A Fiery Dalliance

XV

"I am half inclined to think we are all ghosts...it is not only what we have inherited from our fathers and mothers that exists again in us, but all sorts of old dead ideas and all kinds of old dead beliefs and things of that kind. They are not actually alive in us; but there they are dormant all the same, and we can never be rid of them. Whenever I take up a newspaper and read it, I fancy I see ghosts creeping between the lines. There must be ghosts all over the world. They must be as countless as the grains of the sands, it seems to me. And we are so miserably afraid of the light, all of us." Henrik Ibsen, Ghosts 

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XV.

Perrie still felt utterly mortified at dinner that evening, and it did not help matters that she was seated opposite the twins. Her embarrassment had masked her shock when she had met both of them in library after hiding in there, but she could not deny the awe that crept upon her at the dinner table.

Joe and Ed were identical. Everything about them was physically the same. The same almond shaped brown eyes, the same floppy blond hair that was in desperate need of a trim, the same defined jaws, the same broad shoulders, the same tiny bump on what was otherwise a very straight nose. Their mouths moved the same way when they spoke, and even the pitch of their voices was entirely the duplicate of the other.

The only difference that Perrie could distinguish between them was the fact that Ed spoke, and Joe did not. Ed sat with a much straighter posture than Joe, which again was the same as his brother's were Joe sitting as he ordinarily would. There was a confidence about Ed that was not arrogant, and he very easily charmed Perrie's family with his tales from Cambridge.

Perrie could vaguely hear her father asking question after question as he re-lived his youth through the present-day Cambridge scholar.

Joe, however, said nothing. He was a very large man, as was Ed. He was physically tall and broad, and it bothered Perrie to no end usually. Except at the table that evening he looked ... small. She would not dare make such an observation to his face lest he laugh at Perrie's hypocrisy, but it was still the truth. Joe kept his eyes down, as though his silverware were the most fascinating objects to ever enter his line of sight.

Ed was definitely a gentleman, and when he formally met Perrie in front of her parents, he made no reference to the fact that it was technically their third time meeting one another. At least that time, Perrie was not doing something ridiculous to embarrass herself. Ed simply smiled at her as he oozed charm and friendliness. Were Perrie not so mortified, she would have liked him very much.

She would also have asked Joe why on earth he could not be more like his brother. Ed did not seem one bit the insufferable toad that Joe could be most of the time. The wrong brother had certainly ended up at the village school in Ashwood.

But that thought put another back into Perrie's mind. It was one that she had wondered before. How had Joe ended up at the village school in Ashwood when he was the son of a viscount? Why was his twin brother sitting at their dining room table regaling them all with tales from what was quite possibly the best university in the world, and Joe was sitting there as her father's apprentice?

Joe was barely even sitting. If he slouched any further, he would have slid under the table. What on earth was the matter with him?

Perrie turned her attention as subtly as she could muster to the Viscount Evesham. She could absolutely see the resemblance between the viscount and his twin sons. Except for his eyes. Perrie theorised that Joe and Ed must have inherited their mother's brown eyes. What happened to their mother?

Perrie had never asked Joe that question, not that they had ever had occasion to discuss such personal subjects as they were often too busy with driving the other to madness. But it seemed like such a simple thing to know about another person.