Most of Ralph’s memories of his paternal grandparents were of pure, unconditional love, not unmingled with some pretty firm discipline when it had been necessary. His father had always been bookish and reserved in manner. His mother had always been distracted by her social obligations. Not that either parent had been cruel or unloving or even neglectful. But they had lacked a certain warmth that Ralph had found in his grandparents.
Which fact made him wonder what sort of father he would make to his own children. Chloe, he was almost certain, would be a good mother. She had told him on the morning she suggested her bargain that she would love any children they might have, and he believed her. The servants loved her. He did not believe that was an exaggeration. Servants had only ever respected him. Though maybe that was not strictly accurate. A number of the older ones had been party to some sort of conspiracy to protect him from his grandparents’ wrath whenever as a boy he had got himself into one of his frequent scrapes.
There were other arrivals later in the day—his eldest sister, Amelia, and her husband, an aunt and uncle, a few cousins, a few particular friends of his grandparents. And then three unexpected guests.
Flavian, Viscount Ponsonby, a fellow Survivor, came with his wife from Candlebury Abbey, their country home some distance away though also in Sussex, where they had been hiding away on their honeymoon. And, very late in the evening, Vincent, Viscount Darleigh, the blind one of their number, arrived, having traveled all the way from Gloucestershire with his valet and his guide dog. They could not have lingered anywhere on the road to have arrived in time. Ralph was more deeply moved than he could say. The only two of their number who had not come were Ben, who lived in the farthest reaches of West Wales, and Imogen, who was in Cornwall.
Ralph was late going up to bed that night. Very late, in fact. Everyone had wanted to sit up and talk, as invariably seemed to happen in the face of a recent death. It was as though the living needed to assert their vitality against the great silencer. But his grandmother and his great-aunt had finally gone to bed, and almost everyone else retired soon after. Chloe, Lady Ponsonby, and Lady Trentham went up together, Ralph was pleased to see. They seemed all to like one another. Finally only he and his fellow Survivors remained in the drawing room—and Graham Muirhead. It was an annoyance to Ralph at first that Muirhead chose to intrude upon the closeness of their group, but it was unreasonable of him, for this was not a gathering of the Survivors’ Club. Graham was as much a guest in his house as the others were.
Ralph had always had a complicated relationship with Graham Muirhead, if it could be called by that name. At school Graham had always hovered on the edge of Ralph’s inner circle of four friends, but he had never become part of it. Ralph had liked him. Sometimes he had believed he would enjoy a closer, meaningful friendship with him, for Graham was intelligent and sensible and well read. At other times Ralph had found him so irritating that even his worst enemy would be a preferable companion, for Graham had a mind of his own and did not scruple to disagree with any idea or scheme that ran contrary to his beliefs. To be fair, Ralph had the feeling that Graham had felt the same way about him. Perhaps it was because they were both strong willed. But while Ralph’s strong will had made him a leader, someone other boys emulated and followed, Graham’s had shown itself in a quiet stubbornness, a total disregard for popularity or the approval of others. They had often clashed heads, even if only metaphorically. They had never recovered from the last time it had happened.
Graham was a clergyman now, but not just any clergyman. Not for him the quiet, respectable living he might have found in a country parish, with a wife to make the parsonage cozy and children about his knees, a wealthy patron to offer him security until he inherited his father’s title and modest fortune. And not for him the sort of ambition that would have sent him clawing his way up the ladder of the church hierarchy until he became a bishop or even an archbishop. Oh, no. Graham Muirhead had attached himself, by personal choice, to a poor parish in the very least desirable area of London, his parishioners being the slum dwellers, pickpockets, whores, drunks, moneylenders, ragged orphans, and other undesirables who filled its confines to overflowing. Not to mention the filth and stench of the streets.
And he had done it, he explained to an avidly interested George, Hugo, Flavian, and Vincent, not from any saintly sort of notion that he was going to bring the masses to the church pews, where they would fall to their knees in tearful penitence, but from his conviction that if his Lord had been born in early-nineteenth-century London instead of in Roman Palestine, then it was in that precise part of London he would have been found most often, consorting with the lowest of the low, healing them, eating with them, accepting them as they were, treating them with dignity, and rarely if ever preaching at them. Simply loving them, in other words.
“For that is what my religion is,” he explained without any suggestion of pious pomposity, “and what it impels me to do with my life. Simply to love and accept without judgment.”
Faradiddle, Ralph had wanted to say with great irritability at the same time as there was an ache of something—tears?—in his throat. For the words were not self-righteously spoken or designed to impress. They were merely Graham being Graham.
“Damnation!” Hugo exclaimed, slapping one large hand on his knee. “But you are right, Muirhead.”
“I would rather you than me,” Flavian said. “But you have my d-deepest admiration.”
“Is love enough, though?” George asked. “Love does not find homes for those orphans or respectable employment for those whores or comfort for those who are robbed.”