Chapter 24

Red the color of Clara's hair and gold the color of Alfie's laugh. They danced around the maypole together, and to any other observer, they would appear just two more bodies in the chaotic whirl of merriment. But to Atlas, they stood out as a yellow ribbon torn from a pretty girl's head on a stormy day sticks out against the angry, gray sky. Because they were his.

Had he ever felt this happy? This… part of something?

A hand landed on his shoulder. "Brother," Raph said.

And then another hand on his other shoulder. Zander squeezed. "You owe me a bottle of brandy in the garden tonight for fooling me so long. I thought you'd healed."

Raph grunted. "Why didn't you tell us?"

Atlas didn't feel the fear and guilt he'd thought he'd feel if his family ever found out. He felt light and free and grateful to give himself voice for once. "Didn't want to be a burden. There was already so much to worry about here. Then I show up wounded inside and out when I'd merely been trying to help. I'd made everything worse."

"Bollocks," Raph hissed. "I put you to work everywhere."

"I put myself to work, Raph. Trying to be useful in any way I could."

"In the stables, in the fields and garden, as coachman and footman and—hell." A muscle in Raph's jaw ticked. "I can never apologize enough."

"I don't want you to. You didn't do anything."

"We didn't see," Zander said. "That's the worst bit. Our biggest failure."

Raph nodded. "We should have seen."

"Well, now you do." Atlas shrugged his shoulders out of his brothers' holds. "So no pity."

"Pity you?" Zander smirked. "Unlikely. You've found yourself a fine wife who loves you. You've won your inheritance. You have an admirable son." He slapped Atlas on the back. "You're to be envied."

Atlas grinned. "I think so too."

"How bad is it?" Raph demanded, his gaze flicking to Atlas's thigh. They knew he'd been injured, knew where. They'd just never known how bad it had been. Still could be sometimes.

"It pains me still, but I can handle it."

Identical snorts from his brothers.

"Atlas?"

The three brothers turned at the same time. Their mother stood before them, rotating a square of paper between her fingers, one cheek sunken in like she bit the inside of it.

She took a tentative step toward them. Not like her to show hesitation. No matter what life threw her, she threw all of herself into it.

"What is the matter, Mother?" Atlas asked.

She held out the paper.

"It's your letter." Raph's voice, softer than usual, softer perhaps than Atlas had ever heard it.

Zander swallowed. "Find yourself a nice quiet, private place, brother. So no one sees you cry."

Their mother glanced once at Raph and then at Zander. "May I speak with Atlas alone?"

Zander melted into the crowd, finding Fiona, and Raph went into the house,

And then they were alone, as much as they could be on a grassy lawn with revelers so nearby.

His mother's hair streamed down her back in a long braid, and her flower crown sat at a crooked angle. Atlas straightened it, then she took his hand and pressed the paper into his palm.

"I've put the painting—your inheritance—in your bedchamber. I could have left the letter there, too, but… I caught your father writing it, I think, though I did not realize what he wrote at the time." She closed her eyes and gripped his hands so tightly he thought his bones might break. Something in her seemed to be breaking. "He knew he was dying in the last months of his life, and he spent as much time as he could with me. But on that day, he'd disappeared. I found him in your bedchamber. I've no idea where you'd gone to. But he sat at your desk. Writing. I asked him what, and he said a letter to you. I did not think it odd. He was dying. Naturally, he'd write to those he loved. I—" Her voice cracked. "I did not ask him what about. I asked to stay with him instead. As he wrote." She pressed her lips into a thin line. "He did not want me. He wanted to be ‘with your spirit' in your space as he wrote. So I left."

She opened her eyes, and all the grief he'd thought long banished in the year since his father's death overflowed there. She mourned still. Perhaps always would. Giving his hands one more squeeze, she released them, threaded them tight behind her back.

"I left him that day. And I cried. Not because he was dying. But because… it was the first time I'd seen true regret in his eyes. He knew he'd not done right by his children. But he'd never… brooded on it. But that day, he looked as if every ill decision he'd ever made weighed down on him.

"And that day I felt every one of my ill decisions weigh down on me too." She swallowed hard. "I have not been a good mother. A hard lesson to learn in the last year. No, I've known it longer. The last year has been a test to see if I can admit it. And change."

"Mother—"

"Let me speak. Let me apologize. For not seeing your pain. For not caring for you as I should have. For not stopping your father's excesses. For not even trying to." She bent her head and hid her face for a long, shaky exhale, and when she met his gaze again, it was teary determination in her eyes. "I've always said I've lived my life beyond the pale… but now the only place I wish to live is in my family's hearts. Can you ever forgive me?"

He hugged her, crinkling the letter against her back. "Yes. Of course."

She gave a watery laugh, clinging to him. "Naturally you do." She pushed out of the hug and playfully smacked his shoulder. "My lovely lad Atlas, my lonely son. You take too much on, give too much of yourself away. But—" Her gaze fluttered over his shoulder, to the dancers. "Perhaps you will have some happiness now. Perhaps you will no longer be lonely."

"I won't. I'm not." Not anymore.

She kissed his cheek and danced away from him, throwing her arms in the air, her grin as bright as the sun itself.

He would follow her. But not yet. Tossing one last glance at the revelers, he retreated to the side of the house where it cast a shadow over the lawn. He leaned against the old stone of his home and took one deep breath before unfolding the paper, before his father's handwriting leapt off the path and his father's voice floated through the air.

My dearest Atlas,

I wish I'd never named you that. It has proved unfortunate foreshadowing, as if I sealed your fate when I chose your name. You were destined always to hold the weight of the world on your shoulders. I do not know why you hide your pain, but I wish you would not, my boy. I hope by the time you read this letter, you've let someone in, showed them all. I cannot bear the thought of you remaining so lonely all your life.

All my fault. You ran away to war because of my actions. You ran away to save us because I'd put us in peril.

I've had it all wrong. But then you know that. For me, it is a new revelation, one that kills me more than this blasted tumor reshaping my body. I've spent my life collecting art, owning it, hoarding it like a greedy dragon. But art is not about owning. Art is about seeing. We make it to understand our lives in new ways, and to show others new ways of understanding. The purpose of art is in the making of it, not the buying or the selling of it. If we always hoard and never create, we never truly see. Not as the artist does.

That's why I wish you and your brothers and sister to create something, anything, to earn your inheritance. My actions have made you hate something vital to life. I hope that you will discover that art is not life, but that it helps us live it better.

That's another lesson I learned too late. No matter my talent with a brush, I never became a master artist of life, learning to put more beauty into the world than pain.

But I have high hopes my children will prove true proficients in the art of living and loving.

I hope you are happy, my Atlas. I hope you are whole. I hope you know I love you.

No signature. No need for one.

Atlas folded the paper and slipped it into his waistcoat pocket, right next to his heart. He pushed off the wall and stepped out of the shadow cast by Briarcliff and into the sun.

When he reached the outer circle of merriment around the maypole, he waited until Clara danced by. He caught her and swung her off her feet and in a circle. When he let her feet touch the ground once more, he kissed her, soft and thorough and with everything he was or would be. He kissed her with every note of every song he'd ever written and with the shadows of every nightmare he'd suffered. Or thrust into existence on the fields of Waterloo and the like. He kissed her and kissed her until she pulled away, breathless.

She reached up and rubbed her thumb across his cheek. "You're crying, Atlas." Her smile melted away. A sin.

He kissed it back into life then said against her lips. "Not for sorrow's sake. Not entirely."

"Are you happy? Because if you're not, I'll?—"

"I'm happy. I'm in love with the cleverest, most courageous, most"—he smoothed a hand down her back and cupped her arse—"delectable woman in the entire world. I've never been happier in my life."

"Truly?"

He nodded.

"We are the same in that, I think, then."

"You are happy, too?"

"Terribly so. And terribly in love with you. You know, I am not surprised at your being in love one bit. Did not you tell me once you made a habit of it?"

"I think, now, that was less practice and more… searching. I never found the right something to fall in love with until I found you. I never knew what it meant to love, truly, until I met you." He tipped her chin up, needing her full attention. "I do not love you as I love anything I can so easily walk away from. You are not a moment of beauty. You are all beauty. You are my whole heart."

Her breath caught, and she toyed with his cravat. "You are a true proficient at love. An artist of it. Must be all that practice."

A true proficient in the art of love? Yes, with Clara dancing in his arms, he truly felt like a master artist of the heart.