The Marshal Is My Mate novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: The Claim

Garrick Wexcombe read his brother's sentence once and did not need to read it again.

He had buried that man and eulogized him.

He had stood at the grave and said that his brother was a good head of the house.

Lucan folded the will along its old creases and put it inside his coat.

"I'm taking this," he said.

"Take it."

"I'm going home."

"To the Wexcombe house?"

"To mine," Lucan said. "I still have one. It's small and it leaks, and nobody there ever lied to me."

He went up the forty steps without looking back.

Garrick listened to his boots until they were gone.

Corin helped the sedated Perrin onto a bench and wiped his hands.

"Sir," he said carefully. "Do you want me to go after him?"

"No."

"Do you want me to say something?"

"Say nothing to anyone."

Garrick stood alone in the lamplight with the open drawers around him.

He had held the page for only a few hours, and he had given it to Lucan before he told anyone else.

He did not think that was enough.

His brother had taken six years of another man's life and signed it away. The seal on that act was Garrick's family's, and Garrick was the family.

An apology was only words. He had never trusted words much.

He wanted to give Lucan something that could be held.

He walked up out of the vault, took a pen from Corin's desk, and called for the Chancery clerk at the third bell of the morning.

The clerk arrived in his nightshirt and a coat.

"Marshal?"

"Draw up two instruments," Garrick said. "Quickly, and in plain language."

The first voided every clause of his brother's will that touched Lucan Merrow.

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