“Would you prefer tea?” Simon asked as he sat down.

The serving boy looked at Clara expectantly.

“Coffee is sufficient,” she said. The boy bowed and withdrew. She turned her attention to her brother. There was no reason to beat about the bush. “Is it true? Did you really engage in a bout of fisticuffs with Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde?”

Simon winced. “Trent told you, did he?”

“Not in any great detail. He doesn’t know the why of it. Only that it happened, and that you were, apparently, the aggressor.”

“I wouldn’t say that. It was Bryce-Chetwynde who started it.”

“How? What could he possibly have said to you?”

Simon bent his head to his coffee. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I beg your pardon. It matters very much.” Her voice dropped to an angry undertone. “If you’re rusticated for it, and if you end up having to pay twenty guineas in damages—”

“It will have been worth it to have taken the smug look off of his face. My only regret is that I’ve had to apologize to the blackguard. He doesn’t deserve it. Not after what he did to you.”

And just like that, the world seemed to stop spinning.

Clara gaped at her brother. “What he did to me?”

Simon’s expression hardened. “When I encountered him at the railway station, your name was mentioned. And you know what I’ve always thought. What I’ve always believed.”

Of course she knew. It was the same thing her mother had believed. That Clara had spun a few commonplace civilities from Mr. Bryce-Chetwynde into a romance. That she’d dreamed it all up. An unfortunate result of her novel-reading and love of poetry.

“Bryce-Chetwynde and I might have parted without my being any the wiser,” Simon went on, “but he was in his cups, and he had the gall—the unmitigated nerve—to say he was sorry for it. That things had got out of hand that summer. All because he was bored, and to pass the time, to amuse himself, he’d made you his flirt.”

She stared at her brother, speechless.

He raised his mug to his lips and took a drink. “So, naturally, I knocked him down.”

Clara had difficulty absorbing Simon’s words. “Is that what he said? That it… That he’d made me his flirt?”

“And that he’d kissed you in the meadow behind the cottage that day. All the things you told us that we didn’t believe.” Simon lowered his cup. His face filled with brotherly regret. “I’m sorry for that. In hindsight, I can see he was a villain. My only excuse is, at the time, I idolized the man.”

A chill, as bitter as the winter snow outside, settled into Clara’s veins. “So did I.”

“You’ll be pleased to hear that I blacked his eye and knocked out several of his teeth.”