It was just as well there was still some distance to ride before he had to face anyone at the house. What would people think of Viscount Ponsonby of all men riding up with tears in his eyes? The very idea was enough to give him the shudders.
His approach had indeed been noted, he saw when he turned onto the terrace before the great double doors a few minutes later. They were open, and Vincent was out on the top step, his guide dog on a short leash beside him, his free hand clasped in his viscountess’s. Both were beaming down at him.
“I was beginning to think no one was going to come,” Vincent said. “But here you are, Flave.”
He was first to arrive, then.
“How did you know it was me?” Flavian asked, looking fondly up at him. “Confess now. You have been p-peeping.”
The two of them came down the steps as Flavian swung from the saddle and abandoned his horse to the care of a groom who was hurrying across the terrace from the direction of the stables. He caught Vincent up in a tight hug and then turned to take the viscountess’s hand in his own. But she was having none of such formality. She hugged him too.
“We have been so impatient,” she said. “Just like a pair of children awaiting a special treat. This is the first time we have entertained guests entirely alone. My mama-in-law stayed with us until after my confinement, but she went home to Barton Coombs last week. She has been simply pining to be back there, and I was finally able to assure her that we could do without her, though we would miss her dreadfully—which we do.”
“I trust you have recovered your health, ma’am,” Flavian said.
She certainly looked as if she was blooming. She had been brought to bed of a boy about a month ago, a couple of weeks earlier than expected.
“I have no idea why people speak of a confinement as though it were some deadly disease,” she said, linking her arm through his and proceeding up the steps with him while Vincent, guided by his dog, came up on his other side. “I have never felt better. Oh, I do hope everyone else arrives soon so that we do not burst with excitement or do something equally ill-bred.”
“You had better come up to the drawing room for a drink, Flave,” Vincent said, “before one of us takes it into our head to suggest that you come to the nursery to worship and adore our son and heir. We are trying to understand that other people may not be as besotted with him as we are.”
“Does he have all ten toes and fingers?” Flavian asked.
“He does,” Vincent said. “I counted.”
“And everything else in its p-place, I trust?” Flavian said. “I am vastly relieved and satisfied. And I am p-parched.”
Viewing and cooing over infants had never been one of his preferred activities. But here he was swallowing a suspicious soreness in his throat again at the realization that Vincent had never seen his son and never would. He hoped the others would arrive soon. Vince had always been their collective favorite, though none of them had ever said as much. Flavian found it easier to barricade his feelings against a quite inappropriate pity when the others were around too.
Dash it all, Vince would never play cricket with the child.
And here was he, Flavian thought, feeling all fragile and on the verge of tears or worse, just because he was here, because he was home, though that word had nothing to do with place but only everything to do with the people who would be here with him soon along with Vincent. Then he would be safe again. Then he would be well again, and nothing could harm him. Absurd thoughts!
They had scarcely stepped inside the drawing room when they became aware of the clopping of horses’ hooves on the driveway below and the jingling of carriage traces. And it was not his own coach, Flavian saw when he looked through the long windows. It was not George’s either, or Ralph’s. Hugo’s, maybe? Or Ben’s? Ben—Sir Benedict Harper—had recently taken up residence in Wales, of all the godforsaken places he might have chosen, and was managing some coal mines and ironworks there for the grandfather of his new wife. It was all rather bizarre and improbable and not a little alarming. Even more astonishing was the fact that all of them except Vincent had traipsed off there in January for the wedding. They might have been marooned there for a month or more. What would one do in Wales for a month? In the middle of winter? They all needed their heads examined. Of course, his own head had never been quite right since he had been shot through the side of it and then tumbled down onto it from his horse’s back during one memorable battle in the Peninsula. Memorable for others, that was. It remained a huge, colossal blank for him, as if it were something he had slept through and merely heard about afterward.
“Oh,” Lady Darleigh said, clasping her hands to her bosom, “here comes someone else. I must go back down. Will you stay here, Vincent, and see that Lord Ponsonby has his drink?”
“I shall come with you, Sophie,” Vince said. “Flavian is a big boy. He can pour his own drink.”
“And without spilling any,” Flavian agreed. “But I will c-come down too if I may.”
There was that foolish excitement again, the one that always ensured he was first to arrive for the annual gatherings. Soon they would be together again, the seven of them. His favorite people in the world. His friends. His lifeline. He would not have survived those three years without them. Oh, perhaps his body would have, but his sanity most assuredly would not. He would not survive now without them.
They were his family.
He had another family of people who shared his bloodlines and his ancestral history. He was even fond of them, almost without exception, and they of him. But these, his six friends—George, Hugo, Ben, Ralph, Imogen, and Vincent—were the family of his heart.