Ralph exchanged a glance with Chloe and clasped his hands at his back.
“Well, that was diverting,” he said. Strangely, it had been too. Though now he felt sick to the stomach again.
They were not kept waiting long. It was not the thin footman who came back down the stairs, though, but Harding himself, his wife on his heels.
“Worthingham,” Harding said, reaching out his right hand. “Ralph. Good God, man, you have come to us when we ought to have come to you. You did see us at the theater, then. We ought to have waited on you at your box during the interval. Or we ought to have called at Stanbrook House the very next morning. Instead, we have made you come to us.”
He was wringing Ralph’s right hand as though he would break every bone in it. Then he stepped aside while his wife took both of Ralph’s hands in her own and held them tightly to her bosom.
“Ralph,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “Ralph Stockwood. Oh, my dear boy. We neglected you quite shamefully when you were brought home to England, and ever since then we have been too ashamed to seek you out or even to write. How do things like that happen? And now you have come to us. And you have brought your new wife?”
“Yes.” He stood back, more than a bit bewildered. “Chloe, the Duchess of Worthingham. Viscount and Viscountess Harding, Chloe.”
“Chloe,” the viscountess said, beaming. “What a pretty name. And what a very pretty lady. And you grew into a very handsome man, Ralph, as of course I knew you would. But, oh, your poor, poor face. It was cut when—?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I am so glad you came,” the viscountess told him. “Though you have put us to shame. We have been feeling more and more guilty every day and keep on saying that we really must call upon you. It is not so easy, though, when so much time has passed. We thought you must be disappointed with us, even angry with us. We thought perhaps you thought we did not care. But now you have come to us. Oh, do come upstairs to the drawing room. What are we thinking to keep you standing down here? Duchess, do come up. Or may I call you Chloe? Ralph was almost like a son to us, you know.”
And she linked an arm through Chloe’s and drew her in the direction of the stairs.
Harding gestured with one arm so that Ralph would follow them.
“How are you doing, Ralph, my boy?” he asked. “We heard that you hovered near death for a long time, and then you went off to somewhere in Cornwall and were there for years. We feared you must be permanently incapacitated. But then Courtney’s girl saw you in London and reported that you seemed fine apart from a nasty scar. How are you?”
Ralph had no opportunity to answer. They had arrived in the drawing room, and Lady Harding was directing them to a couple of chairs. Ralph did not sit down. When he did not, they all turned to stare at him. For a moment, there was silence.
“You do not . . . hate me?” he finally asked, looking from one beaming face to the other.
“Hate you, Ralph?” Lady Harding looked puzzled.
“Because you lived and Thomas died?” Harding’s smile had faded. “And Max and Rowland too? But you did not kill them, Ralph. The French did.”
“Did you think we resented the fact that you lived while our son died?” Lady Harding had tears in her eyes again. “Oh, Ralph, my dear boy, is that what you have thought all these years because we did not come to see you? We did not come at first because we were prostrated with grief and you were not allowed any visitors. And then you went off to Cornwall and we did not know exactly where. We could have found out, I suppose. We should have found out. We should have written to you at the very least. But what was there to say? And so much time had passed before we thought of it that we felt awkward and guilty. We ought to have done it sooner. You were one of Thomas’s dearest friends. You had been a frequent guest in our home and we had loved you. We were embarrassed about neglecting you. We were always going to write but never actually did. And then we saw you a couple of weeks ago and still could not make ourselves go and talk to you. How dreadful you must have thought us.”
“But Tom would not have been in the Peninsula if it had not been for me,” Ralph said. “I talked all three of them into it. You did not want Tom to go. Max and Rowland’s parents did not want them to go. They came because I persuaded them.”
“Sit down, Ralph,” Harding said and waited until he had seated himself on the chair the viscountess had indicated. Harding stayed on his feet. “We raised our boy to have a mind of his own. We were pleased with the friends he made at school. You were all good lads, you and Max and Rowland, and there were a few others too. You were the leader, of course. That was clear. But we did not mind. You had a good heart and a good head on your shoulders, and none of them followed you slavishly. If they disagreed with you, they said so. If you disagreed with them, you said so. We were dismayed when Thomas begged me to purchase a commission for him when he left school. We argued with him for a while, and I was determined to keep on refusing. But he was a young man more than a boy. I talked with him at last, man to man—took him fishing for a whole day and just talked. And he convinced me that he could not be happy unless he did what he conceived to be his duty and went to fight. I knew you had planted the idea in his head. But I knew too by the time I gave in and let him go that he was following his own firmly held convictions, not yours. He would have gone even if you had changed your mind.”
“I wrote to you to beg you to talk him out of going, Ralph,” Lady Harding said. “I ought not to have done that. You were not responsible for what our son did or did not do. We let Thomas go—we both did. We sent him to war with our blessing, with dreadful consequences. But we were proud of him. We are proud of him. And we were and are terribly sorry for you. Not sorry that you survived. We were both very, very glad that at least one of you did. But we were sorry for what losing your three closest friends right before your own eyes must have done to you at such a young age. I think that is why we never got around to writing. We thought you did not need the reminder. Though that was foolish. You could not forget anyway, could you? But you thought we blamed you? Oh, my poor, dear boy.”