“Seen your father?”
“Not really.” He didn’t elucidate, and after a thoughtful pause, Hal shook out his own gray military cloak and slung it over his shoulders.
“I’m going down to the river for a bit of air before supper. Come along?”
William shrugged. “Why not?”
They made their way out of the town and down from the bluffs without being accosted, and William felt the tightness between his shoulder blades ease. His uncle didn’t indulge in idle conversation, and didn’t mind silence in the least. They reached the edge of the narrow beach without exchanging a word, and made their way slowly through scrubby pines and yaupon bushes to the clean, solid sand of the tidal zone.
William placed his feet just so, enjoying making prints in the silty gray sand. The summer sky was vast and blue above them, a blazing yellow sun coming slowly down into the waves. They followed the curve of the beach, ending on a tiny spit of sandy gravel inhabited by a gang of orange-billed oystercatchers, who eyed them coldly and gave way with ill grace, turning their heads and glaring as they waddled sideways.
Here they stood for some minutes, looking out into the water.
“Do you miss England?” Hal asked abruptly.
“Sometimes,” William answered honestly. “But I don’t think about it much,” he added, with less honesty.
“I do.” His uncle’s face looked relaxed, almost wistful in the fading light. “But you haven’t a wife there, or children. No establishment of your own, yet.”
“No.”
The sounds of slaves working in the fields behind them were still audible, but muted by the rhythm of the surf at their feet, the passage of the silent clouds above their heads.
The trouble with silence was that it allowed the thoughts in his head to take on a tiresome insistence, like the ticking of a clock in an empty room. Cinnamon’s company, disturbing as it occasionally was, had allowed him to escape them when he needed to.
“How does one go about renouncing a title?”
He hadn’t actually been intending to ask that just yet, and was surprised to hear the words emerge from his mouth. Uncle Hal, by contrast, didn’t seem surprised at all.
“You can’t.”
William glared down at his uncle, who was still looking imperturbably downriver toward the sea, the wind pulling strands of his dark hair from his queue.
“What do you mean, I can’t? Whose business is it whether I renounce my title or not?”
Uncle Hal looked at him with an affectionate impatience.
“I’m not speaking rhetorically, blockhead. I mean it literally. You can’t renounce a peerage. There’s no means set down in law or custom for doing it; ergo, it can’t be done.”
“But you—” William stopped, baffled.
“No, I didn’t,” his uncle said dryly. “If I could have at the time, I would have, but I couldn’t, so I didn’t. The most I could do was to stop using the title of ‘Duke,’ and threaten to physically maim anyone who used it in reference or address to me. It took me several years to make it clear that I meant that,” he added offhandedly.
“Really?” William asked cynically. “Who did you maim?”
He actually had supposed his uncle to be speaking rhetorically, and was taken aback when the once and present duke furrowed his brow in the effort of recall.
“Oh … several scribblers—they’re like roaches, you know; crush one and the others all rush off into the shadows, but by the time you turn round, there are throngs of them back again, happily feasting on your carcass and spreading filth over your life.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you have a way with words, Uncle?”
“Yes,” his uncle said briefly. “But beyond punching a few journalists, I called out George Mumford—he’s the Marquess of Clermont now, but he wasn’t then—Herbert Villiers, Viscount Brunton, and a gentleman named Radcliffe. Oh, and a Colonel Phillips, of the Thirty-fourth—cousin to Earl Wallenberg.”
“Duels, do you mean? And did you fight them all?”
“Certainly. Well—not Villiers, because he caught a chill on the liver and died before I could, but otherwise … but that’s beside the point.” Hal caught himself and shook his head to clear it. Evening was coming on, and the onshore breeze was brisk. He wrapped his cloak about his body and nodded toward the town.
“Let’s go. The tide’s coming in and I’m dining with General Prévost in half an hour.”