Chapter Nineteen
Lucas lay awake that night and thought of all the ways in which he’d been a fool. Finally, dawn came. He climbed out of bed and dressed, responding to Smollet’s comments with monosyllables, unable to look the man in the face. Then he went down to breakfast and stared at his plate without eating anything. And then Tom left.
Almeria was talking about an excursion to Bath, and Robert about the hunting season, but the words were just blurred sounds in Lucas’s ears. He excused himself and went up to the farthest nook of the vast attic, a place he’d come to often in the weeks after Julia’s death, the only place at Whiteoaks where he could be certain of being alone.
Fool, fool, a thousand times a fool.
He sat in the same shadowy corner he’d sat in so many times before, drew u
