led out, not after the first score. One wonders if you would have ever told them if you had not been moved to help Decker."

Berkeley removed her hand and raised her face. She kissed Grey lightly on the mouth. "I don't know if you understand the true nature of revenge. In order to make it felt, you have to make it known. That you finally did was more by accident man design."

"So I can start posing for my statue?" he asked dryly.

She laughed and tapped his chest with her forefinger to drive home her point. "You can take comfort in the fact that you're wonderfully human: complicated, simple, wise, foolish, enigmatic, and transparent. You can embrace the contradictions in your nature or you can spend the rest of your life trying to make sense of them."

Grey didn't have to think about it. He grabbed her hand before she withdrew it. "I'd rather spend the rest of my life embracing you."

That should have deepened her smile. She knew he meant it to. Instead it was marked with a hint of sadness. Her expression had become grave. "The revenge you meant to take on your family never involved killing one of them. Don't forget that, Grey, when you look back on what you did. Garret planned for you to die."

"Because I dishonored the family."

"Because he couldn't be satisfied with the family's disowning you. In his mind you had tainted everything he stood to inherit. Beau Rivage. Alys. His way of life. Your mother's prized piece of jewelry that rightfully had always been yours. Your actions gave him what he wanted and in the same stroke made it all seem so much less than it was." She searched his face. "I've given it a lot of thought, Grey, and I really believe Garret had come to learn I was his half sister. Anderson said I never understood how integral I was to everything that happened. I think that well may be one of the few truths he told me that day. We've found it so easy to blame Anderson that we don't often consider the role Garret played. Perhaps he was afraid that I would want something from hima"or from the father who never showed me the least attention. He couldn't know that I want only what I have. More is never enough for someone like Garret, and he didn't have the capacity to understand someone like me. He needed to have everything for himself."

Grey stared at Berkeley for a long moment. When she looked away, made self-conscious by his scrutiny, he touched her chin and brought her back to him. His voice was softly intent. "You're a marvel."