Slightly Sinful

Where was Bewcastle? But then he was there, standing on the terrace some distance away, and such was the power of his presence that everyone seemed to sense it an fell back away from Alleyne even as they stopped talking. There was still all sorts of noise, of course - horses, carriage wheels, voices, the water spouting out of the fountain - but it seemed to Alleyne as if complete silence fell. Bewcastle had already seen him. His gaze was steady and silver-eyed and inscrutable. His hand reached for the gold-handled, jewel-studded quizzing glass he always wore with formal attire and raised it halfway to his eyes in a characteristic gesture. Then he came striding along the terrace with uncharacteristic speed and did not stop coming until he had caught Alleyne up in a tight, wordless embrace that lasted perhaps a whole minute while Alleyne dipped his forehead to his brother's shoulder and felt at last that he was safe. It was an extraordinary moment. He had been little more than a child when his father died, but Wulfric himself had been only seventeen. Alleyne had never thought of him as a father figure. Indeed, he had often resented the authority his brother wielded over them with such unwavering strictness, and often with apparant impersonality and lack of humor. He had always thought of his eldest brother as aloof, unfeeling, totally self sufficient. A cold fish. And yet it was in Wulfric's arm that he felt his homecoming most acutely. He felt finally and completely and unconditionally loved. An extraordinary moment indeed.

If you are never frightened, sir, you would never find out what you was made of and what you was capable of doing. You would never become a better man than what you started out being. P'raps this is what you will discover - what you are made of and what you are capable of. And when you finally do remember who you are, p'raps you will find that you have become a better man than he ever was. P'raps he was a man why never ever grew any more once he reached manhood. P'raps he needed to do something drastic like losing his memory so that he could get his life unstuck.

Had he healed one wound only to open another?

But it is only people who have plenty of money who can despise it. To the rest of us it is important. It can at least put food in our stomachs clothes on our backs, and it can at least feed our dreams.

Tonight seems eons away, but there are these moments.

But that was the second version," she reminded him. "In the first one you had died and gone to heaven and found it was a brothel..