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And of course the Flynn-Posys were coming for Christmas.

Well, he would endure it. He would even enjoy it. He would establish himself as host.

His mother took him into the dining room the day after his arrival and explained to him all that she planned to have done in there for his comfort and delight.

“I’ll think about it, Mama,” he said. “I may have some ideas of my own.”

“But of course, my love,” she said, beaming happily at him. “Whatever you want provided it will not ruin the overall effect of what I have planned. How lovely it is to have you home again.”

He left it at that. It had never been easy to talk to his mother-it had always seemed something akin to dashing one’s brains against a rock.

Will you talk to your mother, Peter? Really talk?…Tell her who you are. Perhaps she has been so intent upon loving you all your life that really she does not know you at all. Perhaps-probably-she does not know your dreams.

He had never really talked to his mother, or she to him. He had confronted her once, of course-ghastly memory-but they had both been horribly upset at the time, and they had not used the opportunity to open their hearts to each other, to establish a new and equal relationship of adult mother and adult son.

That would change. He would talk to her. He would hold firm against her iron will. It just seemed somewhat absurd that the provocation was probably going to be a lavender dining room.

He spent a good deal of the time before Christmas away from the house. He liked to go and sit in the dower house, sometimes for hours on end, lighting a fire in the sitting room and enjoying the peace he found there. He had always loved the house, and it had always been well kept even though it had been inhabited during his lifetime only by the girls’ governesses and the tutors he had had before going away to school and sometimes during school holidays. It was a small manor in its own right and was set in the middle of a pretty garden in a secluded corner of the park.

It would, in fact, be the ideal home for his mother…

He visited his neighbors again. And he called on Theo.

“I must thank you, by the way,” Theo said as they sat in his library sipping brandy, “for taking Susanna Osbourne to call on my mother and Edith in Bath. They both wrote to tell me all about it the very next day. I suppose because I was away at school at the time of Osbourne’s death and Susanna’s disappearance, I did not realize quite how upsetting it all was for them. My mother has been thinking all these years that she must be dead.”

“Are the letters still in existence?” Peter asked.

“Yes, indeed,” Theo said, stretching out his booted feet to the blaze in the hearth. “They were at the back of the safe in Osbourne’s old office where I never look-it is stuffed with old papers that I must go through one of these days. I had never even read the letter Osbourne wrote my father until I found both letters after my mother wrote. Susanna’s is still sealed. I suppose I ought to send it on to her even though my mother seems to think she is not interested in seeing it. Queer, that.”

“I think it is more that she is afraid to read it,” Peter said.

“Eh?” Theo said, giving a log a shove farther onto the fire with the toe of one boot. “What would she be afraid of? Ghosts? I suppose it might put the wind up someone, though, to see a letter written more than a decade ago in the hand of a dead man.”

“I think she is afraid of what she will find there,” Peter said. “Sometimes it seems better not to know what one thought forever lost in the past. But I do wonder if the not knowing will fester in her now that she knows about the letter. Does she know it still exists?”

“Not unless my mother has told her,” Theo said. “Sometimes I wish I had a secretary of my own. Writing letters is not my favorite occupation. I suppose I must write one, though. I can hardly just bundle up her father’s and send it off to her without comment, can I?”

“Is there likely to be something in your father’s letter that would not be in in hers?” Peter asked. “Remember that hers was written to a twelve-year-old.”

Theo raised his eyebrows and considered the question as he gazed into the fire and took two more sips from his glass. Then he looked at Peter.

“I say, Whitleaf,” he said, “what the devil is your interest in all this?”

“Just that,” Peter said. “Interest.”

“You told me you had met Susanna during the summer,” Theo said. “And then you were with her in Bath of all places, at a concert in Bath Abbey, and then in Sydney Gardens, and then at Edith’s. She isn’t your mistress by any chance, is she? Morley won’t like it if you took your mistress to call on him and Edith.”

But he chose to find the mental picture amusing, and first chuckled and then threw back his head and laughed outright.

“He would probably have a fit of the vapors,” he said. “Lord knows what Edith sees in him, but it was a love match.”

“Susanna is not my mistress,” Peter said, without joining in the laughter. “And I would thank you, Theo, for not making that suggestion ever again. I offered her marriage, and she refused me.”

“Eh?” Theo frowned. “Why the devil? She is a schoolteacher, isn’t she? And last time I looked you were a viscount. It would be a brilliant match for her, wouldn’t it? And that’s a colossal understatement.”

Peter did not answer the question.

“I think she needs to know the full truth,” he said. “Everything you know and everything your mother knows and everything both letters can tell her. It may be upsetting for her, but I don’t think she will be able to put the past fully behind her until she knows all there is to know. He was all she had, Theo, and he deliberately put a bullet through his brain.”

“Well, yes,” Theo said. “Poor devil. I say, I wonder if she would like to come here for Christmas. I’ll wager Edith would be ecstatic, and I think my mother would be pleased too-she is coming home the day after tomorrow, by the way. I’ll see what she says. Come to think of it, though, I have a hankering to see Susanna again myself. I used to be rather fond of her. I can remember teaching her to row a boat one summer. She was damned good at it too for all she was just a little bit of a thing with sticks for arms and a shock of red hair. Does she still have the hair?”

“It is auburn,” Peter said.

He had not been trying to lead Theo in the direction of inviting her to Fincham. He had been thinking more of Theo’s going down to Bath, taking Lady Markham with him and both letters so that the two of them could spend some time with her and help her deal with the past.

“You will invite her?” he asked.

Theo looked at him and chuckled before getting to his feet to fetch the brandy decanter.

“I will indeed,” he said, “and you can decide whether to give Fincham a wide berth over Christmas or haunt it every day. How firmly did she mean no when she said it? And how disappointed were you? They are rhetorical questions, Whitleaf-another fellow’s love life is not my concern. But I’ll fetch Susanna here if she will come. She may not, of course. It sounds to me as if she is a lady with a mind of her own-something that showed up when she was twelve years old, I suppose. More brandy?”

He held the decanter suspended over Peter’s glass.

“It’s dashed good,” Peter said, holding his glass up. “Smuggled, I suppose?”