The question was so strange that Samuel stared. "My lord?"
"The flower. Do you love it, Hale? Better than your place? Better than your wages? Better than anything on my estate?"
Samuel said slowly, "It was my father's. I would not say I love it better than anything. But I love it a great deal."
"I thought so." The Earl came forward, one slow step at a time, across the grass. The guests parted for him without being asked. There was something in his face now that had not been there before, something bright and brittle and terrible, as if a long-held glass had begun to crack. "I thought you might. You have a great talent for loving things that are not yours."
"Lucian!" Cecilia's voice was sharp with alarm. "Lucian, please—"
"Be silent, madam."
She went white as paper.
The Earl stopped in front of the gardener. Up close, the man could see that his hand, the one holding the pearl-headed cane, was trembling very slightly. The Earl reached out with the other and plucked the white flower cleanly from its stem.
A gasp rose from forty throats. The Duke of Marlowe cried out as though he had been stabbed.
Lucian held the orchid up between thumb and finger and looked at it for a moment, the soft white petals, the silver lip, the faint golden heart, with an expression of such raw and naked anguish that anyone who had been looking at his face instead of the flower might have understood everything.
Then he held it out.
"Eat it," he said.
Chapter Nine: Is That an Order, My Lord?
Nobody breathed.
Nobody on the lawn of Wyncombe Park that afternoon, not the Duke, not the vicar, not the forty guests with their lemonade going warm in their hands, would ever forget what happened in the next ten seconds. It would be told in drawing rooms for thirty years. It would be told, with embellishments, by people who had not been there. But the plain truth of it was simple, and very quiet, and it was this.
The Earl of Wyncombe stood with a priceless orchid held out in a trembling hand, and ordered his gardener to eat it.
And the gardener looked at the flower.
He looked at it for what seemed a very long time. In his face there was grief, and there was something else, and the something else was not fear. It was a deep and settled steadiness, the same calm with which he had met three in the morning frosts and six years of failure, and it did not waver.