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Coming home – for that was still how it felt – was always a shock to Edward. He saw every tree, every stream in the fading light of the day, and remembered which he had climbed, which he had forded, and which he had been chased away from with the most reverent of antipathy. He remembered, too, the journey back from school each holiday, watching the familiar sights and longing for them, even as he steeled himself for the horse-whipping he was certain to receive when called up to his father’s study to account for his conduct. 

In later years, with Charles’ smug, hostile silence, and the memory of Thornton’s lips crushing his own, he had longed to be away, to get back to the sweet tyranny of Dickie. After being mastered like that, parental authority had seemed lack-lustre and tedious, too restrictive to knuckle under, and no pleasure at all to defy. 

That, of course, had all been after his mother’s little adventure, when she had been brought home in disgrace and then sent away to prevent the moral ruin of her sons. 

Edward had understood her motives even then; the wild passion which had guided her, come wrack or ruin. 

Charles, however, had never forgiven it. 

And he was the one who grew up to hold the purse strings. 

Rounding the hill, Edward saw where Westlehill Manor nestled in the valley, surrounded by mist. He looked down at it, the line of poplars, the familiar shape not fully warped by the progress of those damned ugly improvements with which Charles was maiming its warm, Elizabethan brick. 

Lady Julia – his wife – had been dead against them because she succeeded in having an ounce of taste in her head. Edward had once been very fond of Julia. He remembered her every time the scar on his arm twinged. 

They drew through the gates, attended by flunkies, and Edward remembered – of course remembered – the plain down by the river and how much of a damn fool he had been in those days. 

Peaches would say that he hadn’t changed over much.

And there, at the end of the drive, stood Edward’s little brother, stolid beside his steward, and checking his watch every few moments as if to reprimand his Edward for tardiness when, in honesty, they had agreed on no time beyond ‘evening’. Edward wouldn’t have put it past him to have been watching from the window to see them approaching just so that he could rush out to appear impatient.

It wasn’t, and he had to remind himself of this, Charles’ fault that he had inherited none of mother’s good-looks. 

 Not that he was ugly. A little bit of honest ugliness would at least have made Charlie an interesting study. Edward had known some wonderfully ugly people whose hideousness was almost charming. 
But no. 

Sir Charles Valance, Bart. had merely inherited the smooth, uninteresting Valance features without any of the litheness of limb, or brightness of expression that had livened the face of – for example – their late, lamented cousin Ned. Still, it would have been cruel of Edward to count such visual misfortune as a personal failing.

It was simply that one sometimes felt that, if not blessed with an appealing countenance, a person could at least attempt to present an intriguing character, and Charles had made no such effort.

 He was tediously conservative, and desperate for all the most conventional of acclaim. Taller than Edward, he tended to wear a fixed expression of disappointed gravity, and waistcoat of a shade which did nothing for his complexion. The highest compliment that anyone had ever paid Sir Charles Valance was that none of his neighbours spoke any ill of him.

Edward had been called many things in his life, and several of them with exquisite justice, but he fervently hoped that if it ever came to pass such a thing could be said of him, it would be the day he would take a long, solitary walk, place the barrel of his remaining Forthenby Lady between his lips, and do the decent thing.  

Edward leaped down from the cabriolet without waiting for Peaches. For, yes, he was a little stiff from the long drive, but his legs moved with fluid grace, his stomach was still firm, and his hair swept back from his forehead, full and luxuriant. 

Charles, moved slowly to greet his brother, revealing a gouty walk, a lined face, a little paunch. Poor Charlie seemed to have run aground on the rock of Middle Age. How exactly he had achieved that was a mystery, for he was four years Edward’s junior, but there it was. Fate played funny games.

Much like the fact that, the last time that Edward had been here, it had been to put pater in the ground, and to be informed that he (Edward) was, in point of fact, permanently out of favour – fallen, disgraced, disinherited – and would forevermore be forced to come cap-in-hand to a merciless younger brother, who offered nothing but unasked advice for the reformation of Edward’s lifestyle and character.

Thus, as he tripped up the steps of the manor, all hint of Lordly hauteur was forgotten in the sheer glee of provocation. 

“Charlie,” Edward cried, bringing a startled look from a passing footman, and the brush of a smile from the steward. “How I have missed this old pile!” A pause just long enough to flash a grin. “And you, naturally.”

Charles Valance stood unmoved and unmoving. He blinked a little.
The fact that Peaches was looking made Edward need to put on a show, and he bounded to his brother, throwing propriety to the winds, making it look for all the world like the was about to embrace the little worm.

He was forestalled by a stiffly extended hand, which he seized with both of his own and wrung with enthusiasm. “Dear Charles, my brother, oh, Charlie, dear boy, how the devil are you?”

His brother gave a gratifying flinch at the oath. “I am quite well, my Lord.”

“Excellent, excellent! And Julia! Where’s my beautiful Julia? How is your good lady wife?”

“She is visiting her mother,” said Charles, stiffly, extracting his hand.

“Oh,” said Edward, as surprised and astonished as if Julia’s mother didn’t live a handful of miles away in the next manor house, where she could go on an afternoon’s ride. “I do hope nothing’s amiss. A lover’s quarrel is a terrible thing.”

“Nothing at all.” They stood there for a few moments, the whole business as tense as any duel, before Charles remembered himself and said, “Won’t you step inside?”

Edward glanced about him, as though acutely sensible both of the honour being done him, and his own damned and undeserved good fortune. As though, indeed, he was an unrepentant prodigal being welcomed home with fanfare and feasting. 

He did all this simply because that was what was best calculated to aggravate his brother. Then he motioned to Peaches and stepped over the threshold of his ancestral home. 

It was rather small, compared to Forthenby. 

“Don’t tell me that Julia picked this paper,” he said, with just a touch of dismay.

“With my guidance,” said Charles, sternly.

“I’d have had something brighter. In a room like this.”

He watched his brother grind his teeth, and positively march him to table without another a word, or even offering him a chance to clean up.