Chapter 233 Scenes at Ravensworth Hall
POV: Cormac | Brennan townhouse, Kensington
The townhouse has been in the Brennan family for ninety years and my father lived in it for sixty of those years and it has the quality of a house that has been organized around a specific person for a very long time, which is the quality of every room having a logic that is not immediately obvious and which reveals itself when you understand whose logic it was.
I have not been here since the night Callum was framed, which is the night I chose the wrong thing and understood it and did not change course, and that night has a quality in my memory that most nights do not have, which is the quality of a moment that divided everything into before and after in a way that is still being resolved.
Moira is beside me and Finn is in front of us, two years old and operating at the speed of a two-year-old who has been given a new space to explore, which is continuously and in every direction simultaneously, and watching him move through the townhouse's entrance hall with the focused intensity of someone for whom every object is new information is the specific quality of watching a child be a child that I was not prepared to feel as much as I feel it.
"Papa," Finn says, stopping in front of the portrait at the end of the entrance hall, which is my father's portrait, painted thirty years ago, and Finn looks at it with the solemn assessment of a two-year-old evaluating a face. "Who's that?"
"Your grandfather," I say. "Ronan Brennan."
Finn looks at the portrait for another moment and then looks at me with the expression that means he is deciding whether this information requires further investigation or whether he has what he needs, and he decides he has what he needs and moves on to the next thing, which is the staircase.
I let Moira follow him up and I stand in the entrance hall and I look at my father's portrait and I think about the specific quality of being in this house now versus the quality of being in it before, and the difference is everything that has happened between those two times.
The house smells the same. This is the thing that is strangest about returning to a childhood space after a long absence, that the smell is the archive of the place in a way that the visual is not, and the smell of this house is the smell of my childhood and my father's presence and the specific quality of a house that has been maintained in the absence of the person who organized it, which is the quality of a preservation rather than a living thing.
I go through the rooms one by one in the way that people go through the rooms of houses they grew up in when they have not been in them for a long time and when the rooms contain things they need to account for, and I find that most of it is the way it was except in the specific ways it is not, the small changes that three years of my absence have produced.
Callum's room is the second on the left upstairs. I stand in the doorway and I look at it and I think about Callum at twelve, at fifteen, at twenty, the specific sequence of the person I watched grow up in this house and who I competed with for forty years and who I betrayed and who rebuilt the relationship anyway with a patience I did not deserve and which is the most generous thing anyone has ever done for me.
"You're different here," Moira says, appearing at my shoulder in the way she appears at my shoulder, which is without sound and with complete accuracy about when the moment is the right one for her presence. "Softer."
"I grew up here," I say.
"I know," she says. "I mean it's different seeing you in the context of where you came from. It explains things."
I do not ask what things. I understand what she means.
Finn is in my childhood room down the hall making the specific sound of a child who has found something interesting, and I go to find him and he is holding a wooden training staff that was mine at approximately his height when I was six, holding it with both hands and looking at it with the solemn focused expression he has when he has decided something is important.
"Is this mine?" he says.
"It was mine," I say. "When I was small."
He considers this. "Can I have it?"
"Yes," I say.
He takes it very seriously and carries it back down the hall to show Moira, and I stand in my childhood room and I look at the space that produced me and I try to hold the specific weight of what I almost did to all of this, what I nearly destroyed in the three years of competition and resentment and the specific choices that came from those things.
What I fought for and nearly destroyed.
The journal is in my father's desk in the study on the ground floor, in the drawer that I always knew existed and which I did not open until now because opening it required being the person I am now rather than the person I was before, and the journal is old and the handwriting is my father's and I read the relevant passage standing at the desk in the afternoon light that comes through the study window.
I read it twice.
The passage says: Callum was always meant to lead. I saw it when they were boys. The steadiness, the way people moved toward him without understanding why, the quality of someone who carries authority without claiming it. But tradition demanded otherwise and I was a man of tradition and I am sorry that I was. I am sorry I did not change that.
I stand at the desk with the journal open to the page and I think about forty years and the trial and the Rookeries and three years of war and the specific long road from the person who made those early choices to the person standing in this study holding this journal, and I think about Callum in a facility at midnight fighting for his daughter.
I think about what the apology means. I think about the fact that the apology came too late for the person it was owed to and the fact that it also, somehow, landed at exactly the right time for the person who found it.