She hesitated, and then nodded. “Very well.”

“But we should put our focus back on the matters at hand. We’ll start in the outbuildings, I think. There’s a storage building, and I know a great deal of Solomon’s things were placed there. Only a few items were put inside the manor.”

“Good,” she said, motioning to the exit from the library. “Then lead the way.”

Thomasina was trying to keep up her cool exterior, but it was difficult when she could see every ounce of pain and anxiety on Jasper’s face. Where before he had kept himself so separate, he seemed to be remaining true to his word and revealing all to her now.

They walked along the paths down toward the outbuildings, away from the main house. It had rained several times in the past week, but today the sun was shining brightly, accosting her pain and fear with its beauty. She wished it would become stormy again instead, to remind her that the situation was tumultuous. To be a physical manifestation of her anger, even though she felt sympathy for her husband.

“Why do you think your brother involved himself with a criminal like Maitland?” she asked. “He had power and influence of his own.”

Jasper shook his head. “And no limits. My father would not give him any because he, himself, did not subscribe to them.”

“He was as wild as Solomon?” she asked, thinking of the soft rumors she’d heard whispered about the previous two earls once her sister’s engagement had been announced.

“Worse, in a way,” Jasper said, staring off into middle distance up the road. “My brother, at least, didn’t have a bride or a family to destroy alongside himself. My father had two sons and a wife. Two wives, considering Solomon’s mother died.”

“How did she die?” Thomasina asked.

He pointed to a building just at the end of the lane. “There is where the things were stored.” He sighed. “Er, my father’s first wife? An illness when my brother was young. Solomon didn’t even remember her. Our father used to talk about what a love match they were. He said it in front of my mother a dozen times over the years, I think just to watch her flinch.”

Thomasina flinched at just the thought. “That is cruel.”

“Well, he was that. He thought it was comical. He prized nothing more than a joke at someone else’s expense. If you think my mother cold and distant, I think he made her that way. It is what I tell myself, at any rate.”

Thomasina glanced at him from the corner of her eye. Jasper was so often accusatory of those in his orbit, seeking blame for all that had gone wrong. But he was willing to offer grace to his mother, even if she might not fully deserve it.

She didn’t know many people who would do the same to a mother so cold and brittle with her children.