Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade by Diana Gabaldon Read Free Book Online Page A

fire into life, and sat by the window with a blanket round his shoulders, watching the snow come down.
    Ice crystals coated the glass like clouded lace, but Grey barely noticed the cold; he was burning. And not with the fires of sudden lust this time—rather, with the desire to walk across town to his brother’s house, drag Hal from his bed, and assault him.
    He could—he supposed—understand why Hal had never mentioned the wager to him. In the wake of the scandal following the duke’s death, Grey had been shipped off promptly to some of his mother’s distant relatives in Aberdeen. He had spent two grim years in that gray stone city, during which time he had seen his brother only once.
    And when he had come back to England, Hal had been virtually a stranger, so preoccupied with the business of re constituting the regiment that he had no time to spare for either friends or family. And then…well, then he himself had met Hector, and in the cataclysms of personal discovery that followed that event had had no attention to spare for anyone else, either.
    The brothers had only come to know each other again when Grey took up his commission with the regiment, and discovered that he shared the family taste and talent for soldiering. Certainly Hal had not forgotten the wager, but as it had plainly never been settled, it was conceivable that it might not have occurred to him to speak of it, years after the fact.
    No, what was galling him was not that Hal had never mentioned the wager, but the fact that his brother had never told
him
openly that he believed their father had not been a traitor. Grey had lived on the tacit assumption that this was the case, but the matter had never been mentioned between them—and a casual observer would have drawn quite a different impression from Hal’s actions, taking these as the efforts of a man to live down shame and scandal, repudiating his patrimony in the process.
    In fact, Grey admitted to himself, he had only assumed that Hal shared his faith in their father because he could not bear to think otherwise. If he were honest with himself, he must admit now that if Hal had not spoken to him of the matter, it was as much because he had never brought it up as because Hal had avoided discussion. He had been afraid to hear what he feared was the truth: that Hal knew something unpleasant and certain about the duke that he did not, but had spared him that knowledge out of kindness.
    While it was good to discover the truth of Hal’s feelings now, any sense of relief he might have felt in the discovery was obscured by outrage. The fact that he knew the outrage to be largely unjustified only made it worse.
    Worst of all was a sense of self-disgust, a feeling that he had wronged Hal—if only in his thoughts—and anger at the sense that he had been betrayed into committing injustice.
    He got up, restless, and strode round the room, careful to step softly. His mother’s room lay below his.
    He couldn’t even have it out with Hal, as that would involve his admitting to doubts that he preferred to keep buried, particularly now that they had been disproved. At least, his doubts regarding Hal had been disproved. As to his father…what the devil did that page from the missing journal mean? Who had left it? And why had his mother told Hal the duke had burnt the journal, when clearly he had not?
    He glanced at the floor beneath his feet, debating the wisdom of going down and rousing his mother in order to ask her. But Hal had wished to speak to her alone; Grey supposed that was his right. Still, if either one of them thought he would be fobbed off now with further evasions or easy reassurances…He realized that he was clenching his fists, and opened them.
    “You are grossly mistaken,” he said softly, and rubbed his palm against his leg. “Both of you.”
    He had left his watch open on the desk. It chimed softly now, and he picked it up, holding it toward the fire to see the time—half two. He set it