‘Here’ was a guest room, with a decent-sized bed and the usual trappings, plus watercolours of more flowers on the walls. It was a perfectly nice room by normal standards. Will guessed it wasn’t even close to the best Holmclere had to offer. His bag was placed on a nightstand, looking oddly empty, so he went and checked. “Shit.”

“What?”

He took out the kitchen knife. “I packed this in case, and your people have unpacked all my clothes and left it in here. What’ll they have thought of that?”

“It doesn’t matter. They aren’t employed to think.”

Will bit back the reply he’d normally have made. “Is that you talking or your father?”

“Take a guess. Christ, Will, I’m sorry.”

Will put the knife down and walked towards him, arms out. Kim folded into them. “Hell. I wish you weren’t here.”

“You want me to go?”

“No. God, no, I need you. It’s just that having you witness my delightful family adds an additional layer of humiliation to the whole thing that I didn’t expect.”

“I don’t see why,” Will said. “I mean, I do. They’ve no right to talk like that. But they’re the ones who look like arseholes.”

“Would you say so? Because to be on the receiving end of that level of contempt—”

“My mother scrubbed floors in a house a tenth the size of this one, and if I’d ever spoken to anyone that way, I’d have had the back of her hand for bad manners. A marquess ought to do better, not worse.”

That won a weak smile. “God, I love it when you play the stolid bourgeois.”

“I’d rather be that than a mannerless blue-blooded prick in a museum. Is it just the two of them in this whole place?”

“It’s normally just my father. And about forty staff, of course.”

“No wonder he’s so miserable. Where are you sleeping?”

“Somewhere on this corridor, I suppose.”

“You don’t have your own bedroom? In a house this size?”

“That privilege was removed.”

Will pulled him a bit closer, hating this. “I don’t suppose you could stay in here.”

“It would probably be ill judged.”

“In that case, can we get a drink?”

Kim disengaged himself, went to the wall, and pressed a bell. Will gave him a look. “I meant going downstairs and getting one. Not making some poor sod run halfway across East Anglia to ask what you want.”

“That’s their job,” Kim said. “And it’s been a long and fairly awful day, so I’d prefer not to risk meeting my brother again before I have to. And mostly I’m Lord Arthur here and this is how things are done. I’m afraid, for the present, you will have to accustom yourself to that.”

***