Chapter 30

When I was finally finished dealing with Brenda, it was a relief to head back to the Carlisle and relax in the suite the firm arranged for me. Before collapsing I spoke to Doctor Cashner and discovered that Brenda had been over that ground ahead of me. He was thoroughly invested in caring for Sheldon for the foreseeable future. The firm had arranged to get him back to Castle Wellington to be with Sheldon while I finished up in the states.

Baby Girl was home with Sheldon and his nannies, so she was well cared for, but I was much happier knowing Sheldon’s doctor was near him all the time. When I got the good doctor on the phone I instructed him to hire two relief pediatricians at two-hundred and fifty thousand a year each, with all appropriate benefits necessary to keep them in place for as long as I wished them employed. While we were speaking I informed him that I was improving his benefit plan to match what the best people in my employ had.

Let’s face it. I could afford to be generous.

It was two years later. Sheldon had recently turned eighteen when his broken, bent and damaged little body began to break down on him. The doctors were way out in front of his problems, and moved him to a previously arranged private ICU, where he had the very best of everything, night and day.

They threw everything possible at him. Their intense attention to his every physical challenge kept him with us for another two years before it all came crashing down early on a Sunday morning. “Lord Terrance, there is a call for you. It appears to be an emergency.”

It was Doctor Cashner and one of his assistants. “Lord Terrance, Sheldon had a very bad night. His heart began to fail a few minutes ago. It appears that he had a very short time left. If you want to be with him at the end, you must come now, Sir.”

Baby Girl went with me, and when we arrived, she jumped up beside Sheldon and squeezed tightly against him, as if she were willing him to survive. Once he realized his best friend was with him, he cuddled against her, relaxed, stopped fighting the fight that took so much out of him each day, and quietly died.

Just like that, I was alone again.

It was a good thing I had Baby Girl. She might be pushing ten, but her heart was the heart of a champion, and her love sustained me through those dark days.

We buried Sheldon beside his dear Aunt in the little graveyard at Castle Wellington. I had Baby Girl’s likeness carved on his headstone. The two headstones were then joined by a marble bridge that gave their graves a companionship that they sought in life and needed in death.

After Sheldon’s burial, I paid off the doctors and nurses. It was then that I realized that my life had been so wrapped around Cathay, and then Sheldon, that I had no friends, no close acquaintances, and no expectations of having any in the near future.

When I wasn’t immersed in Sheldon’s care, I was directing the campaign against those who murdered my bride. Jack’s guys tracked each and every co-conspirator to their hiding place, and then either captured, or killed them. Eventually they had taken lives of every mother’s son of the cabal, including Gregory. The Duke succumbed to a sudden heart attack when he ingested a very special potion designed to take his life untraceably. It was said that his last hours were extremely uncomfortable.

I didn’t attend his funeral.

Deirdre never contacted me again.

I read that she somehow failed to inherit his fortune. It all went to blood relations and she received their London home and a comfortable pension. Based on the many conversations I had with Joan Davidson and Chief Younger at MI6, I would say that they suspected me in those deaths, but lacked anything to connect me beyond motive.

The winter that became my life after Cathay was killed and Sheldon passed away eventually passed. Baby Girl and I boarded the yacht and spent the actual winter at the estate on Curacao. I slept late, ate fattening foods and generally shook off the sorrow that had surrounded me for so long.

It was while we were hiding out on the island that Daphne Bergendorf contacted me through my attorneys. I was reclining under the gigantic sun umbrella, in the rear yard when my housekeeper brought me the phone. “Lord Terrance, you have a call. A Daphne Bergendorf wishes to know if you can speak with her.”

‘What would Daphne want with me,’ I thought as I accepted the phone.