Chapter 26

TWENTY-SIX

I waited for a minute or two outside the door but then felt like an unconscionable lurker, so I decided now was a good time to take a walk in the gardens while Xavier said his peace with Henry. I let the butler know where I was going in case Xavier tried to find me, then went outside in search of Sofia, who had undoubtedly dragged Miriam up to the stable to feed the horses and the sheep. I ended up getting lost within a maze of topiaries and carefully pruned hedges that made me feel like I was in a Lewis Carroll novel. Good lord, where was I supposed to go now?

“‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’” I murmured with a smile to myself, quoting the Cheshire cat as I sank down on a bench. “Where is that, though?”

“Need some help?”

I turned to find Frederick rounding a corner.

“Oh,” I said. “Maybe. I came out looking for Sofia.”

“I believe I saw her towing Miriam in the direction of the pastures,” Frederick said with a small smile. “Looking for sheep. Then they planned to come back to hunt for gnomes in the garden.”

I nodded. “Sounds like her. I’ll just wait here, then.”

“May I join you?”

Surprised, I moved over on my bench so Frederick could take a seat. We sat there for a bit, taking in the view of the gardens before he spoke all at once.

“For what it’s worth,” he said. “I think you’re good for him. My brother, I mean.”

I perked. I hadn’t heard Frederick talk about Xavier before, though being this much younger than him, it made sense he would think of him more like a brother than simply “step” brother.

I found myself wondering if there was more to it than that. If I were a young boy with a rebellious heir for a sibling, I’d probably look up to him. Actually, thinking of Matthew, I knew what that was like completely.

“I have an older brother too,” I told him.

Frederick looked down at me curiously. “Do you? What’s he like?”

I smiled. “Matthew? He’s…” I tipped my head. “He’s kind of like Xavier, actually. Not as big, and his temper isn’t quite as bad. But he’s smart and kind of broody. Doesn’t smile enough. Really loyal to his family. Like, would do anything for us.” I rubbed my palms on my knees, suddenly aching for my family. “He took care of Sofia and me for years. Let us live with him when we didn’t really have anywhere else to go.”

Frederick, I realized, was an uncommonly good listener. His body language turned to me slightly, yet completely, and he watched me until I was finished speaking before he looked away. There was no judgment in his light gray eyes, and it occurred to me I assumed he was just like his mother when, in fact, he’d barely said anything at all around her.

“Why didn’t you tell Xavier?” Frederick asked after a moment’s thought. “About Sofia, I mean. I can’t believe he would abandon you. He would have supported you, too, I’m sure of it.”

“Would he?” I frowned, looking back at the house.

I had thought so briefly, but now I wasn’t so sure. Xavier would have given us money. But I wasn’t sure he understood how to really take care of another person. It required so much more than money could buy.

“It’s what he did with Imogene’s sister, before she died, and they weren’t even involved like that,” he said.

I bit my lip. I didn’t want to think about Imogene right now. Sometimes I wondered if she resembled Lucy more than people said. I wondered if that was why Xavier never seemed to rebuke her completely.

Frederick was quiet for a bit longer, picking a daisy from a weed growing at the base of the bench and fiddling with it a bit before speaking again.

“I was only six when Xavier came to Kendal,” he told me. “The duke had just married my mother, you see. But then he had that accident, and it was obvious he couldn’t have any more children. Mother even left him for a bit, and we went back to live with my grandparents. There was talk of another divorce, but it was just a separation in the end. I suspect Mother liked being a duchess too much to end it completely.”

I bit back a snort, despite Frederick’s wry tone. That seemed very true to Georgina’s character.

“Then Xavier’s mother died, and so he came to Kendal until he could start at Eton.”

I blinked. “That must have been…interesting.”

I could only imagine what Xavier had been like after losing his mother, and then coming here with the understanding that he was a mere illegitimate offspring—with no right to any of the grandeur that surrounded him. He would have been so sad. But probably very angry.

“I was young,” Frederick said. “But I do remember, there was this one night Xavier found me crying in the library. I don’t know why.” He gave a crooked kind of smile that told me, even at six, this was embarrassing. “Young gentlemen are not supposed to cry.”

“I think that’s what men of all ages learn pretty early on,” I said. “Gentlemen or not. Complete malarkey.”

“Yes. Well. Xavier found me, but instead of leaving, he smiled and told me to wait there. Then he dragged a duvet and some pillows in from the bedroom beside the library—they were Mother’s.” Frederick chuckled at the memory. “I couldn’t believe it. Mother would have boxed my ears for even entering her chamber, but Xavier didn’t care a fig what anyone thought. He draped the duvet and the pillows over the Chesterfield in the library and built a fort for the two of us. And then snuck down to the kitchen and brought up some ham and cheese. We had a proper picnic, right there on the floor while he read to me from Wind in the Willows .”

“I’ll bet he enjoyed that too,” I said. “More than you think. Even at sixteen, boys like to play more than they let on.”

Frederick only shrugged. “Perhaps. But you know, I was the one smiling about it, not him.” He gave me a long look that seemed much older than twenty-two. “Since you’ve been here, I’ve seen my brother smile more than all the time I’d known him. It’s clear to me that you make him happy. Even if we do not.”

I opened my mouth to respond but found I didn’t know what to say.

Did I make Xavier happy?

All we seemed to do lately was fight.

“Thank you for telling me, I—Adam?”

Frederick turned, and we both watched as the last person I expected to see came walking down the path into the gardens: Adam Klein, looking for all the world like he knew his way perfectly around the maze of hedges and flowers. Like be belonged here. Like he thought it was all his.

“Frankie,” he greeted me, albeit not particularly fondly. “You’re…here.”

He sneered, but the action made him wince. His entire face was black and blue from the effects of yesterday’s brawl. He wasn’t wearing a brace, but it did look as though he rather needed one.

“I am,” I said. “And so are you. Why are you here?”

“Not to get another broken nose,” he supplied helpfully as he came to stand in front of us, prompting Frederick and me to join him.

“You couldn’t have possibly thought coming to Kendal was an intelligent move,” Frederick said in a droll voice. “Not after what happened at Troop’s. We’ve all seen the papers.”

Adam sniffed, then winced again. “It’s what family does, isn’t it?”

I gaped at both of them. “Family?”

Frederick turned to me, already looking bored. “Adam is a cousin to both me and Xavier.”

“Not so distant, really. After all, our fathers are related. ”

My eyes were bugging out of my head. “Wait, what? You and Xavier are related?”

Adam just scoffed. “Please. I share barely any DNA with that overbearing gorilla. We are related primarily by marriage.”

“If you’re going to intrude, you should do it accurately,” Frederick put in. “After all, we do all three of us share a common ancestor in the tenth Duke of Kendal. He is why you are here, after all.” He turned to me as an aside. “The English gentry is a very small world.”

I blinked. “I’m confused. You’re related…but you’re not?”

“We all three have the same fourth great grandfather,” Frederick explained. “The tenth Duke of Kendal had two sons. One line continued down to Xavier. The other continued through our grandfather, a lower baron who was stripped of his title. And then to our fathers, who had none.”

I turned to Adam. “I thought your name was Klein, not Parker.”

“It is Klein. Mum was widowed young and remarried my father when I was a baby. She gave me his name.”

“You already know my mother is divorced,” Frederick supplied. “But yes, my father’s name was also Parker. It made the transfer seamless, I suppose.”

I turned back to Adam. “You weren’t going to tell me this?”

He just studied his nails. “It’s a distant connection. Xavier and I barely knew each other, like we said. There didn’t seem any point.”

“So…what, does that make you, a…?”

“It’s makes me a nothing,” Adam said, not quite able to mask the bitterness. “Which is what happens when your lying grandsire has his title stripped by the throne, and then your mother runs off with a Jewish diplomat. Try as I might, I could never fit in with them. Not that they’d ever want me. It’s just one more claim they have to get rid of.”

“Claim?” I repeated dazedly, glancing between the two of them. “Claim to what?”

“Neither of us has a claim to anything,” Frederick insisted, more to Adam than to me. “Much less to the dukedom of Kendal.”

“Tell your mother that,” Adam said. “She and Mum haven’t stopped searching for alternative records for a decade.”

Frederick didn’t reply.

“What is he talking about?” I wondered, tired of feeling out of the loop.

“The fact is that until ten years ago, we both thought one of us might have a claim to being the next Duke of Kendal. Until that stupid marriage certificate was found.” Adam spat on the ground. “I’ll never forget the day I realized I was going to remain a fucking elementary school teacher for the rest of my life. It was the same day I realized I was never going to stop working to overturn the whole damn thing.”

“Arrogant as always,” Frederick returned as he picked another daisy. “There’s no point.”

“Oh, please. Like Auntie thinks any differently. She’s been trying for years to get Parliament to strip the title on the basis of a godless marriage.” Adam snorted. “A Buddhist temple marriage? Rupert Parker? Pictures or it didn’t happen, so they say.”

“But it did happen.” I found my voice at last. “Henry went to Japan and got it from Masumi’s family. It’s why Rupert Parker had to acknowledge him as his son.”

“Convenient, isn’t it?” Adam put in.

“They would have verified it,” I said. Or maybe just assumed. “Parliament wouldn’t have just signed off on his inheritance. Would they?”

“Would they?” Adam parroted with the low tone of conspiracy.

All signs of the friendly compatriot from yesterday had vanished. All that was left was a bitter, mocking little man.

“Or maybe they just wanted to have a quick and easy line of succession rather than digging through the weeds of Debrett’s and hashing it all out in the Lords.” The look on Frederick’s face made it clear how likely he thought that was. “I don’t know how you thought you were going to accomplish that in America.”

“It’s called biding my time, you complacent moron,” Adam spat. “I just had to watch and wait for things to sort themselves out.

Frederick shrugged. “So what if it did? The estate would still remain with Henry, the second son, would it not?”

“Only if Rupert left a will,” Adam said. “Which he did not.”

“And now that Henry is just about gone, we’re not wasting the opportunity to set things right. Anyway, Kendal is one of the oldest Dukedoms in England. The queen wouldn’t have wanted it to die out. Nor would she want one of the oldest fortunes in the world to go to the wrong man.”

“That’s what this is about, isn’t it?” I finally found my voice. “You don’t really care about the title. You care about the money.”

Adam’s eyes rolled. “Well, of course I care about the money, Frankie. Who wouldn’t care about a net worth of eight billion dollars?”

My jaw dropped. I’d known Xavier was rich, that his family was one of the wealthiest in England. But I hadn’t known it rivaled the GDP of a small nation.

“It’s a moot point, regardless of what you, Mother, and Aunt Caroline think,” Frederick replied, turning to me. “Xavier Parker is the Duke of Kendal and will be until his death. And so it will die with him unless he has a legitimate son of his own.”

“Rupert didn’t think Xavier would inherit,” Adam claimed. “He knew it would be you or me, especially since he couldn’t have any more children himself. And since he was a freaking anti-Semite on top of everything else, he married Georgina to give you a greater claim when the time came. You know and I know. It was Henry that changed the plan. It was always Henry’s doing. And I’m going to find the evidence if it’s the last thing I do.”