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It was impossible to work, so he went to bed at the unheard-of hour of eleven o’clock. But an hour later he could stand it no more. The scent of the madeleines was everywhere in the house. And faint as it was, nothing else could overpower it, not the soap with which he’d washed his hands, the lavender water in which his sheets had been laundered, or even the cigarette he’d lit and extinguished without quite realizing either.

At least this time he had not imagined things. Had the scent of the madeleines in the basement been any stronger, it would have tyrannized the senses. As such, it was only maddening in its beauty, as if spring had arrived overnight.

He blew out his taper and let the scent slowly saturate him. Memories surfaced like a creature of the sea, leaping above the waves. It had been a rainy day, long ago. Cooped up inside, he and Bertie had played hide-and-seek. For his turn, Stuart had tucked himself into a particularly snug spot in the wardrobe in Bertie’s room. And his hiding place had proved so clever that Bertie had gone by twice, even poked his head inside the wardrobe, without seeing Stuart.

But there, alone in the dark, a desperate homesickness had assaulted him. He missed the friends he’d left behind in Ancoats, the pub owner who’d taught him to read from the
Manchester Guardian,
and the Catholic prostitute who’d watched him after school and done her best to convert him to Papism.

And he missed his mother, who had disappeared off the face of the earth after their good-byes the previous June.

He worried constantly about her. Could she make her own tea and toast? Would she remember where she’d kept the key to the door? And why hadn’t she sent news to let him know that she was all right?

He didn’t even realize he’d been crying until Bertie had climbed inside the wardrobe, found a place for himself, and handed Stuart a handkerchief.

“I miss my mum too,” Bertie had said.

And that was all Bertie had said in the half hour and more he’d stayed with Stuart, until Stuart was sufficiently himself again to leave the wardrobe.

What had happened to them?

You may be legitimized, but you will never be one of us.

But that hadn’t been the cause, only the final sundering of a bond that had been attenuating a long time. Bertie, secure in his parentage, had seen school and sports as little more than rituals to which he must give a nod. To Stuart, everything that he was asked to undertake—new subjects at school, new sports, new hobbies that Sir Francis wanted to share with him—had been a test, a test he couldn’t afford to fail, lest he be shamefully ejected from his new life.

Bertie had never understood why Stuart would spend his holidays reading all the extant volumes of
Controversiae
in the original Latin, translating
Candide
into English when perfectly good English editions already existed, or running miles every day across the thirty thousand acres of moors that belonged to the estate—never, that was, until the idea occurred to him that Stuart was deliberately trying to win a greater portion of their father’s love, an idea bolstered by Sir Francis’s increasing pride in this younger, illegitimate brother.

It seemed implausible, in retrospect, that their bond should have been susceptible to such gross misunderstandings. Yet like a shining blade rusting to dust, it had happened gradually, sometimes imperceptibly, until it was too late.

To Stuart’s left a door opened. A narrow swath of light swung into the basement. He shifted in surprise and knocked over the candlestick he’d set down next to him.

The opening door—it was the door to the service stairs—reversed its motion.

“Madeleines,” he said, as the door was about to close. “They were Bertie’s favorite.”

For a long time no one responded. He’d spoken in French. He wondered now if he’d confounded a peckish maid braving the cold stairs for a bite of something to eat.

Then her voice came, careful and low. “Yes, they were.”

Giddiness flooded him, a reaction better suited to an adolescent given to a secret rendezvous than a respectable middle-aged man who would rather draft parliamentary bills than make love.

“Was he happy?”

“Bertie?” His question surprised her. “I think so.”

“Tell me why you think so.”

He moved to gain a direct line of sight to the service stair door. It was slightly ajar. The stairwell was dark except for a flickering orangish light, and the only thing visible of her was, as always, a bit of her black dress.

“The people of the parish thought well of him: The gentlemen liked him, and so did their widows.” Was that a note of slyness to her voice? “He busied himself with the composition of a local history and the expansion of the gardens. And he ate better than anyone else in Britain.”

He smiled. Dinners obviously mattered a great deal to both Bertie and his cook. “Good,” he said.

Bertie had never returned to London after he’d lost the town house to Stuart. It cheered Stuart that Bertie had settled into his life in the country, that he’d been surrounded by people and food he enjoyed in his last years.

“Were you—” she stopped.

“Yes?”

“Were you close once, the two of you?”

His heart swerved. “Did he tell you that?”

“No. He usually spoke of you as if you were a horseman of the Apocalypse. I thought he must have cared greatly for you at some point, to have become so embittered,” she said.

Stuart, in return, had never spoken of Bertie to anyone, had pretended that Bertie was something that could be excised entirely from his existence.

“Yes, we were close once.” The admission, after all these years, was as sweet as it was terrible.

“What happened?” she asked softly.

He didn’t want to talk about their estrangement, the slow choking of affection, the uneasy drifting apart, the sudden, sinking realization one day that coolness had turned into hostility, that he had no concrete understanding of how they’d arrived there, and therefore no notion at all how to return things to the way they’d once been.

“Do you know the first thing Bertie ever said to me?” he asked instead.

He’d said his good-byes to his mother in the midst of the bewildering elegance of the manor. Or rather, she had talked and he’d stood dumb and mute, stunned from her revelation that she would not remain at Fairleigh Park with him. The more she reassured him that he would be all right, the queasier he’d become, until his silence had drained her of her power of speech altogether. In the end, she’d only embraced him and walked away.

And when he’d turned around, there had been Bertie, gesturing from behind a door.

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘They say the French eat snails. I want to try. Will you help me find some?’”

The woman in the service stairwell chuckled. “Did you?”

“Not immediately.”

His father had come into the drawing room instead and given him a stern talk. Stuart was to be a gentleman now. He must forget everything he’d ever seen, heard, or learned on the streets—never mind that Stuart had never lived a day on the streets, and had only been taught what all English children ought to be taught at the charity school he’d attended.

Then he’d been hauled upstairs to be scoured raw, the clothes he’d brought with him burned, his small tin of prized possessions—a pencil he’d received at Christmas, the pin he’d won at school for being the best speller, and the crucifix that Lydia, the Catholic prostitute, had pressed into his palm the night before—thrown away while he was in the bath.

“We did look for snails the next morning, but it was a disappointing hunt. I was no use at all in the woods and Bertie could only find tiny ones that wouldn’t be worth the trouble.”

But then they’d sat down on a log and Bertie had given Stuart the essentials he needed to survive his new life.

Do not say “legs” in front of Fräulein Eisenmueller.

Do not disturb Father when he reads his paper.

Do not ask about the women who sometimes come to the house late at night.

Do not ever let servants, not even the frightful housekeeper who’s been at the house since time began, forget that you are the master’s son and they are entirely replaceable.

Bertie had been his lifeline in those days. He’d taught Stuart how to speak, how to behave at the table, and how to extract proper respect—respect that Stuart had been sure he didn’t deserve—from servants, villagers, and the children of guests.

“Did you love him?” he asked her.

“I did. Very much,” she said.

The calm goodwill of her answer moved him, the way children walking down the street holding hands still moved him.

“I loved him too. Very much,” he said. “I wish I hadn’t waited until he died to remember that.”

She made no response. Her silence drew him closer to the service stairs. When she spoke again, her voice was near, so near that it gave him gooseflesh.

“Once Bertie and I shared some madeleines on a picnic—it was some months before the Court of Appeal’s decision came down—and he said, ‘When we were small, I tried and tried to find something that Stuart would actually like to eat. I never succeeded. But I think he would have liked this.’”

Stuart smiled. So that was what Bertie had been trying to do, all those years that he’d placed one exotic item after another before Stuart and peered at him with anxious hope.

Suddenly there were tears in his eyes. He tilted his face up. He should not have allowed anything to come between them. He should not have taken Bertie for granted. And he should not have persisted in thinking that Bertie would never understand him and so it was useless to try to explain himself.

The corridor went dark.

It took him a moment to realize that she’d extinguished the light she’d carried with her. The hinges squeaked slightly, and then he smelled her, a stir of butter and flour in the still air.

Her hand brushed him at an odd angle across his torso, as if she held out her arm in search.

“Can you see, Madame?” he said.

She came up to him and wrapped her arms about him. He seized with shock, then embarrassment at this unsolicited contact, this assumption on her part that he needed to be comforted by a servant.

Physical contact in his life was largely limited to handshakes and an elbow offered to the ladies. Even with Lizzy the extent of their intimacy had never gone beyond anything greater than handholds and kisses on the cheek. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had embraced him, fully, solidly, and sustained it for more than a fraction of a second.

But he did not disentangle himself from her. After a few seconds, it didn’t seem quite so appalling. Her warmth seeped into him along his torso—he hadn’t realized that he was cold, standing in the basement in nothing more than his pajamas and his dressing gown.

And she wasn’t short—the top of her head came to just under his nose, making her about medium height for a woman. Her cap smelled of starch; the fringe of it tickled his chin ever so slightly.

“I’m all right,” he said. “Thank you.”

She moved, but only slightly. The edge of her cap caressed him from his jaw to the lobe of his ear. Riots erupted along his nerves. She breathed deeply and he realized that she was inhaling
him,
the odor of his skin. His pulse accelerated.

“What do I smell of?” he murmured.

“A fastidiously clean man who uses French soap for his bath.”

She spoke with her lips almost touching him—her breath soft and moist against his skin. Then she pressed those lips
into
his skin, and kissed his neck. The entire surface of his body smoldered, so much so he could barely tell where her kiss had landed.

She pressed another kiss into his neck. No, it was more than a kiss: a nibble. She tasted him, the touch of her tongue a white-hot blaze.

He flung her away from him: literally picked her up and threw her. Her body thudded heavily against the opposite wall of the corridor. She yelped.

“Don’t!” He sounded at once distant and furious. “I’m to be married.”

He would not succumb to it. He would not.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice small and distraught. “I’m very sorry.”

Pride called for him to storm out of the basement in a show of his moral superiority. He obviously lacked sufficient pride, for he stayed exactly where he was, his breath ragged, his hands flat against the wall behind him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s not your fault.”

Everything was his fault. She would not have done it had he not wanted it. And of course she knew that he wanted it—lust steamed from him like the scent of blood from an abattoir. During the day his mind turned to her with an obscene frequency. At night he dreamed incessantly of her.

She made no response. His ears caught the tremble of a sob. She was weeping. He was instantly at her side. “Did I hurt you? Are you all right?”

He felt her shake her head, but he didn’t know which one of his questions she’d answered. He caught hold of her face—both of her cheeks were wet and cold—and tried to wipe away her tears.