be ridiculous, older brother.” His voice was annoyingly cheerful. Ash was convinced he put on that bright expression on purpose, just to annoy him. He became even more sure when Mark leaned over the arm of his chair and favored him with a brilliant smile. “I’ve never even touched her, you know.”
“It hardly matters. Neither have I.”
“That was rather the point.” Mark pushed away from Ash’s seat and turned around. “Come now. Chastity builds character.”
Ash held back a rude noise. He’d wanted to spend time with his brother, not antagonize him further.
“If you must know,” Mark continued, “she reminds me of Hope.”
A brief band of pain constricted about Ash’s chest. “She’s nothing like Hope.” But his brother’s words brought to mind a picture of their sister, her hair long and dark, her smile fragile. It was an image he couldn’t forget, even had he wanted to. She should have been a grown woman now. She would have been, if Parford had acted when Ash begged him to do so.
“What do you remember of her, anyway?”
“Not enough. Her hands. Her laugh. I remember that after she died, everything seemed to change so quickly. It was as if she had been the gatekeeper to all that was good in the world, and with her gone…” Mark shrugged again. “But all that’s over. Still, I remember enough of the nightmare that followed to know that it’s a hellish thing to be alone in the world, unprotected.”
“Miss Lowell doesn’t need protection from me.”
“She’s employed by the Dalrymples, Ash. What do you suppose will happen to her when we leave and Richard and Edmund return? Do you fancy leaving her to their tender mercies, then?”
He hadn’t fancied leaving her behind at all. But if he said that, Mark would tease him all the more. “I hadn’t thought what would happen when we left,” Ash said stiffly.
“No. You wouldn’t.” Mark spoke this piece of brazen treachery with an utterly matter-of-fact manner.
Ash flinched. He could not make himself look away from his brother’s gaze. He spent half the days wishing Mark would talk to him. It was in moments like this that he wished to take it all back. He wished he could push his brother away. That he could forget what he had done to his brothers—or rather, what he hadn’t.
“Christ, Mark.”
“You don’t always think about others the way you should,” Mark said simply.
That criticism cut more deeply than the reference to Hope. Mark stated it so mildly, making the wound sting all the more. Mark’s gaze was as piercing as only someone who had survived the precise contours of one’s faults could be.
“I think about others every damned second of the day. It’s because of you that I’m here, after all, because of what I wanted to give you—”
“And still you stomp about, leaving little eddies of destruction in your wake.”
Hell. Guilt was bad enough, without having his brother point out his every flaw. Ash had been the one to solemnly swear that he would protect and defend the younger children. He had been the one who had nodded as his father told him that their mother was given to excess. He’d solemnly promised to temper her zeal.
He’d failed. A few years later, despite his best efforts, his sister had died. A few months after that, Ash had left for India, determined to make his fortune and thus undo everything their mother had done.
But he’d left his brothers behind. He would never be able to forget the sick sensation he’d felt when he found Mark and Smite on his return, pale and thin, alone on the streets of Bristol. It had made so much sense to leave them. But nothing he did could repair what had happened to them in his absence. They wouldn’t even talk of those years, not to him.
And that hadn’t been the only time he’d abandoned Mark. Just the first.
“Very well,” he said stiffly. “You are quite in the right. I should never have left. I failed Hope. I failed you.”
A puzzled look flitted across Mark’s face. “How is it that we are talking about me, then?”
“Every time I look at you, I recall how I’ve failed you. There. I’ve admitted it. Are you happy now?”
“Happy that you look at me and see failure?” Mark’s voice was tending towards scorn now, and his lip curled. “Hardly.”
Christ. He was cocking it up again. “I know you’re not a failure. You took a first at Oxford.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Mark said hotly, “I’m a good deal more than that. Granville himself said I was the brightest student he’d seen in the thirty-five years he’d been in philosophy. And this—” Mark gestured at the pages that lay on the table in front of him “—this will show everyone what I can do. Even you, Ash. Even you. So don’t look at me and see failure. I haven’t failed anything.”
This had all gone horribly wrong. “Don’t get so upset, Mark. I’m not questioning your intelligence. Or your capabilities.”
“What are you questioning, then? It can’t be my principles, seeing as how you have none of your own to speak of.”
“Oh, it’s my principles you object to, then?” Ash felt the whole bitter weight of his responsibilities shift restlessly. He’d done everything for his brothers—everything. Mark was his principle. And if Ash’s hands were a little dirty, it was because he’d wanted to keep his brothers’ clean. “They’re a hell of a lot more honest than your own,” he snapped.
He wished he could take the words back as soon as he’d said them, because Mark actually gasped in surprise.
“What do you mean by that?”
Ash didn’t want to answer. He didn’t want to let Mark know that there was yet another barrier between them, another one of Ash’s many failures. But Mark gestured, and the words tripped out anyway.
“Maybe you’re too young to remember what it was like before father died, or what happened in those years afterwards. You might not remember the day Mother decided to take to heart the Biblical command that one should sell everything one had and give it all to the poor. Nice, in principle; in practice, it leaves your own children starving, housed in rat-infested penury. We lost everything we should have had—modest comfort, education. She traded a secure competence for some stupid words she didn’t even understand.”
“You’re the one who never understood Mother,” Mark said.
“As if I could. She was mad, Mark. Plain and simple.”
Mark’s lip curled. “There was nothing plain or simple about her insanity.”
“Maybe it doesn’t seem that way to you. But I was supposed to protect you—all of you. Her principles killed Hope. They almost killed you and Smite. And throughout it all, Mother clung to dead words in a dead book, paying no attention to the living around her. Maybe you can understand why I mislike the notion of my youngest brother clinging to more dead words. Maybe you can understand why I wince, knowing that my little brother, who spent his childhood with a woman who quite literally went mad with her principles, is spending the summers of his youth practicing the same sort of abstemious insanity that he grew up with. Do you want to know why I’ve failed you? Because I haven’t been able to save you from a woman who has been dead these past ten years. I haven’t saved you from anything.”
Mark stared at him, his hands curled into fists. “You don’t know anything,” he spat. “Not about me. Not about Mother. You can be such a great oaf sometimes.”
“Oaf? Is that the best insult the brightest student in thirty-five years of philosophy can muster? Call me a damned bastard. Curse me. Consider a little blasphemy, Mark. It would make me feel a great deal better, knowing you were capable of even a little sin.”
“Far