Maxim was the first to return home.
Boarding school lay closer than the university town, and so it was he who arrived first beneath a sky bleached pale by late summer heat — a season that should have been heavy with ripening fruit, open windows, and the idle restlessness of long afternoons, but which instead seemed to have clothed itself in mourning.
The house was dressed in black.
Not extravagantly, not theatrically, but unmistakably.
Dark ribbons.
Covered mirrors in certain rooms.
Servants moving with lowered voices and softer steps.
Candles left unlit until truly necessary, as though even light ought not to be too bold in a grieving house.
When Maxim stepped into the entrance hall, bag in hand, the altered air struck him before words did.
De Montfort had always felt vast, but never hollow.
Now it did.
Sophia, Arthur, and Fredrick were there, along with two servants and the housekeeper, all gathered not in welcome exactly, but in the solemn instinct of people who knew someone beloved had crossed the threshold carrying the fresh shock of grief from outside into the center of the house.
Maxim looked at them all in silence first.
He was older than when he had last stood there — taller, more solid in the shoulders, more careful in posture. The softness of younger boyhood had thinned from him. He had begun to acquire that same upright steadiness Theodore had once carried with such natural authority.
And yet the moment he stepped inside and saw black where summer should have been gold, he did not look older.
He looked like a son who had come home to a house that no longer had a father in it.
"How is Mama?" he asked quietly.
No one answered at once.
Because what answer could there be?
Sophia, who had spent the past days learning that some truths changed shape depending on who spoke them, said only, "She is in her room."
Maxim nodded.
He did not remove his gloves immediately. He did not ask for food or rest. He merely handed his things to a footman and went upstairs.
The Duchess had spent more than five days largely in bed by then.
She rose when necessary. She answered what required an answer. She allowed mourning clothes to be laid out, funeral correspondence to be sorted, formal replies drafted, and practical matters placed before her when they could not be postponed.
But grief still descended upon her in waves so heavy they bent her back and stole speech from her throat.
When Maxim entered, she was seated rather than lying down, though she looked as though she had not properly slept since the second letter had arrived.
At the sight of him, something in her expression broke.
For all the children she loved, Maxim had always carried a certain visible inheritance of Theodore — not as uncannily as Laurence did in face and bearing, but in stance, in reserve, in the way duty sat early and firmly upon him.
Seeing him there — long-limbed, fair-haired, holding himself so straight even now — was like being confronted with one portion of Theodore returned in living form.
"Maxim," she said, and her voice nearly failed on his name.
He crossed the room immediately.
The first time he embraced her after his return, he did so with a restraint that lasted only the span of a breath before it gave way. He saw her face up close. Saw how reduced she looked, how drained, how unlike the Duchess who had once moved through the house with poised command. Saw the strain grief had laid into her features.
And then, for the first time since receiving the news, Maxim cried.
Not loudly.
Not with a child's broken wail.
The tears came with the same terrible discipline that marked so much in him and, before him, in Theodore. His shoulders did not shake violently. His voice did not splinter. The tears simply came and could not be stopped, slipping down a face held rigid with effort.
The Duchess held him tighter.
Not because he was the eldest she had borne — he was not — but because in that moment he was wholly a son bereaved, and she understood with fresh pain what this must mean to him. He had not seen his father in years. None of them had, not truly. The memory of Theodore had lived in portraits, letters, discipline, stories, and longing.
Now even that possibility of reunion had ended.
"My darling boy," she whispered into his hair. "My poor darling boy."
She drew back enough to look at him properly.
There, in his fairness, in the line of his shoulders, in the effort with which he mastered himself, she saw Theodore's influence so strongly that it made her chest ache afresh.
They spoke little.
There was very little language fit for such moments.
She told him only what he needed to know, and he listened, jaw tightening when details became too concrete. When he finally left her chamber again, he did so altered — quieter still, sobered not merely by the fact of death, but by proximity to its devastation.
Laurence arrived a few days later.
By then the Duchess had begun, outwardly at least, to move through the house again. Not with her old steadiness, not with ease, but with that grave, almost ceremonial composure grief sometimes grants to those who have no choice but to go on while breaking.
She greeted him at the front entrance herself.
It was fitting.
No servant should have stood between them in such a moment.
Laurence stepped down from the carriage in mourning black. The heat of summer had not abated, and yet he wore the colour without apparent discomfort, as though he had entered a season beyond weather. He looked thinner than when he had left for university in spring, though not from illness — rather from responsibility, strain, and the slow hardening that grief and duty together can accomplish in a man not yet fully grown.
Of all the sons, he most resembled Theodore.
This had always been true, but in mourning it became almost uncanny.
The dark hair.
The severe, intelligent lines of his face.
The reserve that could look like coldness to those who did not know better.
The economy of movement.
The stillness before speech.
Only the eyes differed — those had come from the mother he had lost in infancy, and in certain lights their blue seemed almost too clear for the sternness of the rest of him.
When he entered the house and saw the Duchess standing there, dressed entirely in black, grief held upright by will, he stopped for the smallest of moments.
Then he bowed his head slightly.
"Your Grace," he said, and then, lower, more human, "I am sorry."
It was not enough. Nothing was enough. But it was what he had.
The Duchess looked upon him and felt a second, sharper ache — because in losing Theodore he had lost not only a father, but now stood once again within that old private wound of having no living parent of his own blood left in the world.
He was heir now not merely in theory, but in fact.
Duke-to-be. Head of De Montfort in waiting.
A young man with one year of university left and the whole weight of a duchy waiting beyond it.
She stepped forward and embraced him, more tightly and for longer than she ordinarily would have permitted herself. Laurence, though momentarily stiff as he always was with unexpected tenderness, did not draw away.
When she released him enough to look at him, she spoke quietly.
"Despite everything, you must remember this — you are not alone in this house. You may think of me as a mother, if you will allow it. And as someone you may rely on."
The words cost him more than he showed.
Something deep in Laurence always held itself apart, not out of ingratitude but from some early-formed instinct of self-containment. Yet in that moment he understood the generosity of what she was offering and the courage it required of her to offer it while grieving Theodore so profoundly.
He inclined his head.
"I understand."
His voice remained steady.
He did not cry.
He did not allow the devastation that had lived in him since reading the letter to cross fully onto his face. But it was there, not in tears, but in the unnatural control of every line of him.
He looked at the Duchess once more and said, with absolute sincerity, "You have done more for De Montfort than anyone could have asked while Father was away."
That nearly undid her again.
But she held.
Because she had to.
That summer was not one for celebration.
No guests came for gaiety. No music was invited into the drawing room. No plans were made beyond those required by death and its attendant formalities.
Instead, condolences flooded the estate.
Letters arrived daily.
From neighbouring houses.
From distant relations.
From men who had served under Theodore.
From women who remembered him at court years earlier.
From old allies, former rivals, tenants, clergy, and acquaintances.
Even the royal family sent word.
A message of official sympathy was accompanied by an award bestowed posthumously for Theodore's bravery in the final battle. The language of it was grand, ceremonial, polished with honour. Yet all such distinctions felt strange set beside the reality of loss. Medals could not fill a chair at table. Royal gratitude could not restore a husband, or a father, or the living presence of the man the portraits on the walls had captured but not preserved.
Theodore's body had been embalmed on the continent with every effort made to ensure the journey home preserved what could still be preserved. Arrangements were painstaking. Correspondence passed between solicitors, military officials, household staff, clergy, and the family chapel.
By then the children had learned that grief had its own bureaucracy.
Things had to be signed, sent, organized, approved.
Black cloth must be measured.
Guests accounted for.
The route of the funeral decided.
The family chapel prepared.
Laurence had almost no idle time that summer.
He moved constantly between rooms, papers, visitors, and instructions, stepping into duties the Duchess could no longer always perform without being overtaken by sorrow. He did not do so dramatically. He simply saw what was not being held and took hold of it.
In another summer he might have walked the grounds, read, fenced, or accompanied guests. In this one, he became a quiet axis of necessity.
If something needed answering, Laurence answered it.
If something needed carrying, confirming, arranging, he did it.
The Duchess noticed and was both grateful and heartbroken by it.
Maxim, meanwhile, became a kind of sentinel.
He watched over Arthur and Fredrick, whose noise had lessened so drastically that at times the house seemed to miss their former unruliness. He watched over Sophia too, particularly during those long hours when the other two were shut away with tutors and she was left lonely in the great hush of mourning.
Maxim was not a natural conversationalist. His love took practical form. He did not know how to soothe with stories or chatter. But he remained near. He sat with Sophia when she asked for company. He followed her into the gardens when she did not wish to be alone. He ensured she ate. He made certain Arthur and Fredrick did not pull her into arguments more exhausting than amusing.
Sophia had turned eleven by then.
It felt, to her, as though she had turned eleven inside a closed room where even time moved more quietly.
For the first time in many months she found herself unable to think much of Florian.
His letters still came.
She received one expressing his condolences in a tone so sincere and gentle that it stung. She replied with a polite note of thanks, but nothing more. She had no spirit left for her usual descriptions of the estate, no warmth for stories of gardens or weather. Her days were spent instead in thought, gloom, and a grief that confused her because it was at once real and strangely incomplete.
Maxim was not pleasant company exactly during this time, but he was reliable, which became its own comfort.
Sophia pondered her father, Theodore De Montfort often.
The truth was, she could not remember him.
He had gone to war before her earliest memory truly took shape, and so the grief she felt was built not on recollection but on absence, on image, on what he had meant to the others, and on the knowledge that he had once chosen to make her part of De Montfort.
Visually, she knew him only through portraits.
She studied them repeatedly that summer.
There was one of him in youth, at about Laurence's age, and the resemblance there was almost unnerving — same dark hair, same severe beauty of line, same expression of restrained intelligence, though Theodore's gaze had held a rougher, older-world authority even then.
There was another portrait in which he stood behind a lady seated with a child in her arms. Sophia was never entirely sure who the lady was — perhaps a relation, perhaps someone from before the life she knew — but in that portrait the duke's expression was unexpectedly soft, touched by affection rather than command.
Another showed him in full military splendour: uniform immaculate, medals bright against dark cloth, cape falling grandly behind him, one hand resting on the sword at his hip. In that painting he looked almost less like a man than an idea — noble, martial, made for history.
And then there was the family portrait.
Theodore De Montfort standing with Charlotte and all four boys arranged around them. A complete family.
A family Sophia had entered after the fact, as though into a room where love had already begun but had not been closed against her.
From all these images she had formed one conclusion over and over again: Theodore De Montfort had been a father, a general, a nobleman, and a man who loved deeply but quietly.
It upset her sometimes that her grief did not feel as sharp as her brothers' or as devastating as the Duchess's. She cried, yes. She felt the loss, yes. But the loss was built of imagination as much as memory, and that made her feel disloyal.
She loved what he had represented.
What he had done.
What others had been to him.
But she could not summon his voice.
That absence haunted her more subtly than grief itself.
By the last week of summer, Theodore's body arrived at De Montfort.
From the moment the carriage bearing his remains crossed onto the estate, something in the house changed again. Mourning that had until then been partly anticipatory, partly administrative, became immediate and embodied.
He was home.
Not living.
But home.
The funeral preparations, nearly complete already, moved into their final form. The casket would remain closed. That had been Theodore's wish, made plain in his final instructions. He did not want the world to see what war had done to him. He wished to be remembered not as a ruined body, but as the man he had been.
Laurence understood this at once.
So did Maxim.
But Charlotte—
Charlotte understood and agreed, and yet could not bear the idea of letting him be buried without looking upon him one final time.
And so, in private, in the family chapel the evening before the funeral, the casket was opened for her.
The chapel was lit only by candles.
Their flames trembled faintly in the still air, casting gold over stone, wood, and mourning cloth. No one accompanied her at first. She asked to be alone.
When the lid was lifted, she saw him.
And all at once she understood far more than Theodore's letter had permitted her to imagine.
The damage was terrible.
Not because it was merely grotesque — though parts of it were — but because it was intimate evidence of suffering. This was what his brave language had concealed. This was what he had endured while writing to her of Christmas and home and pride. Burns, ruin, the aftermath of pain no opium could truly dignify.
She did not recoil.
What shook her was not horror, but love.
The knowledge of how much he had borne.
How brave he had been.
How impossible it was now to help him.
She stood beside the casket and wept with a grief so private it seemed to separate her even from her own body. By the time a servant, worried by the lateness of the hour, finally came to guide her back to her room, it was near midnight.
The funeral was held the next morning.
By then distant relatives had begun to arrive. The house, despite mourning, was full. Carriages lined the drive. Black hats, veils, formal coats, crests, and condolence murmurs moved through the entrance halls and reception rooms.
Close friends attended. So did extended kin. Military men came. Clergy came. Neighbours, allies, and those whose rank or affection made their presence fitting arrived one after another.
Even the Crown Prince came in his father's stead.
That alone lent the day an almost historical weight, though Sophia, in her youth, only half grasped the significance. She knew merely that important people had come and that every face seemed carved from solemnity.
The casket remained closed.
Above it, placed prominently, was Theodore's portrait — not the image of a ruined man returned from war, but the great commanding likeness in uniform, hand on sword, eyes fixed somewhere beyond the painter and beyond time.
Laurence read the eulogy.
He did so without faltering.
His voice was low, controlled, and carried well through the chapel and the gathered silence beyond it. More than once, those listening noted how much he sounded then like Theodore, though younger and with that strange clarifying difference of the blue eyes.
He spoke of duty.
Of courage.
Of service.
Of fatherhood.
Of the Duke as he had been — not simply a decorated general, but a man whose strength had ordered and protected a household as well as a title.
When the procession moved afterward and Theodore was buried beside Laurence's mother, another layer of complexity settled over the day — though not all who attended understood it. The first wife and the second. The son who belonged to one and had been raised by the other. Death laying old histories beside one another in stone.
Afterward, a memorial service gathered the mourners again to remember the Duke in words, stories, and formal tribute.
Sophia spent much of the day uncertain whether she should approach Laurence.
She did not know that Charlotte was not his birth mother.
That knowledge had never been given to her, and she had never had reason to suspect it fully. But she did know — as much by instinct as by observation — how deeply Laurence had looked up to Theodore. She knew what it was to see a boy become a man under a father's gaze, even when the father had been absent for years.
Throughout the funeral Laurence had not cried.
Not once.
But that did not reassure her.
If anything, it unsettled her more.
He seemed too composed. Too closed. As though grief had been forced inward until it had nowhere left to go except behind the eyes.
That evening, after most guests had dispersed and the house had fallen into the exhausted quiet that follows ritual, Sophia finally made her way toward his room.
The corridors seemed longer at night after a funeral.
She walked softly, one hand brushing occasionally against the wall as though to steady herself.
When she reached his door, she paused.
What if he wished to be alone?
What if she had no right to be there?
What if he opened the door and looked at her as though she had interrupted something he could not bear to share?
Still, she knocked.
A moment later the door opened.
Laurence stood there.
He was no longer dressed for public mourning, though he was still in black. The candlelight from within the room caught his face enough for her to see what she had not seen before.
His eyes were red.
No tears remained.
No visible sign of breakdown.
But the redness was unmistakable.
He had not wept before the gathered house.
He had done so here, in private, or had at least come close enough that his body had betrayed what his discipline would not.
Sophia's chest tightened.
He looked down at her, and for once he seemed too tired even for proper reserve.
"Is something the matter?" he asked.
She shook her head quickly.
"No. I only… I wondered if there was anything I could do."
The question hung there between them with all the inadequacy of love spoken by someone too young to mend anything real.
Laurence looked at her for a long moment.
Then, because he could not say what grief truly felt like and because tenderness with Sophia had always come to him easiest when disguised in gentleness, he forced the smallest smile.
"You are doing plenty already," he said. "By being your lovely self."
The words were simple.
But they touched her deeply enough that she remembered them long afterward.
She did not stay long.
She did not need to.
The point had not been conversation.
It had been presence.
And he had understood that.
Summer came to its close.
Laurence returned to university.
The Duchess had insisted upon it.
He was to finish his studies. She would manage the estate until he graduated and formally assumed the full weight of his title and household.
Maxim returned to boarding school.
The house emptied again.
Autumn passed.
No one truly celebrated the passage of the seasons.
Christmas came and went without festivity. It was observed, not marked. Neither Laurence nor Maxim returned that year. Mourning and study and distance held them elsewhere, and De Montfort did not hang garlands or make music. The season passed like a candle burning in another room.
Spring arrived.
Then moved quietly into its end.
And before anyone could say precisely when the shift had happened, summer came once more — and grief, though still present, had been washed thinner by the patient movement of time and weather.
Not gone.
Never gone.
But altered.
Softened at the edges by distance, letters, duties, and the simple fact that life, indifferent and persistent, continued to call the living forward.