A Secret Consequence For The Viscount
A Secret Consequence For The Viscount
Sophia James
An unexpected Christmas gift…Like all of London society, Lady Eleanor believed Viscount Bromley dead. Now, after six years, he has returned a changed man. Brooding Nicholas Bartlett has no memory of their one night of incredible passion – so how can she tell him he fathered a child…?As Nicholas starts to regain his lost memories, he realises the true reason he feels so drawn to beautiful Eleanor and her young daughter. And with the danger from his past threatening to rear its head, it’s up to Nicholas to protect his newly-discovered family!
An unexpected Christmas gift...
Like all of London society, Lady Eleanor believed Viscount Bromley dead. Now, after six years, he has returned a changed man. Brooding Nicholas Bartlett has no memory of their one night of incredible passion—so how can she tell him he fathered a child?
As Nicholas starts to regain his lost memories, he realizes the true reason he feels so drawn to beautiful Eleanor and her young daughter. And with the danger from his past threatening to rear its head, it’s up to Nicholas to protect his newly discovered family!
Hidden amongst the masked revellers of an underground Regency gentlemen’s club, where decadence, daring and debauchery abound, the four owners of Vitium et Virtus are about to meet their match!
Welcome to…
The Society of Wicked Gentlemen
Read
A Convenient Bride for the Soldier
by Christine Merrill
An Innocent Maid for the Duke
by Ann Lethbridge
A Pregnant Courtesan for the Rake
by Diane Gaston
A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
by Sophia James
All available now!
Author Note (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
I wrote the prologue for this book on a plane between Los Angeles and Melbourne after the Romance Writers of America® 2016 conference, and by the time I arrived home in Auckland I both understood and loved Nicholas Bartlett, the lost Viscount Bromley and one of the owners of the club Vitium et Virtus.
It was my absolute pleasure and privilege to work with Christine Merrill, Ann Lethbridge and Diane Gaston on The Society of Wicked Gentlemen series.
I hope you enjoy this last story, A Secret Consequence for the Viscount, as much as I enjoyed writing it.
A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
Sophia James
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay, on Auckland, New Zealand’s North Shore, with her husband who is an artist. She has a degree in English and History from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed by reading Georgette Heyer in the holidays at her grandmother’s house. Sophia enjoys getting feedback at www.Facebook.com/sophiajamesauthor (http://www.Facebook.com/sophiajamesauthor).
Books by Sophia James
Mills & Boon Historical Romance
Knight of Grace
Lady with the Devil’s Scar
Gift-Wrapped Governesses
‘Christmas at Blackhaven Castle’
Ruined by the Reckless Viscount
The Society of Wicked Gentlemen
A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
The Penniless Lords
Marriage Made in Money
Marriage Made in Shame
Marriage Made in Rebellion
Marriage Made in Hope
Men of Danger
Mistletoe Magic
Mistress at Midnight
Scars of Betrayal
The Wellingham Brothers
High Seas to High Society
One Unashamed Night
One Illicit Night
The Dissolute Duke
Visit the Author Profile page
at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk) for more titles.
This book is dedicated to Linda Fildew, my wonderful and irreplaceable editor, who has been with me right from the start.
Thanks for knowing when to give me a push to try new things.
Contents
Cover (#u3d13f6b5-d013-5a6c-bf5f-80de5155a231)
Back Cover Text (#u495d612d-cc2e-5988-b0fc-8f1f53b6b3e0)
Introduction (#ud9832f2b-57d4-5032-9a50-f9bda049cd79)
Author Note (#u1f7e8a86-4853-56e4-a029-89c32d1cc75f)
Title Page (#u403222cf-fc2c-5979-8a4b-2cd847820f74)
About the Author (#u729ec307-f37d-5d02-a1e5-780bba680c3f)
Dedication (#ubd2f85f2-df13-5a27-9007-565a8e0d49f5)
Prologue (#ua18a4ecf-e7d9-59f3-9919-b6fb7607a28d)
Chapter One (#ue94bcf33-f62d-5440-940b-701d594a1d27)
Chapter Two (#u0cfd6ec9-038a-5ba5-bc8c-93fee012e5bd)
Chapter Three (#u76b828c8-7695-5baa-92ec-00e0870416b6)
Chapter Four (#u5ee90698-bcef-5f90-8510-68910daaa1c6)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
James River, Virginia—1818
He was bone-weary and cold and had been for a long time now.
He could feel it in his hands and heart and in the fury wrapped around each intake of breath, fear raw against the sound of the river.
Once he knew he had been different. Such knowledge sent a shaft of pain through him that was worse than anything else imaginable, an elusive certainty drifting on the edge of misunderstanding.
He swore as he lowered his body into the water, closing his eyes against the sting of cold. With the hand that still had feeling in it he grabbed at the rushes and steadied movement. He was here somewhere, the man who had slashed at him with a blade. He could feel his presence, close now, a shadow catching at space between darkness, barely visible. He held no weapon except for his wits, no way of protecting himself save for the years of desperation honed in distance. He couldn’t remember ever feeling safe.
The voice came unexpectedly and close.
‘Nicholas Bartlett? Are you there?’
The sound had him turning his head. For more or for less he knew not which. The name was familiar, its syllables distinct as they ran together into something that made a terrible and utter sense.
He wanted to stop the sudden onslaught of memories, each thread reforming itself into more, building a picture, words that pulled at the spinning void of his life and anchored him back into truth. A truth that lay above comprehension and disbelief.
More words came from the mouth of his stalker, moving before him, as he raised steel under a dull small moon.
‘Vitium et Virtus.’
A prayer or a prophesy? A forecast of all that was to come or the harbinger of that which had been?
‘No.’ His own voice was suddenly certain as he shot out of the water to meet his fate, fury fuelling him. He hardly felt the slice of the knife against the soft bones of his face. He was fearless in his quest for life and as the curve of his assailant’s neck came into his hands he understood a primal power that did away with doubt and gave him back hope. He felt the small breakage of bone and saw surprise in the dark bulging eyeballs under moonlight. The hot breath on the raised skin of his own forearm slowed and cooled as resistance changed into flaccidity. Life lost into death with barely a noise save the splash of a corpse as it was taken by the wide flowing James to sink under the blackness, a moment’s disturbance and then calm, the small ridges slipping into the former patterns of the river.
He sat down on the bank in the wet grass and placed his head between his knees, both temples aching with the movement.
Vitium et Virtus.
Nicholas Bartlett.
He knew the words, knew this life, knew the name imbued into each and every part of him.
Nicholas Henry Stewart Bartlett.
Viscount Bromley.
A crest with a dragon on the dexter side and a horse on the sinister. Both in argent.
An estate in Essex.
Oliver. Frederick. Jacob.
The club of secrets.
Vitium et Virtus.
‘Hell.’ It all came tumbling back without any barriers. Flashes of honour, shame, disorder and excess after so very many years of nothing.
Tears welled, mixed with blood as the loss of who he now was melded against the sorrow of everything forgotten.
The young and dissolute London Lord with the world at his feet and a thousand hours of leisure and ease before him had been replaced by this person he had become, a life formed by years of endurance and hardship.
‘Nicholas Bartlett.’
He turned the name on his tongue and said it quietly into the night so he might hear it truly. The tinge of the Americas stretched long over the vowels in a cadence at odds with his English roots, though when he repeated it again he heard only the sorrow.
He searched back to the last memories held of that time, but could just think of being at Bromworth Manor in Essex with his uncle. Arguing yet again. After that there was nothing. He could not remember returning to London or getting on a ship to the Americas. He recalled pain somewhere and the vague sense of water. Perhaps he had been picked up by a boat, a stranger without memory and shanghaied aboard?
He knew he would not have disappeared willingly though his gambling debts had been rising as he had been drawn into the seedy halls of London where cheating was rife. There had been threats to pay up or else, but he had by and large managed to do so. His friends had been there to help him through the worst of the demands and he also had the club in Mayfair. A home. A family. A place that felt like his. He loved Jacob Huntingdon, Frederick Challenger and Oliver Gregory like the brothers he’d never had.
Shaking fingers touched the ache on his cheek near his right eye and came away with the sticky redness of oozing blood.
The eye felt strange and unfocused. The night was so dark he wondered if he had gone blind in that eye, a last gift from his pursuer. He shut the other one and tried to find an image, holding his fingers up against what little light there was on the water, and was relieved to see a blurry outline.
He did not feel up to walking back yet through the reeds and the river path to the shade of the cottonwoods. He didn’t want others to see him like this and he needed to make certain there were not more who would be trying to hurt him. A tiredness swept over everything, a grief at the loss of a life at his own hands. He had not killed before and the quickness of fear was now replaced by an ennui of guilt.
How could he ever fit in again? How could he be the lord he was supposed to be after this? Had his assailant held a family close? Had he been only doing a job he was sent to complete? The grey shadows in which he’d lived the last six years were things familiar. The sludgy silhouette of them, the blacks and whites of shining morality left as other men’s choices but not available to him. Twice before in America others had tried to kill him; different men in the pay of a shadowy enemy and the mastermind at pulling the strings.
* * *
He had used so many different names as he moved on for ever, away from discovery, fleeing relationships. In the end he only brought people harm and danger. If they got to know him they were always at risk and so he had not allowed such closeness. Twice before he had felt his stalkers near.
Emily. The young daughter of the kindly reverend and his wife who had taken him in had been pushed off a cliff top. The girl had survived by clinging to the undergrowth, but he had understood that after that for him there could never be intimacy with anyone.
New towns, different jobs and a series of women with favours for sale had followed. He did not seek out decent company again, but dwelt in the underworld of secrets, squalor and shallow rapport. He understood the people who were as brutalised and damaged as himself and there was safety in the shifting unsettled disconnection of outsiders.
Peter Kingston. His name now here in the river town of Richmond, the capital of the Colony and Dominion of Virginia. He could disappear tomorrow and nobody would miss him, the man employed at the tavern of Shockoe Bottom who seldom spoke and hardly ever smiled. Stranger. Foreigner. Outsider. Murderer now. Another name added to all the ones he had gathered. A further disengagement. A shadow who had walked through the Americas with barely a footprint. Until tonight. Until now. Until his hands had fastened around the throat of his pursuer and broken the life from him.
He leant over and was neatly sick into the green heart of some poison ivy.
Leaves of three, let them be.
The ditty came of its own accord as he wiped his mouth with the frayed edge of his jacket. Had he been truly regretful he might have laid his hand across the plant and allowed its penance. As it was he merely frowned at such an idea and stood.
He would gather his few possessions and find a ship to England. Frederick, Oliver and Jacob would help him to make sense of things and then he would leave London to retire to the country in Essex. Alone. It was the only way he could see before him.
As he looked back a fog bank slid by on the flat black current of the James.
Chapter One (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
London—December 26th, 1818
It was one day past Christmas.
That thought made Nicolas smile. He had forgotten the celebration for so long in the Americas that the presence of it here in London was somehow comforting. A continued and familiar tradition, a belief that transcended all difficulty and promised hope for the likes of himself? Or would it tender despair? He could not imagine any church exonerating his sins should he be foolish enough to confess them.
The age-old music of carols could be heard as he left the narrow service alley behind the club of Vitium et Virtus in Mayfair and came around to the front door. Here the only sound was that of laughter and frivolity, a card game underway, he guessed, in the downstairs salon. High stakes and well funded. The few coins he had left in his own pocket felt paltry and he wondered for the millionth time whether he should have come at all.
The late afternoon lengthened the shadows. He could slip away still, undetected, and make his way north. Boxing Day kept most people at home enjoying the company of family. There would be few around to note his progress.
He swallowed as he looked up and saw the sky was stained in red. Blood red. Guilt red. A celestial nod to his culpability or a pardon written in colour?
Digging into his pocket, he found a silver shilling.
‘Heads I stay and tails I go.’ It was all he could think of at this moment, a choice that was arbitrary and random. The coin turned and as it came down into his opened palm the face of George the Third was easily visible. The thought crossed his mind that had it been tails he would have tried for the best of three.
His knuckles were against the main door before he knew it, the polished black lacquer of the portal attesting to great care and attention and a certain understated wealth.
When it opened a big man he did not know stood there, dressed in the clothes of a footman, but with the visage of one who knew his intrinsic worth.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
Nicholas could feel the condescension. His clothes from the long voyage were dirty and they had not been well looked after. His beard was full and his hair uncut. He was glad there was no looking glass inside the door to reflect his image over and over again.
‘Are any of the lords who own this place present inside this evening?’
He tried to round his vowels and sound at least halfway convincing. It would not take much for the man to bid those who guarded the front door to throw him out. He knew there was desperation in his eyes.
‘They are, sir.’
‘Could you show me through to them?’
‘Indeed, sir. But may I take your hat and coat first and could you give me your name?’
‘Bromley. They will know me.’
‘If you would just wait here, sir.’ The footman snagged Nick’s attire across a series of wooden pegs carved into the shape of a man’s sexual parts inside the front door. The sheer overtness of the furnishings shocked him now, where once it had not.
A further confusion. Another way in which he had changed. He swallowed and as dryness filled his mouth he wished he’d thought to bring his brandy flask.
Then there was the sound of chairs scraping against the floor and the rush of feet, a door flung back against its hinges and three faces he knew like his own before him. Astonished. Disbelieving.
‘Nicholas?’ It was Jacob who came forward first just as he knew it would be. Rakish and handsome, there had always been an undercurrent of kindness within him, a care for the underdog, a certainty of faith.
Oliver and Frederick followed him, each one as bewildered as the next.
‘You’ve been gone for more than six damn years...’ It was Oliver who said this, the flush of emotion visible across the light brown of his skin.
‘And to turn up like this without any correspondence? Why would you not let us know where you were or how you fared at least?’ Fred’s voice cracked as his glance took in Nick’s cheek and the bandage on his left hand holding the deep wound safe from further damage.
Twenty-five days at sea had not helped the healing. It ached so much he had taken to cradling it across his body, easing the pain and heat. He released it now and let it hang at his side, taking hope from the bare emotion of his friends even as his fingers throbbed in protest.
‘Thank the Lord you are returned.’ Oliver stepped towards him and wrapped his arms around all the damaged parts of his body. It had been such a very long time since someone had touched him like this that he stiffened. Then Fred was there and Jake, enveloping him so tight in an embrace he hardly knew where one of them stopped and another one started.
Safety. For the first time in years Nicholas took a breath that was not forced. Yet despite this, he himself reached out to none of them. Not yet. Not till it was over. Protecting each of them from harm was the only thing he now had left to offer.
He should not have come. He should not have been so selfish. He should have listened to his inner voice and stayed away until he knew where the danger had come from. But friendship held its own beacons and the hope of it had led him here, hurrying across the seas.
‘This unexpected reunion calls for a celebration.’ Fred spoke as he hauled Nicholas back into the private drawing room at the end of the corridor, the others following. A table set up for poker had been dismantled in the rush of their exit, the cards fallen and the chips scattered. Just that fact warmed him and when Oliver chose an unopened bottle from a cabinet in the corner and poured them each a drink, Nick took it gratefully.
He waited till the others filled their glasses and raised his own.
‘To friendship,’ he said simply.
‘To the future,’ Jake added.
‘May the truth of what has happened to you, Nicholas, hold us together,’ Fred’s words were serious and when Oliver smiled the warmth in his green eyes was overlaid by question.
The cognac was smooth, creamy and strong and unlike any home-brewed liquor Nick had become so adept at dispensing in the cheap bars of the east coast of the Americas. The kick in it took his breath away. The flavour of his youth, he thought, unappreciated and imbibed in copious amounts. Today he savoured it and let it slide off the back of his tongue.
When Jacob motioned to the others to sit Nick took his place at the head of the table. This was where he had always sat, his initials carved into the dark mahogany of the chair. The first finger of his right hand ran across the marking, the ridges beneath tracing his past.
‘We never erased anything of you, Nicholas. We always believed that you would be back. But why so long? Why leave it for so many years before returning?’ Jacob voiced just what he imagined the others were thinking.
‘I had amnesia. I could not remember who I was or where I had been. My memory only began to function again in the Americas five weeks ago after encountering a man who wanted me dead.’
‘He nearly succeeded by the looks of it.’
‘Nearly, but not quite. He came off worse.’
‘You killed him.’ The soldier in Fred asked this question and there was no room in his answer for lies.
‘I did.’
‘We found blood in the alley behind Vitium et Virtus the morning after you disappeared.’ Jacob stood at that and walked over to the mantel to dig into a gilded box. ‘This was found, too.’
His signet ring surprised him. He had always worn it, but had forgotten that he had. The burnished gold crest caught at the light above. Servire Populo. To serve the people. The irony in such a motto had been humorous to him once given his youthful overarching ability to only serve himself. Reaching out, he took the piece between his fingers, wincing at the dirt under his nails and the scars across his knuckles. He swallowed back the lump that was growing in his throat.
His old life offered back with such an easy grace.
‘I can’t remember what happened in the alley.’
‘What was the last thing you remember then? Before you disappeared?’
‘Arguing at Bromworth Manor with my uncle. It was hot and I was damnably drunk. It was my birthday, the fifteenth of August.’
‘You disappeared the next Saturday night then, a week later. That much at least we have established.’ Fred gave this information.
‘Did you know that your uncle has taken over the use of the Bromley title?’ Oliver leant back against the leather in his chair and raised his feet up on an engraved ottoman, his stance belying the tension in his voice. ‘He wants you declared dead legally, given the number of years you have been missing. He has begun the procedure.’
‘The bastard has the temerity to call himself your protector,’ Jacob snarled, ‘when all he wants is your inheritance and your estates.’
Nicholas took in the information with numbed indifference. Aaron Bartlett had never been easy but, as his late father’s only brother, he’d had the credentials to take over the guardianship of an eight-year-old orphan. Nicholas remembered the day his uncle had walked into Bromworth Manor a week after his parents’ death, both avarice and greed in his eyes.
‘He’s a charlatan and everyone knows it and I for one would love to be there when you throw him lock, stock and barrel out of your ancestral home.’ As Oliver said this the others nodded. ‘Do you think he had any part in your disappearance?’
Nicholas had wondered this himself, but without memory or proof he had no basis on which to found an opinion. Shrugging his shoulders, he finished the last of his cognac and was pleased when Jacob refilled the glass again.
He held the signet ring tight in his right hand, a small token of who he was and of what he had been. He did not want to place it on his finger again just yet because the wearing of it implied a different role and one he didn’t feel up to trying to fill. He had walked under many names in the Americas, but the shadow of his persona here was as foreign to him now as those other identities he had adopted.
Jacob and Fred each wore a wedding ring. That thought shocked him out of complacency and for the first time he asked his own question.
‘You are married?’
The smiles were broad and genuine, but it was Jacob who answered first.
‘You have been gone a long time, Nicholas, and dissoluteness takes some effort in maintaining. There comes a day when you look elsewhere for real happiness and each of us has found that. Oliver may well be wed soon, too.’
‘Then I am glad for it.’
And he was, he thought with relief. He was pleased for their newfound families, pleased that they had managed to move forward even if he had not. ‘Can I meet them? Your women?’
‘Tomorrow night.’ Fred said. ‘We have a function at my town house with all the trimmings and a guest list of about eighty. You look as though you could do with a careful introduction, Nick, and such a number would not be too daunting for a first foray back into English society.’
‘You will need the services of a barber and a physician before others see you. Fred is about your size so with a tailor to iron out the differences you could get away with wearing his clothes.’ Jacob watched him carefully, his blue eyes sharp on detail. When his glance ran over his face Nick knew he would have to say something, his good hand going up to the ruined cheek as though he might hide it a little.
‘If someone still wishes me dead, perhaps it would be better not to involve any of you in this. I should not want...’
Fred shook his head. ‘We are involved already as your friends. There is no way you could stop any of us helping you.’
Oliver placed his hand on the table palm up in the way they had since their very first meeting and the others laid theirs on top. It took only a second’s hesitation before he found his own above theirs joined in the flesh and in promise.
‘In Vitium et Virtus.’ They all said the words together. In Vice and Virtue. The motto seemed more appropriate at this second than it ever had before.
‘We should retire to my town house for a drink. There is more of this cognac there and the occasion calls for further celebration. You can stay with me for as long as you need to, Nick, for I will have a room readied for you.’
Jacob’s invitation was tempting. ‘The offer is a kind one, but I’m reluctant to place you in danger.’ He needed to say this to allow Jacob the chance of refusal at least.
‘I think I can take care of myself and my family. Let’s just worry about getting to the bottom of this mystery, to help you recover the final bits of memory you seem to have lost. If you can start to remember the faces of your assailants in the alley that may lead us to the perpetrator.’
‘How does amnesia work, anyway?’ Oliver asked this question and Fred answered.
‘In the army many people lost their memories for the short term. A day or two at the most due to trauma, though I knew of a few chaps who never recovered theirs at all.’
‘I don’t think Nick wants to hear about those ones, Fred.’ When Jacob said this they all laughed. ‘At least he remembers us and the club.’
‘It would be hard to forget.’ Nicholas gestured to the excess and the luxury. ‘But it is the friendships I recall the most.’ His voice cracked on the last words and he swallowed away the emotion. He was not here for pity or sympathy. He knew he looked half the man who had left England, with his filthiness and his wounds but it was the hidden hurts that worried him the most. Could he ever trust anyone again? Was he doomed for ever to hold himself apart from others, all the shadows within him cutting him off from true intimacy?
He could see in each of his friends’ eyes that they found him altered, more brittle. But the lord who had cared not a whit for social convention was long gone, too, that youth of reckless pleasure seeking debauchery and high-stakes gambling. If he met a younger version of himself now he doubted he would even like him very much.
The uncertainty in him built. He did not respect his past nor his present and his future looked less rosy than he imagined it might have on returning to England. Each of his friends had a woman now, a family, a place to live and be. His own loneliness felt more acute given the pathway they had taken. He had missed his direction and even the thought of confronting his guardian in the large and dusty halls of Bromworth Manor had become less appealing than it had been on the boat over.
Did he want it all back, the responsibility and the problems? Did he need to be a viscount? Such a title would confine him once again to society ways and manners, things which now seemed pointless and absurd.
Even the club had lost its sheen, the dubious morality of vice and pleasure outdated and petty. The overt sexuality disturbed him. From where he sat he could see a dozen or more statues of women in various stages of undress and sensual arousal. The paintings of couplings on the wall were more brazen than he could ever remember, more distasteful.
In America he had seen the effects of prostitution on boys, girls and women in a way he had never noticed here, the thrill of the fantasy and daring dimmed under the reality. For every coin spent to purchase a dream for someone there was a nightmare hidden beneath for another.
‘You seem quiet, Nicholas? Are you well?’ Jacob had leant over to touch his arm and the unexpected contact made him jump and pull away. He knew they had all noticed such a reaction and struggled to hide his fury.
Everything was wrong. He was wrong to come and expect it all to have been just as it was. The headache he had been afflicted with ever since his recovery of memory chose that moment to develop into a migraine, his sight jumping between the faces of his friends and cutting them into small jagged prisms of distortion.
He wished he could just lie down here on the floor on an Aubusson rug that was thick and clean and close his eyes. He wished for darkness and silence. He hated himself as he began to shake violently and was thankful when Oliver crossed the room having found a woollen blanket, tucking it in gently around his shoulders.
Chapter Two (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
Lady Eleanor Huntingdon kissed her five-year-old sleeping daughter on the forehead before tiptoeing out of the bedroom.
Lucy was the very centre of her life, the shining star of a love and happiness that she had never expected to find again after...
‘No’. She said the word firmly. She would not think of him. Not tonight when her world was soft and warm and she had a new book on the flowers of England to read from Lackington’s. Tonight she would simply relax and enjoy.
Her brother Jacob was downstairs chatting to someone in his library and Rose, his wife, had retired a good half an hour ago, pleading exhaustion after a particularly frantic day.
Her own day had been busy, too, with all the celebrations, guilt and sorrow eating into her reserves as yet another Christmas went by without any sign of Lucy’s father.
‘No.’ She said it again this time even more firmly. She would not dwell on the past for the next few hours because the despair and wretchedness of the memory always left her with a headache. Tonight she would dream of him, she knew she would, for his face was reflected in the shape of her daughter’s and this evening the resemblance had been even more apparent than usual.
She sat on the damask sofa in the small salon attached to her room and opened her book. She had already poured herself a glass of wine and had a slice of the apple pie the cook had made that night for dinner beside it. Everything she needed right there. Outside it was cold, the first snows of winter on the ground. Inside a fire roared in the hearth, the sound of it comforting.
She seldom came to the city, but she had journeyed down to be with her family in the autumn and had decided to stay for the Christmas celebrations, the food and the decorations—things that Lucy needed in her life. She would leave tomorrow with her daughter for Millbrook House, the ancestral estate of the Westmoor dukedom in Middlesex. Her home now. The place she loved the most in all the world.
Opening her book, she began to read about the new varieties of roses, a plant she enjoyed and grew there in the sheltered courtyard gardens. She could hear her brother’s voice from the downstairs library more distinctly now. He must have opened the door that led into the passageway and his quiet burr filled the distance.
She stopped reading and looked up, tilting her head against the silence. The other voice sounded vaguely familiar, but she could not quite place its tone. It was not Frederick Challenger or Oliver Gregory, she knew that, but there was a familiarity there that was surprising. The click of a door shutting banished any sound back into the faraway distance, but still she felt anxious.
She was missing something. Something important. Placing the book on her small table, she stood and picked up the glass of wine, walking to the window and pulling back the curtains to look out over the roadway.
No stranger’s carriage stood before the house so perhaps the newcomer had come home in her brother’s conveyance from Mayfair, for she knew Jacob had been to his club.
Her eyes strayed to the clock. It was well after ten. Still early enough in London terms for an outing, but late for a private visitor on a cold and rainy evening. She stopped herself from instructing her maid to go down and enquire as to the name of the caller. This hesitancy also worried her for usually she would have no such qualms in doing such a thing.
A tremor of concern passed through her body, making her hands shake. She was twenty-four years old and the last six difficult years had fashioned such strength and independence that she now had no time for the timidity she was consumed with. If she was worried she needed to go downstairs herself and understand just where her anxieties lay.
But still she did not move as she finished her wine in a long and single swallow and poured herself another.
There was danger afoot for both herself and Lucy.
That horrible thought made her swear out loud, something she most rarely did. Cursing again under her breath, she took a decent swallow of the next glass of wine and then placed it on the mantel. The fire beneath burnt hot. She could see the red sparks of flame against the back of the chimney flaring into life and then dying out.
Soldiers.
Ralph, Jacob and herself had played games in winter with them for all the young years of their life. Her hand went to her mouth to try to contain the grief her oldest brother’s death had left her with. With reverence she recited the same prayer she always did when she thought of him.
‘And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds...’
It was a snippet from one of the verses of Thessalonians, but the image of her and her brothers rising whole into the sky was a lovely one. Lucy would be there, of course, and Rose and Grandmama, as well, and all the other people that she loved.
She was not particularly religious, but she did believe in something—in God, she supposed, and Jesus and the Holy Family with their goodness. How else could she have got through her trials otherwise?
She was sick of her thoughts tonight, fed up with their constant return to him.
That damn voice was still there in her mind, too, changing itself into the tones of the man she had loved above all else and then lost.
The hidden name. The unuttered father. Although she knew Jacob suspected she had told their father, she had never told anyone at all exactly what had happened to her, because sometimes she could barely understand it herself.
For a moment she breathed in deeply to try to stop the tears that were pooling in her eyes. She would not cry, not tonight with a fire, a good book, some apple pie and French wine.
Her life had taken on some sort of pattern that felt right and she loved her daughter with all her heart.
The door downstairs was ajar again and the voices came more clearly than they had before. Her brother sounded perturbed, angry even, and she stood still to listen, opening her own door so that the words would be formed with more precision.
‘You cannot possibly think that we will not help you. All of us. There is no damn way in the world that I will let you go and fight this by yourself.’
‘But it is dangerous, Jake. If anything were to happen to you and your family...’
The room began to spin around Eleanor, in a terrifying and dizzying spiral. There was no up and down, only the vortex of a weightless imbalance pulling at her throat and her heart and her soul.
Nicholas Bartlett. It was his voice, lost for all these years. To her and to Lucy. To Jacob and Frederick and Oliver. Why was he down there?
He had not come to see her? He had not beaten down her door in the rush of reunion? He had not called her name from the bottom of the stairs again and again as he had stormed up to find her before taking her into his arms and kissing her as he had done once? Relentlessly. Passionately. Without thought for anyone or anything.
He had sat with her brother discussing his own needs for all the evening. Quietly. Civilly.
Perhaps he did not know she was here, but even that implied a lack of enquiring on his behalf. The man she remembered would have asked her brother immediately as to her whereabouts and moved heaven and earth to find her.
She nodded her head in order to underline such a truth.
Her own heart was beating so fast and strong she could see the motion of it beneath the thick woollen bodice of her blue-wool gown. Eleanor wondered if she might simply perish with the shock of it before she ever saw him.
Sitting down, she took a deep breath, placing her head in her hands and closing her eyes.
She needed to calm herself. This was the moment she had dreamed about for years and years and it was not supposed to be anything like this. She should be running down the stairs calling his name, joy in her voice and delight in her eyes.
Instead she stood and found her white wrap to wind it tightly about her shoulders because, whether she wanted to admit it or not, there had been a hesitancy and a withdrawal between them on the last night they had been together.
He’d seen her off, of course, in his carriage, but he had not acted then like a man who was desperate for her company.
‘Thank you, Eleanor.’ He had said that as he’d moved back and away from the kiss she had tried to give him, as if relieved for the space, his glance sliding to the ground.
He had not even stayed to watch her as the conveyance had departed, the emptiness reflected in her own feelings of dread.
So now, here, six years later she could not quite fathom where such an absence left her. What if she went downstairs now and saw this thought exactly on his face? Would her heart break again? Could she even withstand it?
She had to see him. She had to find in his velvet-brown eyes the truth between them. There was a mistake, a misunderstanding, a wrongness she could not quite identify.
Her feet were on the stairs before she knew it, hurrying down. A short corridor and then the library, the door closed against her. Without hesitation she pushed the portal open and strode through.
Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, was sitting on the wing chair by the fire and he looked nothing like how she remembered him.
His clothes were dirty, his hair unshaped, but it was the long curling scar that ran from one corner of his eye almost to his mouth that she saw first.
Ruined.
His beautiful handsome face had been sliced in half.
‘Eleanor.’ Her brother had risen and there was delight in his expression. ‘Nicholas has been returned to us safely from all his years abroad in the Americas. He will be staying here at our town house for a time.’
‘The Americas...?’ She could only stand and stare, for although Nicholas Bartlett had also risen he made no effort at all to cross the floor to greet her. Rather he stood there with his brandy held by a hand that was dressed with a dirty bandage and merely tipped his head.
In formal acknowledgement. Like a stranger might do or an acquaintance. His cheeks were flushed, the eyes so much harder than she remembered them being and his countenance brittle somehow, all sureness gone.
For a second she could not quite think what to say.
‘It has been a long time.’ Foolish words. Words that might be construed as hanging her heart on her sleeve?
He nodded and the thought of his extreme weariness hit her next. Lifting her hand to her heart, she stayed quiet.
‘Six years,’ he returned as if she had not been counting, as though he needed to give her the time precisely because the duration had been lost in the interim.
Six years, seventeen weeks and six days. She knew the time almost to the very second.
‘Indeed, my lord.’ She swallowed then and saw her brother looking at her, puzzlement across his face, for the hard anger in her voice had been distinct.
‘You welcome my best friend back only with distant words, Eleanor, when you seemed most distraught at his disappearance?’
God, she would have to touch him. She would have to put her arms around his body and pretend he was nothing and nobody. Just her brother’s friend. The very thought of that made her swallow.
He had not moved at all from his place by the fire and he had not put his glass down either. Stay away, such actions said. Stay on your side of the room and I shall stay on mine.
‘I am glad to see you, Lord Bromley. I am glad that you are safe and well.’
His smile floored her, the deep dimple in his un-ruined cheek so very known.
‘Thank you, Lady Eleanor.’ He held up his injured hand. ‘Altered somewhat, but still alive.’
The manner of his address made her sway and she might have fallen had she not steadied herself on the back rest of the nearby sofa. His dark brown hair was lank and loose, the sheen she remembered there gone.
‘I heard you had been married to a lord in Scotland and now have a child. Your brother spoke of it. How old is your daughter?’
Terror reached out and gripped her, winding its claws into the danger of an answer.
Without hesitation she moved slightly and knocked her brother’s full glass of red wine from the table upon which it sat. The liquid spilled on to the cream carpet beneath, staining the wool like blood. The glass shattered into a thousand splinters as it bounced further against the parquet flooring.
Such an action broke all thought of answering Nicholas Bartlett’s question as her brother leapt forward.
‘Ellie, stay back or you will cut yourself.’
* * *
Ellie? The name seared into some part of Nicholas’s mind like a living flame. He knew this name well, but how could that be?
He shook his head and looked away. He knew Jacob’s sister only slightly. She had been so much younger than her brother when he was here last, a green girl recently introduced into society. But she had always been attractive.
Now she was a beauty, her dark hair pulled back in a style so severe it only enhanced the shape of her face and the vivid blueness of her eyes. Eyes that cut through him in a bruised anger. He knew she had spilt the wine on purpose for he had spent enough years with duplicity to know the difference between intention and accident.
He’d asked of the age of her daughter? Was there something wrong with the child, some problem that made the answer untenable to her?
Jacob looked as puzzled as he probably did, the wine soaking into his carpet with all the appearance of never being able to be removed.
A permanent stain.
He saw Eleanor had sliced her finger in her attempt at retrieving the long stem of crystal that had once been attached to the shattered bowl. He wished she had left it for the maid who was now bustling around her feet sweeping the fragments into a metal holder.
‘I need to go and see to my hand.’ Eleanor’s words came with a breathless relief, the red trail of blood sliding down her middle finger as she held it in the air. ‘Please excuse me.’
She looked at neither of them as she scurried away.
When she was gone and the maid had departed, too, Jacob’s frown deepened. ‘Eleanor has been sad since the death of her husband. Widowhood weighs heavily upon her.’
‘How did her husband die?’
‘Badly.’ The same flush of complicity he had seen on his sister’s visage covered Jacob’s face.
Since he had been gone the Huntingdon family had suffered many tragedies. Jacob had told him of the loss of Ralph, the oldest brother and heir, and his father in a carriage accident. In the telling of it Nicholas had gained the distinct impression that Jacob blamed himself somehow for their loss.
His friends had their demons, too. That thought softened his own sense of dislocation. The hedonistic decadence of the club had not been all encompassing. Real life had a way of grabbing one by the throat and strangling the air out of hope. Perhaps no one reached their thirties without some sort of a loss? A rite of passage, a way of growth? A bitter truth of life?
He wished Eleanor Huntingdon might have stayed and talked longer. He wished she might have come forward and welcomed him back in the way her brother had directed. With touch.
* * *
She reached her room and threw herself upon her bed, face buried in her pillow as she screamed out her grief. Six years of sorrow and loss and hope and love. For nothing.
Six years of waiting for the moment Nicholas Bartlett might return with all sorts of plausible explanations as to why he’d been away for so very long and how he had fought hard to be back at her side again, his heart laid at her feet.
The truth of tonight had a sharper edge altogether. Was he just another rake who had simply made a conquest of a young girl with foolishness in her heart? She had offered him exactly what it was he sought—the use of her body for a heady sensual interlude, a brief flirtation that had meant the world to her. Had it meant nothing at all to him?
‘I. Hate. Him.’
He had looked at her like a stranger might, no inkling as to what had passed between them in his bedroom at the Bromley town house, when he had whispered things into her ear that made her turn naked into the warmth of him and allow him everything.
Swallowing hard, she thought she might be sick.
Lucy might never have the promise of a father now, a papa who would fold her in his arms and tell her she meant the world to him and that he would always protect her.
The family she’d imagined to have for years was gone, burst in the bubble of just one look from his velvet-brown eyes and his complete indifference. And the worst thing of all was that she would have to see him again and again both here in the house and at any social occasion because he was her only brother’s best friend.
That thought had her sitting and swiping angrily at her eyes.
She would not waste her tears. She would confront him and tell him that to her it was as if he was dead and that she wished for no more discourse between them.
Then she would leave London for Millbrook and stay there till the hurt began to soften and the fury loosened its hold.
She would survive this. She had to for Lucy’s sake. She had seen other women made foolish by the loss of love and dreams and simply throw their lives away. But not her. She was strong and resolute.
Taking in a shaky breath, she walked over to her writing desk and drew out paper. She would ask to meet him tonight in the summer house in the garden, a place they had met once before in their few heady days of courtship.
She would not be kind and filter out any of the ‘what had been’. She would throw his disloyalty in his face and make him understand that such a betrayal was as loathsome to her as it was hurtful. No. Not that word. She did not wish for Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, to know in any way that he had entirely broken her heart.
Chapter Three (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
He was exhausted. His migraine had dulled to a constant headache and all he wanted to do was to sleep.
Tomorrow he would clean himself up. He would have his hair cut, his beard shaved and find some clothes that were not torn and dirty. He would also see a doctor about his hand because it felt hot and throbbing and he was sure an inflammation had set in. But for now...sleep, and the bed in the chamber Jacob had given him on the second floor looked large and inviting.
A sheet of paper placed carefully on the pillow caught his attention and he walked across to lift it up.
Meet me at the summer house as the clock strikes one. It is important.
Eleanor Huntingdon
Surprise floored him. Why would she send him this? Even his own dubious moral code knew the danger in such a meeting.
Her writing was precise and evenly sloped, and she had not used her married surname. He could smell a perfume on the paper that made him bring the sheet to his nose and breath in. Violets.
A mantel clock above the fireplace told him it was already fifteen minutes before the hour she had stated. Pulling his coat from the one bag he had brought as luggage from the Americas, he let himself quietly out of the room.
* * *
Ten minutes later he saw her coming through the drifts of dirty snow, a small figure wrapped in a thick shawl that fell almost to her knees. The moon was out and the wind had dropped and in the silence all about it was as if they were the only two people left in the world.
Her face was flushed from cold as she came in, shutting the glass door behind her. In here the chill was lessened, whether from the abundance of green plant life or just good building practice, he knew not which. When she spoke though he could see a cloud of mist after each word.
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘You thought I would not?’
She ignored that and rushed on. ‘I was more than surprised to see you tonight. I don’t know why you would wish for all those years of silence and no contact whatsoever, but—’
‘It was not intentional, Lady Eleanor. My memory was lost.’
Her eyes widened at this truth and she swallowed, hard.
‘I must have been hit over the head, as there was a sizeable lump there for a good time afterwards. As a result of the injury my memory was compromised.’
She now looked plainly shocked. ‘How much of it exactly? How much did you lose?’
‘Everything that happened to me before I disappeared was gone for many years. A month ago I retrieved most of my history but still...there are patches.’
‘Patches?’
‘The week before my disappearance and a few days after have gone entirely. I cannot seem to remember any of it.’
She turned at that, away from the moonlight so that all her face was in shadow. She seemed slighter than she had done a few hours earlier. Her hands trembled as she caught them together before her.
‘Everything?’
‘I am hoping it will come back, but...’ He stopped, because he could not know if this was a permanent state or a temporary one.
‘How was your cheek scarred?’
‘Someone wants me dead. They have tried three times to kill me now and I doubt that will cease until I identify the perpetrators.’
‘Why? Why should you be such a target?’
‘I have lived in the shadows for a long time, even before I left England, and have any number of enemies. Some I can identify, but others I can’t.’
‘A lonely place to be in.’
‘And a dangerous one.’
‘You are different now, Lord Bromley.’ She gave him those words quietly. ‘More distant. A harder man. Almost unrecognisable.’
He laughed, the sound discordant, but here in the night there was a sense of honesty he had not felt in a long, long time. Even his friends had tiptoed around his new reality and tried to find the similarities with what had been before. Lady Eleanor did not attempt to be diplomatic at all as she had asked of his cheek and his circumstances and there was freedom in such truth.
He felt a pull towards her that was stronger than anything he had ever known before and stiffened, cursing beneath his breath. She was Jacob’s younger sister and he could offer her nothing. He needed to be careful.
‘I am less whole, I think.’ His good hand gestured at his face. ‘Less trusting.’
‘Like me,’ she returned in a whisper. ‘Just the same.’
And when her blue eyes met his, he saw the tears that streamed down her cheeks, sorrow, anger and grief written all over her face.
He touched her then. He took her hand into his own to try to give the coldness some warmth. A small hand with bitten-down nails. There was a ring on the third finger, encrusted diamonds in gold.
‘Was he a good man, your husband?’
‘I thought so.’
‘Then I am sorry for it.’
At that she snatched her fingers from his grasp and turned. She was gone before he could say another word, a shadow against the hedgerows, small and alone.
Why had she asked him here? What had she said that could not have been discussed in the breakfast salon in the morning? Why had she risked such a meeting in the very dead of night just to ask of his health?
Nothing made any sense.
* * *
Everything was now dangerous.
Nicholas being here, the desperate people who were chasing him, the new man he had become at the expense of the one he had been.
She barely recognised him inside or out. He looked different and he sounded different. Bigger. More menacing. Distant. And yet...when he had taken her hand into his she had felt the giddy rush of want and desire.
‘Nicholas.’ She whispered his name into the night as she sat by the fire.
‘Amnesia.’ She breathed the word quietly, hating the sound of it.
Lucy had been her priority for all the years of their apartness. She had risked her social standing, her family’s acceptance and her future for her daughter and if there was even a slight chance that Nicholas could place her in danger then Eleanor was not prepared to take it.
He had said the perpetrators had attacked him three times already and had looked as though he expected a fourth or a fifth or a sixth. What was it she had heard him say to her brother just a few hours ago as she had over-listened to their conversation in the library?
‘But it is dangerous, Jake. If anything were to happen to you or your family...’
If she told him the truth about that week before he disappeared, would he want to be back in their lives? Did she want to risk telling him of their closeness, knowing so little about him? He was a stranger to her now, so perhaps she should wait to discover what kind of man he was before revealing a secret so huge it would change all their lives for ever.
These thoughts tumbled around and around in her mind, going this way and that. If he had just looked at her for a second as he used to, she knew she would have capitulated and let him know everything. But this new Nicholas was altered and aloof, the indifference in his eyes crushing.
Lucy was now her priority. As a mother she needed to make decisions that would protect her child. She had not told another soul about her relationship with Nicholas. Jacob had been distraught from the loss of his friend and she thought he might not cope with another heartbreak and scandal. She had never seen her brother so broken.
And so she had told her family nothing of the father and lover and instead, with their help, had removed to Scotland and away from prying eyes.
Goodness, those years had been hard, she thought, and shook her head. She had been so lonely she might have simply died, there in Edinburgh in the house Jacob had set her up in waiting until she could return to Millbrook for the birth of her child. A terrible secret, a dreadful scandal and all the hope of what could have been disappeared as completely as Nicholas Bartlett had.
Blighted by her own stupidity, she’d lived in sadness until the first look at the face of her daughter had banished any regret.
On her return she found Jacob had concocted a story of a husband who had died and that she was now a grieving young widow with a small child in tow. She had become Eleanor Robertson at the stroke of a pen, the name being a common and unremarkable one, though she never thought of herself as such and used Huntingdon when signing letters to anyone she knew well. Oh, granted, she realised that many people did not believe such a fabrication, but nobody made a fuss of it either. She was a duke’s daughter with land and money of her own and in the very few times she’d returned to the city she found the few friends she still did have to be generally accepting of her circumstances.
A fragile existence that only took the renewed appearance of Nicholas Bartlett to break it down completely. But this missing week seemed well established in his mind and he himself had said it had been a month since any recall had returned.
Which meant no other memories had crept back in. She did not know enough about the state of amnesia to have a certainty of anything, but tomorrow she would go to Lackington, Allen & Co. and look up the files under the medical section of the library. Knowledge would aid her.
Perhaps she could help him redefine his memory. But should she? Would her presence at his side, even in that capacity, put her own self into danger?
She needed to wait, she thought. She needed to see just how the next few days turned out in order to make an informed decision about her and Lucy’s future.
He did not wear his crested ring any more. He did not smile as he used to. She wondered if he was financially strapped with his hair and his clothes and his scuffed old boots. There had been talk of his inheritances passing on to his uncle given the number of years of his being away. Perhaps being presumed dead even negated legal rights to property?
Many had thought him dead, after all. She had heard it in the drawing rooms of society and in the quieter salons of the ton. The dashing and dissolute young Viscount Bromley’s disappearance was mourned by myriad feminine hearts and the gold coins he had lost in the seedier halls of London’s gambling scene had only added to his allure. He was now touted as a legend whose deeds had only been enhanced by the mystery surrounding him.
Eleanor could not even imagine him in society looking like he did now. No one would recognise him. People would pity him. The scar at his cheek, the injured hand and the uncertainty. He would be crucified within the hallowed snobbery of the ton!
How could she protect him?
By staying in London and being there to pick up the pieces, perhaps? By sending Lucy home to Millbrook House with her nanny and maids tomorrow until she was certain which way the dice tumbled?
Oh, God, now she was thinking at the opposite spectrum of what she had started to decide. Stay away from Nicholas entirely or try to protect him? Which was it to be? Which should it be?
Underneath her thoughts a small flame flared, then took and filled her whole body with gladness. These arguments were all academic because now he was alive to her again. Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, was not dead. He was here and breathing, the past covering him like a dull shroud, but nevertheless still quick.
Everything was possible whilst life bloomed and her brother and his friends would not desert him. She knew that from what Jacob had said. Placing her hands together she prayed.
‘Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you...’ Thessalonians again. She murmured the scripture into the silence with an emotion that she found both comforting and worrying.
Tonight she would dream of him just as she had done a thousand times since he had disappeared, his arms around her body and his warm lips covering her own.
But this time it would be different for he was no longer just a ghost.
* * *
Frederick’s carriage collected him the next morning well before the luncheon and when he arrived at the home of the Challengers in St James’s Square, Nick understood just how happy his friend was these days.
Georgiana, Fred’s wife, was gracious and welcoming even with the house in an uproar as it made itself ready for the evening’s entertainment.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Lord Bromley.’ A real smile touched her blue eyes and although she did not look at his scar, she did not look away from it either. ‘I have heard much about you for Frederick has spoken of you so very often.’
‘I hope he concentrated on my good qualities rather than the bad ones.’ He tried to keep his tone light.
‘The wildness of youth is never easy, I fear, and often misrepresented, but rest assured my husband has missed you.’
In such wisdom Nick detected that Georgiana’s life might have had its own complexities and he wondered about her story.
* * *
Half an hour later when he and Fred were alone in the library and a drink had been poured, Nick put his head back against the leather rest of a large wing chair and took in breath.
‘Your wife has the knack of making this all look easy,’ he said finally. ‘A house of things being both interesting and alive, but without the chaos of your upbringing? Where did you meet her?’
‘I first saw her at Vitium et Virtus late one night when she was auctioning off her virginity to the highest bidder, wearing nothing more than a silk concoction that was barely decent.’
Nick laughed at that and liked the sound of it. ‘And I gather that the winner of such an unusual prize was yourself?’
‘Fortunately.’
They both took a drink and listened to the low rumbling noise of the busy house.
‘Georgie was promised in marriage to Sir Nash Bowles and doing her level best to get out of it. It was the only plan she could think of. Unwise but spectacularly successful.’ Frederick’s laugh was deep.
‘Bowles was there? At the club?’
‘He was.’ Fred had sobered now at mention of that name, the good humour of a second ago fading markedly.
‘One of the last things I remember is warning him to never darken its door again, but he obviously returned.’
‘My wife sees him as perverted and cruel.’
‘And I would agree with her.’
‘Well, the one thing I do thank him for is his threats to unmask her completely. It was only because she thought she might be shunned as a pariah when the ton got wind of her improper plan that she agreed to marry me.’
‘A wise choice.’ Nick lifted his glass and finished the brandy before placing it down on the table beside him and refusing Frederick’s offer of another. ‘The world you all live in has changed a lot since I have been gone.’
‘And you have changed in appearance since last night. Jacob’s barber is a magician, by the way.’
‘The bath helped, too. The Westmoor physician also came this morning to see to my hand. He says he expects it to heal completely if I am careful.’
‘Knife wounds can be difficult things.’
‘The blade hit the bone at the back of the wrist, but at least it did not break.’
‘Which explains the sling. If you don’t want to be thrown into society so quickly by coming tonight, Nick, I will understand. After the army it was hard for me to fit straight back in.’
‘Because you felt different? Out of place?’
‘Yes, and because I had seen things that no one else could even imagine.’
Frederick was quiet then and Nicholas was glad of it.
‘I had thought to go to ground, but if I don’t come tonight it will only get harder. Better to get it over and done with. I saw Lady Eleanor yesterday, too, by the way.’ He tried to keep interest out of his words though he was not certain he had succeeded as Frederick looked up. ‘What is her story?’
‘Jake is very tight lipped about his sister, but from what I can gather the man she married was from a well-thought-of family in Edinburgh. The Robertsons.’
‘Was it the family of the Robertson boy we knew at school, then?’
‘No, by all accounts he was not related to them. Douglas Robertson, Eleanor’s husband, was killed falling off a horse, apparently in some hunting accident, and when Eleanor found out she was pregnant she came home to Millbrook to have her baby daughter, Lucy. And to grieve.’
Lucy. Nick stored the name inside him and thought how hard a path that must have been for a sheltered duke’s daughter with all the promise in the world.
A bit like him, perhaps, although his promise had been dimming even before his absence from England. His uncle had encouraged him into the profligate and debauched underworld of the ton and he had gone in to welcome the inherent risks with his eyes wide open.
‘Do you ever think, Fred, that maybe we were fools back then, playing so hard and fast?’
‘I think you and Oliver were the ones who were the worst of us although you held the biggest share in Vitium et Virtus and gambled away the most money.’
‘It was fun until it wasn’t,’ he returned and stood to look out of the window. ‘I will go up to Bromworth House tomorrow and see my uncle.’
‘Take my carriage.’
‘Oliver offered me the use of his yesterday.’
‘Will you live there this time, do you think? Put down roots and stay?’
Nicholas shrugged his shoulders because he truly did not know.
‘My advice would be to find a wife like mine, Nick. A woman who can be the better half of you, for without Georgiana at my side I’d still be lost.’
As I am, Nicholas thought, and felt the shiver of ghosts walk down his spine.
Frederick leant forward, swirling the brandy around in his glass. ‘We can move the club on into other hands, younger ones. It’s probably past time.’
‘Do you have anyone in mind?’
‘Half the upcoming bucks of the ton would jump to it in a second, but it has to be the right people. A group of friends like us maybe, people who could work together.’ He smiled, his brown eyes soft. ‘For so long we all feared you were dead, Nick. For so long we talked of you with sorrow and regret even as we relived your wildest exploits. It is good to have you back again and in one piece.’
‘Well, perhaps not quite one piece, Frederick.’ That truth settled between them.
‘The bits will come back to you, but give it time and don’t force it. One day you will rise in the morning and realise life is easier and that the demons that once threatened to engulf you are more distant.’
‘Less insistent?’
‘Then you will also understand that life carries on, different from before maybe but still valuable, and that there are people in the world who never stopped loving you. Myself included.’
Frederick waited until he nodded before carrying on.
‘But enough of this maudlin emotion and confession, for I think we now need to get down to this afternoon’s business and find you some more appropriate clothes to wear.’
Thus the mundane allowed an end to the extraordinary truths of the conversation.
* * *
Nicholas could not remember ever taking this long to dress, but the Challenger valet was both insistent and persuasive and, although he had no clothes of his own to speak of, the man soon conjured up an array of cast-offs that fitted him well.
‘Just a slight tuck here, my lord.’ His grip was firm on the side seam of the jacket. ‘You don’t quite have the girth of Major Challenger. The trousers have been lengthened, but a good steam has taken care of any tell-tale signs of alteration. They give a fine impression of being your own clothes, Lord Bromley. Tailored to perfection if I might say so myself.’
‘Thank you.’ He gave this quietly. It had been years since he had had a servant fuss over him in such a way and it made him feel strangely odd. He had never given those who worked for the Bromley estate much thought before, but now he did. He hoped his uncle had treated them well and that there might be a few familiar faces at the Manor when he went up there on the morrow.
The luxury of London unsettled him and he fought for a touchstone. He wondered if Eleanor Huntingdon might come to Frederick’s soirée with her brother. He would like to see her dressed in finery with her hair arranged to show off the colour of it. He would like to dance with her. He would like to have her near.
Frederick came into the room he had been assigned just as the valet had finished the last stitch and broken off the thread, smoothing down the fabric.
‘A fine job, Masters. The Viscount looks as though he should fit in nicely.’
When the man collected all the assorted spools and left, Fred poured them each some wine in ornate cut-crystal glasses.
‘For fortification,’ he said and raised the tipple. ‘Most of those present tonight are friends and acquaintances, but there are always the certain few outsiders who might want to rock the boat.’
‘Are you warning me, Fred?’
‘You’ve been away a long time and stories have formed around your disappearance that have no bearing on the truth.’
‘For that I am glad.’
‘But a word of advice. If you do not wish to be the continued censure of the gossipmongers perhaps you could think of a reason for your injuries that may be more palatable. An army wound? The sanctity of government violence goes a long way in suppressing criticism, I have always found. The Seminole Wars, perhaps? The time frame would fit.’
‘You have thought about this already?’
When Frederick began to laugh he did, too.
‘The legends that abound about you as the reckless and dissolute Viscount Bromley are also a protection. No one will know quite who you are.’
‘Including me.’ He said the words quietly and finished his drink.
Frederick’s frown was deep. ‘You can’t do this alone any more, Nick. You have to let us all help you.’
‘You are already doing that and I will be fine.’
Chapter Four (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
Eleanor had dressed as carefully as she ever had, her maids watching her with puzzlement on both their faces. Usually she barely cared. Normally if she went out it was only with much chagrin that she suffered even an hour of the business of ‘getting ready’.
Today she had spent most of the afternoon changing her mind from this dress to that one, from a formal hair style to a far less structured one. Even her shoes had been swapped from one pair to the next.
And now with only a few moments before she needed to go downstairs and join her brother and sister-in-law she was still unsure. Was the gold of her gown a little gaudy? Did her hair, set into up-pulled ringlets, look contrived? Was the diamond choker at her throat too much of a statement for a woman of her age?
She looked away from her reflection and breathed in deeply. No more. No other changes. She was exhausted by her uncertainty.
Jacob smiled as he saw her descending the staircase.
‘I have not seen you look quite as beautiful for a very long time, Ellie.’
Rose beside him looked as pleased as her brother did. ‘It is going to be so lovely to have you with us at Frederick and Georgiana’s, Eleanor. I wish you were with us more often in London.’ Her sister-in-law was in blue tonight and her fairness made her look like an angel. Every time Eleanor saw Rose she could understand exactly what her brother had seen in her as a choice of wife. She was kind and quiet, a woman who did not push herself forward, but waited for others to come to her.
With a laugh Eleanor took the offered hand and felt immeasurably more confident, an emotion she would need if she were to be any help to Nicholas Bartlett.
‘Nick has gone on already,’ Jacob said. ‘Frederick had a set of clothes that he needed to see if he fitted and he wanted Nicholas to meet Georgiana before this evening’s function.’
‘I am sure the Viscount will look well in anything he chooses. From all the accounts I have heard from my maid this morning as I was dressing he is a most handsome man.’
Rose’s statement was firm and Eleanor glanced at her. She herself had not seen Nicholas Bartlett in the house all day as he had left in the mid-morning for the Challengers. She hoped he had found a barber at least to shave off his beard.
Her nerves started to make her worried again. If people were rude or worse to him she could not quite think what she would do. Her brother would hardly tolerate such behaviour, of course, but still there was a difference between being accepted for who you were and being gossiped about behind raised fans and turned heads.
‘I hope Lord Bromley will enjoy himself,’ she finally said and left it at that.
It was only a short ride from Chelsea to St James’s Square and the rain and wind had held off enough to allow them a quiet passage into the house. After the death of her brother and father the family had been largely in mourning so it felt good to be able to go out again. The Challenger soirée would have a lot of people who were known to them attending, but it was not as formal as some of the grander balls.
Frederick and Georgiana Challenger were there to greet them after their cloaks, hats and gloves were seen to. Eleanor was, as always, struck anew at just how fine they looked together as they welcomed the newcomers.
‘Oliver was unable to make it tonight, Jake, because Cecilia is not very well. Nick is inside, but the doctor wanted his hand up in a sling so we had to rearrange his shirt and jacket somewhat.’
Another problem, Eleanor thought. A further way to draw attention to his differences. She suddenly wished she had stayed home.
The large downstairs salon of the Challenger town house was completely decked out in yellow, the colour lightening the space and making it seem even bigger. Numerous people milled around the room in groups and at one end an orchestra was tuning up with a Christmas song, ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’. Eleanor had always liked the melody.
‘I thought Frederick said this was to be a small gathering,’ Rose remarked. ‘It seems half the ton is here tonight.’
Eleanor looked around trying to find the figure of Nicholas Bartlett. At six foot two his height should have had him standing a good head above many of the others, but she could not see him.
Perhaps he had cried off and left?
‘There is Nicholas. Over by the pillars.’ Her brother’s voice penetrated her reveries as he pushed through the crowd and once the crush thinned a little she saw the Viscount surrounded by women and men all hanging on to his every word.
Her first true sight of him took her breath away. He looked completely different from yesterday. Menacing, dangerously beautiful, the boy she had known fashioned into the man before her, the harder lines of his face without the full beard suiting him in a way she had not comprehended before.
He was all in black, save for the snowy cravat at his neck, folded simply. His hair was pulled into a severe queue and she could see the sheen of dark brown picked out under the chandeliers above them.
His left hand was fastened into a sling of linen, the small vulnerability suiting him in a way she had not thought would be possible—a warrior who had been into battle and returned triumphant. She could see in his velvet eyes an apartness that left him unmatched. Every man near him looked soft, tame and pliable. Untouched by danger and hardship.
Their party had to squeeze into the space about him and Eleanor noticed the frowns of those women who had hoped for a closer acquaintance as they were ousted back.
‘You have cleaned up well, Nick. I hardly recognise you in the man we saw yesterday.’ Jacob sounded relieved. ‘I would like to introduce you to Rose, my wife. You did not meet her this morning before you left.’
Rose looked tiny compared to the Viscount, his darkness contrasting, too, against her light hair and eyes. Eleanor watched as Nicholas Bartlett brought up her sister-in-law’s hand and kissed the back of it, his gallantry reminiscent of the younger man who had left them all those years before. A slide of anger turned inside Eleanor as he acknowledged her with a mere tip of his head and yet he made a space at his side and she came to stand there, making very sure that she did not touch him.
‘I hope you slept well last night, Lady Eleanor.’ He said this to her as Rose and Jacob were busy in conversation with an older lord they knew well. An allusion to their late-night meeting, she supposed. Unexpectedly she coloured and hated herself for doing so.
‘I did, thank you.’ In truth, she had gained about three hours’ sleep and it probably showed in the darkness under her eyes. He, on the other hand, looked as if he had slept like a baby.
‘Frederick said there would be dancing later in the evening. Might I petition you to save one for me?’
‘I am rather out of practice, my lord.’ She could not keep the surprise from her tone.
‘And you think I wouldn’t be?’
‘I do not know. I have no idea of what sort of life you lived in the Americas.’
At that he sobered.
As the crowd about them jostled slightly Mr Alfred Dromorne and his daughter broke in on their conversation.
‘Bromley. It has been a long time. May I introduce my daughter to you. She is recently out in society. Susan, this is Viscount Bromley.’
Nicholas Bartlett inclined his head at the beautiful girl standing next to her father, though his eyes were far less readable than they had been a second ago. It was as if a shutter had been placed over any true expression and the fingers she could see that were visible in the sling had curled in tension.
The vibrant red head smiled in the way only the very young and very beautiful know how to. All coquetry and cunning. Eleanor felt instantly older and a lot more dowdy than she had even a second before.
‘I am pleased to meet you, Miss Dromorne.’
‘And I you, my lord.’ She brought her fan up and twirled it a few times, the art of flirtation both complex and simple in its execution.
‘You will be going home to Bromworth Manor, no doubt, now that you are back. You might notice some changes to the place.’
Her father had taken up the conversation and his statement produced a flicker of genuine interest in Lord Bromley’s visage. Eleanor saw the eagerness even as he sought to hide it.
‘In what ways do you mean?
‘Your uncle has the run of the estate these days and he has made certain to stamp his authority on to the place. Last time I was there I rather thought that those still serving him were not entirely happy.’
‘Large estates have their problems,’ Nicholas replied, giving the distinct impression that he did not wish to discuss such personal matters with a stranger. Eleanor noticed, too, that the pulse at his throat had quickened markedly.
‘You promised Lord Craybourne that you would be back to talk with him and I see he is free now, Lord Bromley. Perhaps this would be a good time.’
‘It would.’ With a slight bow to the Dromornes he allowed Eleanor to lead the way across the floor, though once they were out of sight she felt his hand on her arm stopping her.
She turned and saw right into his tortured soul, the lack of reserve astonishing.
‘Are you ill, my lord?’
He looked away and swallowed hard. She had the distinct impression that should she leave him here in the middle of the crowded floor he might very well simply fall over.
Knowing the Challengers’ town house as well as she did, she gestured to a room off to one side, glad when he followed her and the door shut behind them.
‘I think you should sit down, Lord Bromley.’
He did that, immediately, and closed his eyes.
‘I have been alone for a very long time. It takes some getting used to, this crush of people.’
‘It was not like this in the Americas?’
‘I kept away from others there.’
His words to her brother in the library last night came back. ‘It is dangerous, Jake. If anything were to happen to you and your family...’
He was trapped in his life as surely as she was.
‘You think you might cause those around you harm? Even here in England?’
At that he opened his eyes and leant back. ‘I know so.’
‘Is it your uncle? Is it his doing?’
‘He has the motivation, but...’
‘You think it is another?’
* * *
For the first time in a long while Nicholas felt his intuition kick in fervently. Eleanor Huntingdon made him alive again in a way no one else did. He barely knew her, but there was something between them that felt right and strong.
‘I have many other enemies. Some I probably don’t even remember.’
‘That sounds dangerous. To not have recall of people who might hurt you, I mean. Is Dromorne one of those enemies?’
‘Perhaps. He is a friend of my uncle, Mr Aaron Bartlett, who now sets himself up in Bromworth Manor with the intention of taking both my title and inheritance.’
‘Why would he introduce his daughter to you, then? He looked as if he wished for you to take the acquaintance with his offspring a lot further.’
‘To hedge his bets, perhaps. A pound on my uncle and another on me. The Bromley assets are substantial.’
‘A gambling man? No true morality in him?’
‘I remember that I owe Dromorne money. No doubt he will be calling upon it as soon as he can.’
There was now a dark cloud of worry in Eleanor’s eyes as he told her this.
‘Could I give you some advice?’ He fashioned the words with care and was pleased when she nodded.
‘You should probably stay well away from me, Lady Eleanor. The man I used to be was not much, but this one is even more...’ Struggling for a word he gave up and left the implication hanging.
‘Perilous?’ Her smile surprised him as did the quick flare of anger. ‘That may very well be true, but you offered me a dance a few moments ago and I shall hold you to your promise. The quadrille is my favourite, Lord Bromley.’
He felt better even looking at her, the gold of her gown picking up the sky blue of her eyes. ‘I shall find you then when I hear the tune struck. And thank you.’ He gazed around the room.
‘My pleasure, but I think I must go now or the others will miss me.’
She had left before he could give her his response and the night dulled with her absence, but he needed the solitude, too, to recoup and recover. He hoped that there were not others here who would pounce on his memory. The medicines Jacob’s physician had given him for his arm were making him feel sick. Sick in body and in mind. This evening was a lot more tiring than he had thought it would be and he was only glad that Eleanor Huntingdon had recognised the desperation in him and found him sanctuary.
He tried in earnest to bring to mind the steps of the quadrille she had mentioned, hoping that he might manage it without tipping both of them over.
The face of his uncle also hovered above him, a man whom he had never liked. Looking back, Nick knew he should have heaved him out of his life when his majority was reached, but he had been too self-destructive to even bother, his days revolving around the fast London set, Vitium et Virtus and gambling.
A mistake, he thought now, looking back. He would see his man of business and his lawyer as soon as he could to find out where he stood with his inheritance. But a day or two away in the quiet English countryside might be just what he needed and the sooner he got rid of his father’s scheming younger brother from influencing any part of his future, the better.
* * *
The hours seemed to have flown by at this soirée of Frederick’s. Nicholas Bartlett had not come near her again, but she had watched him across the other side of the room, ensconced in a group of admirers both female and male.
He looked much recovered, she thought, and the fact that her brother and Frederick Challenger were there beside him probably had something to do with that.
Rose, next to her, saw where she was looking. ‘There is something about Lord Bromley that makes him fascinating, do you not think? He looks both vulnerable and dangerous, a man whose history sits upon him with weight.’
‘Did Jacob tell you of his time in the Americas?’
‘A little. He said the Viscount was always moving to the next place of work and that he had a hard life there. I think people here are watching to find the careless dissolute lord they used to know, for the young girls certainly have their eyes on him. But he does not seem to be rising to any expectation and that is what is causing a quandary. Who is he now seems to be the general question. Did you know him well before he left, Eleanor? Can you see similarities with who he is now?’
Eleanor ignored the first question and answered the second. ‘I think he was a lot less dangerous and more easily swayed perhaps.’
Nicholas Bartlett tipped his head as she said this and looked straight at her, across the distance of the room, across the music and the movement and the chatter and it was as if the tableau of everything faded. Only him. Only her. Only the memory of what had been. Her memory, but not his. She looked away and fidgeted with her reticule, hating the way her fingers shook as she reached for her fan.
‘Do you ever imagine yourself marrying again, Ellie?’ Rose’s voice was soft.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because you are a beautiful woman with much to offer a man.’
‘No.’ The word burst from her very being, the truth of such emotion worrying. Because she did not. If she could not have Nicholas Bartlett to love her again as he had done before then she did not want anyone. Ever.
‘Secrets can be lonely things, Eleanor. If you wish to talk...’
Rose left it there as they both looked across to watch the orchestra tune up for their next round of songs and then the Viscount was right next to her, holding out his hand.
‘You promised me a dance, Lady Eleanor, and I have come to claim it.’
‘I think this one is a waltz, sir,’ she clarified, hearing the tell-tale three-beat music.
‘Good,’ he returned, ‘for I am sure I can remember those steps.’
‘And your injured hand?’ When she looked she saw he had taken off the sling in readiness, only the bandage left, a snowy white against the dark edge of the cuff of his jacket.
‘The doctor assured me that if needs be I could remove the sling without too much harm.’
He had not danced at all that evening and she could see the interest in those around them as he made his way to the floor with her in tow. Her brother was watching, as was Rose and myriad other faces from further afield.
‘One turn about the floor shall not drag you into the mire of who I am, I think. It should be safe.’
His fingers were at her side now, the other injured hand coming carefully on to hers. She could feel his breath in her hair as he counted in the steps and see up close the damage done to his face.
He did not try to hide it from her and she liked that, but the scar was substantial and recent, the reddened edges of it only just knitted.
‘The wife of the owner of the tavern I worked at sewed it up for me.’ He said this when he saw her observing him. ‘She was an accomplished seamstress so I was lucky.’
‘Lucky...’ she echoed his word.
‘Not to die from it. Lucky to have escaped a second blow and still live.’
‘What happened to the man who did this to you?’
When he glanced at her and she saw the darkness in his eyes she knew exactly what had happened to his assailant.
A further difference. Another danger.
‘Scars can be hidden, too, Lord Bromley.’
The upturn of his mouth told her he had heard her whisper even when he did not answer.
‘And rest assured that in a room like this there will be people who have been hurt just as surely as you.’
‘But they have not the luck to dance with the most beautiful woman in the house.’
‘I think your eyesight must have suffered with your injury.’
‘Gold suits you.’
She was quiet.
‘So does silence.’
At that she laughed, because thus far since meeting him again she had voiced her opinion without reserve. He made her talk again. He made her take risks.
He was quickly catching on to the rhythm of the dance and manoeuvred her easily about the room despite the number of others on the floor. She could feel hardness in his body where before there had been softness. He smelt of lemon soap and cleanliness, the lack of any other perfume refreshing.
At five foot six she was quite tall for a woman. With him she felt almost tiny, her head fitting easily into the space beneath his chin. Breathing him in, she allowed him to lead her, closing her eyes for a second just to feel what she once had at the Bromley town house the night before his disappearance. The night Lucy was conceived.
She had sent Lucy away today, back to Millbrook, just so that as a mother she might understand the road she must now travel.
Towards him or away? The quick squeeze of his fingers against hers brought her eyes up to his own, an emotion there she could not interpret.
‘A lack of memory is a hard taskmaster,’ he whispered, ‘because sometimes I imagine...’ He stopped.
‘What? What do you imagine?’
‘That I have danced with you before.’
She looked away and hated the lump that had formed in the back of her throat.
The night lights of the city had glowed through the large sashed windows of his town house as he had taken her into his arms and danced her to his bed.
Please remember, she thought. Please remember and love me. Then Mr Dromorne’s face at the side of the floor came into view, watching with eyes that held no warmth whatsoever and as the music ran down into the final notes Nicholas escorted her back to her brother.
She did not see him again that evening, but knew he had gone into the card room because the whispers of his luck there began to float into the salon.
An hour later when Rose pleaded tiredness, Eleanor was more than grateful to accompany her home.
* * *
Nicholas sat with a whisky in his room and listened to the clock strike the hour of five. The fire in the grate was still ablaze for he had fed it for all the small hours of the early morning with the coal piled near the hearth in a shining copper holder.
Eleanor Huntingdon was asleep somewhere in the house and close. He wished they could talk again. He wished he could see her smile and hear her clever honest words.
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Sophia James
An unexpected Christmas gift…Like all of London society, Lady Eleanor believed Viscount Bromley dead. Now, after six years, he has returned a changed man. Brooding Nicholas Bartlett has no memory of their one night of incredible passion – so how can she tell him he fathered a child…?As Nicholas starts to regain his lost memories, he realises the true reason he feels so drawn to beautiful Eleanor and her young daughter. And with the danger from his past threatening to rear its head, it’s up to Nicholas to protect his newly-discovered family!
An unexpected Christmas gift...
Like all of London society, Lady Eleanor believed Viscount Bromley dead. Now, after six years, he has returned a changed man. Brooding Nicholas Bartlett has no memory of their one night of incredible passion—so how can she tell him he fathered a child?
As Nicholas starts to regain his lost memories, he realizes the true reason he feels so drawn to beautiful Eleanor and her young daughter. And with the danger from his past threatening to rear its head, it’s up to Nicholas to protect his newly discovered family!
Hidden amongst the masked revellers of an underground Regency gentlemen’s club, where decadence, daring and debauchery abound, the four owners of Vitium et Virtus are about to meet their match!
Welcome to…
The Society of Wicked Gentlemen
Read
A Convenient Bride for the Soldier
by Christine Merrill
An Innocent Maid for the Duke
by Ann Lethbridge
A Pregnant Courtesan for the Rake
by Diane Gaston
A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
by Sophia James
All available now!
Author Note (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
I wrote the prologue for this book on a plane between Los Angeles and Melbourne after the Romance Writers of America® 2016 conference, and by the time I arrived home in Auckland I both understood and loved Nicholas Bartlett, the lost Viscount Bromley and one of the owners of the club Vitium et Virtus.
It was my absolute pleasure and privilege to work with Christine Merrill, Ann Lethbridge and Diane Gaston on The Society of Wicked Gentlemen series.
I hope you enjoy this last story, A Secret Consequence for the Viscount, as much as I enjoyed writing it.
A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
Sophia James
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
SOPHIA JAMES lives in Chelsea Bay, on Auckland, New Zealand’s North Shore, with her husband who is an artist. She has a degree in English and History from Auckland University and believes her love of writing was formed by reading Georgette Heyer in the holidays at her grandmother’s house. Sophia enjoys getting feedback at www.Facebook.com/sophiajamesauthor (http://www.Facebook.com/sophiajamesauthor).
Books by Sophia James
Mills & Boon Historical Romance
Knight of Grace
Lady with the Devil’s Scar
Gift-Wrapped Governesses
‘Christmas at Blackhaven Castle’
Ruined by the Reckless Viscount
The Society of Wicked Gentlemen
A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
The Penniless Lords
Marriage Made in Money
Marriage Made in Shame
Marriage Made in Rebellion
Marriage Made in Hope
Men of Danger
Mistletoe Magic
Mistress at Midnight
Scars of Betrayal
The Wellingham Brothers
High Seas to High Society
One Unashamed Night
One Illicit Night
The Dissolute Duke
Visit the Author Profile page
at millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk) for more titles.
This book is dedicated to Linda Fildew, my wonderful and irreplaceable editor, who has been with me right from the start.
Thanks for knowing when to give me a push to try new things.
Contents
Cover (#u3d13f6b5-d013-5a6c-bf5f-80de5155a231)
Back Cover Text (#u495d612d-cc2e-5988-b0fc-8f1f53b6b3e0)
Introduction (#ud9832f2b-57d4-5032-9a50-f9bda049cd79)
Author Note (#u1f7e8a86-4853-56e4-a029-89c32d1cc75f)
Title Page (#u403222cf-fc2c-5979-8a4b-2cd847820f74)
About the Author (#u729ec307-f37d-5d02-a1e5-780bba680c3f)
Dedication (#ubd2f85f2-df13-5a27-9007-565a8e0d49f5)
Prologue (#ua18a4ecf-e7d9-59f3-9919-b6fb7607a28d)
Chapter One (#ue94bcf33-f62d-5440-940b-701d594a1d27)
Chapter Two (#u0cfd6ec9-038a-5ba5-bc8c-93fee012e5bd)
Chapter Three (#u76b828c8-7695-5baa-92ec-00e0870416b6)
Chapter Four (#u5ee90698-bcef-5f90-8510-68910daaa1c6)
Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
James River, Virginia—1818
He was bone-weary and cold and had been for a long time now.
He could feel it in his hands and heart and in the fury wrapped around each intake of breath, fear raw against the sound of the river.
Once he knew he had been different. Such knowledge sent a shaft of pain through him that was worse than anything else imaginable, an elusive certainty drifting on the edge of misunderstanding.
He swore as he lowered his body into the water, closing his eyes against the sting of cold. With the hand that still had feeling in it he grabbed at the rushes and steadied movement. He was here somewhere, the man who had slashed at him with a blade. He could feel his presence, close now, a shadow catching at space between darkness, barely visible. He held no weapon except for his wits, no way of protecting himself save for the years of desperation honed in distance. He couldn’t remember ever feeling safe.
The voice came unexpectedly and close.
‘Nicholas Bartlett? Are you there?’
The sound had him turning his head. For more or for less he knew not which. The name was familiar, its syllables distinct as they ran together into something that made a terrible and utter sense.
He wanted to stop the sudden onslaught of memories, each thread reforming itself into more, building a picture, words that pulled at the spinning void of his life and anchored him back into truth. A truth that lay above comprehension and disbelief.
More words came from the mouth of his stalker, moving before him, as he raised steel under a dull small moon.
‘Vitium et Virtus.’
A prayer or a prophesy? A forecast of all that was to come or the harbinger of that which had been?
‘No.’ His own voice was suddenly certain as he shot out of the water to meet his fate, fury fuelling him. He hardly felt the slice of the knife against the soft bones of his face. He was fearless in his quest for life and as the curve of his assailant’s neck came into his hands he understood a primal power that did away with doubt and gave him back hope. He felt the small breakage of bone and saw surprise in the dark bulging eyeballs under moonlight. The hot breath on the raised skin of his own forearm slowed and cooled as resistance changed into flaccidity. Life lost into death with barely a noise save the splash of a corpse as it was taken by the wide flowing James to sink under the blackness, a moment’s disturbance and then calm, the small ridges slipping into the former patterns of the river.
He sat down on the bank in the wet grass and placed his head between his knees, both temples aching with the movement.
Vitium et Virtus.
Nicholas Bartlett.
He knew the words, knew this life, knew the name imbued into each and every part of him.
Nicholas Henry Stewart Bartlett.
Viscount Bromley.
A crest with a dragon on the dexter side and a horse on the sinister. Both in argent.
An estate in Essex.
Oliver. Frederick. Jacob.
The club of secrets.
Vitium et Virtus.
‘Hell.’ It all came tumbling back without any barriers. Flashes of honour, shame, disorder and excess after so very many years of nothing.
Tears welled, mixed with blood as the loss of who he now was melded against the sorrow of everything forgotten.
The young and dissolute London Lord with the world at his feet and a thousand hours of leisure and ease before him had been replaced by this person he had become, a life formed by years of endurance and hardship.
‘Nicholas Bartlett.’
He turned the name on his tongue and said it quietly into the night so he might hear it truly. The tinge of the Americas stretched long over the vowels in a cadence at odds with his English roots, though when he repeated it again he heard only the sorrow.
He searched back to the last memories held of that time, but could just think of being at Bromworth Manor in Essex with his uncle. Arguing yet again. After that there was nothing. He could not remember returning to London or getting on a ship to the Americas. He recalled pain somewhere and the vague sense of water. Perhaps he had been picked up by a boat, a stranger without memory and shanghaied aboard?
He knew he would not have disappeared willingly though his gambling debts had been rising as he had been drawn into the seedy halls of London where cheating was rife. There had been threats to pay up or else, but he had by and large managed to do so. His friends had been there to help him through the worst of the demands and he also had the club in Mayfair. A home. A family. A place that felt like his. He loved Jacob Huntingdon, Frederick Challenger and Oliver Gregory like the brothers he’d never had.
Shaking fingers touched the ache on his cheek near his right eye and came away with the sticky redness of oozing blood.
The eye felt strange and unfocused. The night was so dark he wondered if he had gone blind in that eye, a last gift from his pursuer. He shut the other one and tried to find an image, holding his fingers up against what little light there was on the water, and was relieved to see a blurry outline.
He did not feel up to walking back yet through the reeds and the river path to the shade of the cottonwoods. He didn’t want others to see him like this and he needed to make certain there were not more who would be trying to hurt him. A tiredness swept over everything, a grief at the loss of a life at his own hands. He had not killed before and the quickness of fear was now replaced by an ennui of guilt.
How could he ever fit in again? How could he be the lord he was supposed to be after this? Had his assailant held a family close? Had he been only doing a job he was sent to complete? The grey shadows in which he’d lived the last six years were things familiar. The sludgy silhouette of them, the blacks and whites of shining morality left as other men’s choices but not available to him. Twice before in America others had tried to kill him; different men in the pay of a shadowy enemy and the mastermind at pulling the strings.
* * *
He had used so many different names as he moved on for ever, away from discovery, fleeing relationships. In the end he only brought people harm and danger. If they got to know him they were always at risk and so he had not allowed such closeness. Twice before he had felt his stalkers near.
Emily. The young daughter of the kindly reverend and his wife who had taken him in had been pushed off a cliff top. The girl had survived by clinging to the undergrowth, but he had understood that after that for him there could never be intimacy with anyone.
New towns, different jobs and a series of women with favours for sale had followed. He did not seek out decent company again, but dwelt in the underworld of secrets, squalor and shallow rapport. He understood the people who were as brutalised and damaged as himself and there was safety in the shifting unsettled disconnection of outsiders.
Peter Kingston. His name now here in the river town of Richmond, the capital of the Colony and Dominion of Virginia. He could disappear tomorrow and nobody would miss him, the man employed at the tavern of Shockoe Bottom who seldom spoke and hardly ever smiled. Stranger. Foreigner. Outsider. Murderer now. Another name added to all the ones he had gathered. A further disengagement. A shadow who had walked through the Americas with barely a footprint. Until tonight. Until now. Until his hands had fastened around the throat of his pursuer and broken the life from him.
He leant over and was neatly sick into the green heart of some poison ivy.
Leaves of three, let them be.
The ditty came of its own accord as he wiped his mouth with the frayed edge of his jacket. Had he been truly regretful he might have laid his hand across the plant and allowed its penance. As it was he merely frowned at such an idea and stood.
He would gather his few possessions and find a ship to England. Frederick, Oliver and Jacob would help him to make sense of things and then he would leave London to retire to the country in Essex. Alone. It was the only way he could see before him.
As he looked back a fog bank slid by on the flat black current of the James.
Chapter One (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
London—December 26th, 1818
It was one day past Christmas.
That thought made Nicolas smile. He had forgotten the celebration for so long in the Americas that the presence of it here in London was somehow comforting. A continued and familiar tradition, a belief that transcended all difficulty and promised hope for the likes of himself? Or would it tender despair? He could not imagine any church exonerating his sins should he be foolish enough to confess them.
The age-old music of carols could be heard as he left the narrow service alley behind the club of Vitium et Virtus in Mayfair and came around to the front door. Here the only sound was that of laughter and frivolity, a card game underway, he guessed, in the downstairs salon. High stakes and well funded. The few coins he had left in his own pocket felt paltry and he wondered for the millionth time whether he should have come at all.
The late afternoon lengthened the shadows. He could slip away still, undetected, and make his way north. Boxing Day kept most people at home enjoying the company of family. There would be few around to note his progress.
He swallowed as he looked up and saw the sky was stained in red. Blood red. Guilt red. A celestial nod to his culpability or a pardon written in colour?
Digging into his pocket, he found a silver shilling.
‘Heads I stay and tails I go.’ It was all he could think of at this moment, a choice that was arbitrary and random. The coin turned and as it came down into his opened palm the face of George the Third was easily visible. The thought crossed his mind that had it been tails he would have tried for the best of three.
His knuckles were against the main door before he knew it, the polished black lacquer of the portal attesting to great care and attention and a certain understated wealth.
When it opened a big man he did not know stood there, dressed in the clothes of a footman, but with the visage of one who knew his intrinsic worth.
‘Can I help you, sir?’
Nicholas could feel the condescension. His clothes from the long voyage were dirty and they had not been well looked after. His beard was full and his hair uncut. He was glad there was no looking glass inside the door to reflect his image over and over again.
‘Are any of the lords who own this place present inside this evening?’
He tried to round his vowels and sound at least halfway convincing. It would not take much for the man to bid those who guarded the front door to throw him out. He knew there was desperation in his eyes.
‘They are, sir.’
‘Could you show me through to them?’
‘Indeed, sir. But may I take your hat and coat first and could you give me your name?’
‘Bromley. They will know me.’
‘If you would just wait here, sir.’ The footman snagged Nick’s attire across a series of wooden pegs carved into the shape of a man’s sexual parts inside the front door. The sheer overtness of the furnishings shocked him now, where once it had not.
A further confusion. Another way in which he had changed. He swallowed and as dryness filled his mouth he wished he’d thought to bring his brandy flask.
Then there was the sound of chairs scraping against the floor and the rush of feet, a door flung back against its hinges and three faces he knew like his own before him. Astonished. Disbelieving.
‘Nicholas?’ It was Jacob who came forward first just as he knew it would be. Rakish and handsome, there had always been an undercurrent of kindness within him, a care for the underdog, a certainty of faith.
Oliver and Frederick followed him, each one as bewildered as the next.
‘You’ve been gone for more than six damn years...’ It was Oliver who said this, the flush of emotion visible across the light brown of his skin.
‘And to turn up like this without any correspondence? Why would you not let us know where you were or how you fared at least?’ Fred’s voice cracked as his glance took in Nick’s cheek and the bandage on his left hand holding the deep wound safe from further damage.
Twenty-five days at sea had not helped the healing. It ached so much he had taken to cradling it across his body, easing the pain and heat. He released it now and let it hang at his side, taking hope from the bare emotion of his friends even as his fingers throbbed in protest.
‘Thank the Lord you are returned.’ Oliver stepped towards him and wrapped his arms around all the damaged parts of his body. It had been such a very long time since someone had touched him like this that he stiffened. Then Fred was there and Jake, enveloping him so tight in an embrace he hardly knew where one of them stopped and another one started.
Safety. For the first time in years Nicholas took a breath that was not forced. Yet despite this, he himself reached out to none of them. Not yet. Not till it was over. Protecting each of them from harm was the only thing he now had left to offer.
He should not have come. He should not have been so selfish. He should have listened to his inner voice and stayed away until he knew where the danger had come from. But friendship held its own beacons and the hope of it had led him here, hurrying across the seas.
‘This unexpected reunion calls for a celebration.’ Fred spoke as he hauled Nicholas back into the private drawing room at the end of the corridor, the others following. A table set up for poker had been dismantled in the rush of their exit, the cards fallen and the chips scattered. Just that fact warmed him and when Oliver chose an unopened bottle from a cabinet in the corner and poured them each a drink, Nick took it gratefully.
He waited till the others filled their glasses and raised his own.
‘To friendship,’ he said simply.
‘To the future,’ Jake added.
‘May the truth of what has happened to you, Nicholas, hold us together,’ Fred’s words were serious and when Oliver smiled the warmth in his green eyes was overlaid by question.
The cognac was smooth, creamy and strong and unlike any home-brewed liquor Nick had become so adept at dispensing in the cheap bars of the east coast of the Americas. The kick in it took his breath away. The flavour of his youth, he thought, unappreciated and imbibed in copious amounts. Today he savoured it and let it slide off the back of his tongue.
When Jacob motioned to the others to sit Nick took his place at the head of the table. This was where he had always sat, his initials carved into the dark mahogany of the chair. The first finger of his right hand ran across the marking, the ridges beneath tracing his past.
‘We never erased anything of you, Nicholas. We always believed that you would be back. But why so long? Why leave it for so many years before returning?’ Jacob voiced just what he imagined the others were thinking.
‘I had amnesia. I could not remember who I was or where I had been. My memory only began to function again in the Americas five weeks ago after encountering a man who wanted me dead.’
‘He nearly succeeded by the looks of it.’
‘Nearly, but not quite. He came off worse.’
‘You killed him.’ The soldier in Fred asked this question and there was no room in his answer for lies.
‘I did.’
‘We found blood in the alley behind Vitium et Virtus the morning after you disappeared.’ Jacob stood at that and walked over to the mantel to dig into a gilded box. ‘This was found, too.’
His signet ring surprised him. He had always worn it, but had forgotten that he had. The burnished gold crest caught at the light above. Servire Populo. To serve the people. The irony in such a motto had been humorous to him once given his youthful overarching ability to only serve himself. Reaching out, he took the piece between his fingers, wincing at the dirt under his nails and the scars across his knuckles. He swallowed back the lump that was growing in his throat.
His old life offered back with such an easy grace.
‘I can’t remember what happened in the alley.’
‘What was the last thing you remember then? Before you disappeared?’
‘Arguing at Bromworth Manor with my uncle. It was hot and I was damnably drunk. It was my birthday, the fifteenth of August.’
‘You disappeared the next Saturday night then, a week later. That much at least we have established.’ Fred gave this information.
‘Did you know that your uncle has taken over the use of the Bromley title?’ Oliver leant back against the leather in his chair and raised his feet up on an engraved ottoman, his stance belying the tension in his voice. ‘He wants you declared dead legally, given the number of years you have been missing. He has begun the procedure.’
‘The bastard has the temerity to call himself your protector,’ Jacob snarled, ‘when all he wants is your inheritance and your estates.’
Nicholas took in the information with numbed indifference. Aaron Bartlett had never been easy but, as his late father’s only brother, he’d had the credentials to take over the guardianship of an eight-year-old orphan. Nicholas remembered the day his uncle had walked into Bromworth Manor a week after his parents’ death, both avarice and greed in his eyes.
‘He’s a charlatan and everyone knows it and I for one would love to be there when you throw him lock, stock and barrel out of your ancestral home.’ As Oliver said this the others nodded. ‘Do you think he had any part in your disappearance?’
Nicholas had wondered this himself, but without memory or proof he had no basis on which to found an opinion. Shrugging his shoulders, he finished the last of his cognac and was pleased when Jacob refilled the glass again.
He held the signet ring tight in his right hand, a small token of who he was and of what he had been. He did not want to place it on his finger again just yet because the wearing of it implied a different role and one he didn’t feel up to trying to fill. He had walked under many names in the Americas, but the shadow of his persona here was as foreign to him now as those other identities he had adopted.
Jacob and Fred each wore a wedding ring. That thought shocked him out of complacency and for the first time he asked his own question.
‘You are married?’
The smiles were broad and genuine, but it was Jacob who answered first.
‘You have been gone a long time, Nicholas, and dissoluteness takes some effort in maintaining. There comes a day when you look elsewhere for real happiness and each of us has found that. Oliver may well be wed soon, too.’
‘Then I am glad for it.’
And he was, he thought with relief. He was pleased for their newfound families, pleased that they had managed to move forward even if he had not. ‘Can I meet them? Your women?’
‘Tomorrow night.’ Fred said. ‘We have a function at my town house with all the trimmings and a guest list of about eighty. You look as though you could do with a careful introduction, Nick, and such a number would not be too daunting for a first foray back into English society.’
‘You will need the services of a barber and a physician before others see you. Fred is about your size so with a tailor to iron out the differences you could get away with wearing his clothes.’ Jacob watched him carefully, his blue eyes sharp on detail. When his glance ran over his face Nick knew he would have to say something, his good hand going up to the ruined cheek as though he might hide it a little.
‘If someone still wishes me dead, perhaps it would be better not to involve any of you in this. I should not want...’
Fred shook his head. ‘We are involved already as your friends. There is no way you could stop any of us helping you.’
Oliver placed his hand on the table palm up in the way they had since their very first meeting and the others laid theirs on top. It took only a second’s hesitation before he found his own above theirs joined in the flesh and in promise.
‘In Vitium et Virtus.’ They all said the words together. In Vice and Virtue. The motto seemed more appropriate at this second than it ever had before.
‘We should retire to my town house for a drink. There is more of this cognac there and the occasion calls for further celebration. You can stay with me for as long as you need to, Nick, for I will have a room readied for you.’
Jacob’s invitation was tempting. ‘The offer is a kind one, but I’m reluctant to place you in danger.’ He needed to say this to allow Jacob the chance of refusal at least.
‘I think I can take care of myself and my family. Let’s just worry about getting to the bottom of this mystery, to help you recover the final bits of memory you seem to have lost. If you can start to remember the faces of your assailants in the alley that may lead us to the perpetrator.’
‘How does amnesia work, anyway?’ Oliver asked this question and Fred answered.
‘In the army many people lost their memories for the short term. A day or two at the most due to trauma, though I knew of a few chaps who never recovered theirs at all.’
‘I don’t think Nick wants to hear about those ones, Fred.’ When Jacob said this they all laughed. ‘At least he remembers us and the club.’
‘It would be hard to forget.’ Nicholas gestured to the excess and the luxury. ‘But it is the friendships I recall the most.’ His voice cracked on the last words and he swallowed away the emotion. He was not here for pity or sympathy. He knew he looked half the man who had left England, with his filthiness and his wounds but it was the hidden hurts that worried him the most. Could he ever trust anyone again? Was he doomed for ever to hold himself apart from others, all the shadows within him cutting him off from true intimacy?
He could see in each of his friends’ eyes that they found him altered, more brittle. But the lord who had cared not a whit for social convention was long gone, too, that youth of reckless pleasure seeking debauchery and high-stakes gambling. If he met a younger version of himself now he doubted he would even like him very much.
The uncertainty in him built. He did not respect his past nor his present and his future looked less rosy than he imagined it might have on returning to England. Each of his friends had a woman now, a family, a place to live and be. His own loneliness felt more acute given the pathway they had taken. He had missed his direction and even the thought of confronting his guardian in the large and dusty halls of Bromworth Manor had become less appealing than it had been on the boat over.
Did he want it all back, the responsibility and the problems? Did he need to be a viscount? Such a title would confine him once again to society ways and manners, things which now seemed pointless and absurd.
Even the club had lost its sheen, the dubious morality of vice and pleasure outdated and petty. The overt sexuality disturbed him. From where he sat he could see a dozen or more statues of women in various stages of undress and sensual arousal. The paintings of couplings on the wall were more brazen than he could ever remember, more distasteful.
In America he had seen the effects of prostitution on boys, girls and women in a way he had never noticed here, the thrill of the fantasy and daring dimmed under the reality. For every coin spent to purchase a dream for someone there was a nightmare hidden beneath for another.
‘You seem quiet, Nicholas? Are you well?’ Jacob had leant over to touch his arm and the unexpected contact made him jump and pull away. He knew they had all noticed such a reaction and struggled to hide his fury.
Everything was wrong. He was wrong to come and expect it all to have been just as it was. The headache he had been afflicted with ever since his recovery of memory chose that moment to develop into a migraine, his sight jumping between the faces of his friends and cutting them into small jagged prisms of distortion.
He wished he could just lie down here on the floor on an Aubusson rug that was thick and clean and close his eyes. He wished for darkness and silence. He hated himself as he began to shake violently and was thankful when Oliver crossed the room having found a woollen blanket, tucking it in gently around his shoulders.
Chapter Two (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
Lady Eleanor Huntingdon kissed her five-year-old sleeping daughter on the forehead before tiptoeing out of the bedroom.
Lucy was the very centre of her life, the shining star of a love and happiness that she had never expected to find again after...
‘No’. She said the word firmly. She would not think of him. Not tonight when her world was soft and warm and she had a new book on the flowers of England to read from Lackington’s. Tonight she would simply relax and enjoy.
Her brother Jacob was downstairs chatting to someone in his library and Rose, his wife, had retired a good half an hour ago, pleading exhaustion after a particularly frantic day.
Her own day had been busy, too, with all the celebrations, guilt and sorrow eating into her reserves as yet another Christmas went by without any sign of Lucy’s father.
‘No.’ She said it again this time even more firmly. She would not dwell on the past for the next few hours because the despair and wretchedness of the memory always left her with a headache. Tonight she would dream of him, she knew she would, for his face was reflected in the shape of her daughter’s and this evening the resemblance had been even more apparent than usual.
She sat on the damask sofa in the small salon attached to her room and opened her book. She had already poured herself a glass of wine and had a slice of the apple pie the cook had made that night for dinner beside it. Everything she needed right there. Outside it was cold, the first snows of winter on the ground. Inside a fire roared in the hearth, the sound of it comforting.
She seldom came to the city, but she had journeyed down to be with her family in the autumn and had decided to stay for the Christmas celebrations, the food and the decorations—things that Lucy needed in her life. She would leave tomorrow with her daughter for Millbrook House, the ancestral estate of the Westmoor dukedom in Middlesex. Her home now. The place she loved the most in all the world.
Opening her book, she began to read about the new varieties of roses, a plant she enjoyed and grew there in the sheltered courtyard gardens. She could hear her brother’s voice from the downstairs library more distinctly now. He must have opened the door that led into the passageway and his quiet burr filled the distance.
She stopped reading and looked up, tilting her head against the silence. The other voice sounded vaguely familiar, but she could not quite place its tone. It was not Frederick Challenger or Oliver Gregory, she knew that, but there was a familiarity there that was surprising. The click of a door shutting banished any sound back into the faraway distance, but still she felt anxious.
She was missing something. Something important. Placing the book on her small table, she stood and picked up the glass of wine, walking to the window and pulling back the curtains to look out over the roadway.
No stranger’s carriage stood before the house so perhaps the newcomer had come home in her brother’s conveyance from Mayfair, for she knew Jacob had been to his club.
Her eyes strayed to the clock. It was well after ten. Still early enough in London terms for an outing, but late for a private visitor on a cold and rainy evening. She stopped herself from instructing her maid to go down and enquire as to the name of the caller. This hesitancy also worried her for usually she would have no such qualms in doing such a thing.
A tremor of concern passed through her body, making her hands shake. She was twenty-four years old and the last six difficult years had fashioned such strength and independence that she now had no time for the timidity she was consumed with. If she was worried she needed to go downstairs herself and understand just where her anxieties lay.
But still she did not move as she finished her wine in a long and single swallow and poured herself another.
There was danger afoot for both herself and Lucy.
That horrible thought made her swear out loud, something she most rarely did. Cursing again under her breath, she took a decent swallow of the next glass of wine and then placed it on the mantel. The fire beneath burnt hot. She could see the red sparks of flame against the back of the chimney flaring into life and then dying out.
Soldiers.
Ralph, Jacob and herself had played games in winter with them for all the young years of their life. Her hand went to her mouth to try to contain the grief her oldest brother’s death had left her with. With reverence she recited the same prayer she always did when she thought of him.
‘And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds...’
It was a snippet from one of the verses of Thessalonians, but the image of her and her brothers rising whole into the sky was a lovely one. Lucy would be there, of course, and Rose and Grandmama, as well, and all the other people that she loved.
She was not particularly religious, but she did believe in something—in God, she supposed, and Jesus and the Holy Family with their goodness. How else could she have got through her trials otherwise?
She was sick of her thoughts tonight, fed up with their constant return to him.
That damn voice was still there in her mind, too, changing itself into the tones of the man she had loved above all else and then lost.
The hidden name. The unuttered father. Although she knew Jacob suspected she had told their father, she had never told anyone at all exactly what had happened to her, because sometimes she could barely understand it herself.
For a moment she breathed in deeply to try to stop the tears that were pooling in her eyes. She would not cry, not tonight with a fire, a good book, some apple pie and French wine.
Her life had taken on some sort of pattern that felt right and she loved her daughter with all her heart.
The door downstairs was ajar again and the voices came more clearly than they had before. Her brother sounded perturbed, angry even, and she stood still to listen, opening her own door so that the words would be formed with more precision.
‘You cannot possibly think that we will not help you. All of us. There is no damn way in the world that I will let you go and fight this by yourself.’
‘But it is dangerous, Jake. If anything were to happen to you and your family...’
The room began to spin around Eleanor, in a terrifying and dizzying spiral. There was no up and down, only the vortex of a weightless imbalance pulling at her throat and her heart and her soul.
Nicholas Bartlett. It was his voice, lost for all these years. To her and to Lucy. To Jacob and Frederick and Oliver. Why was he down there?
He had not come to see her? He had not beaten down her door in the rush of reunion? He had not called her name from the bottom of the stairs again and again as he had stormed up to find her before taking her into his arms and kissing her as he had done once? Relentlessly. Passionately. Without thought for anyone or anything.
He had sat with her brother discussing his own needs for all the evening. Quietly. Civilly.
Perhaps he did not know she was here, but even that implied a lack of enquiring on his behalf. The man she remembered would have asked her brother immediately as to her whereabouts and moved heaven and earth to find her.
She nodded her head in order to underline such a truth.
Her own heart was beating so fast and strong she could see the motion of it beneath the thick woollen bodice of her blue-wool gown. Eleanor wondered if she might simply perish with the shock of it before she ever saw him.
Sitting down, she took a deep breath, placing her head in her hands and closing her eyes.
She needed to calm herself. This was the moment she had dreamed about for years and years and it was not supposed to be anything like this. She should be running down the stairs calling his name, joy in her voice and delight in her eyes.
Instead she stood and found her white wrap to wind it tightly about her shoulders because, whether she wanted to admit it or not, there had been a hesitancy and a withdrawal between them on the last night they had been together.
He’d seen her off, of course, in his carriage, but he had not acted then like a man who was desperate for her company.
‘Thank you, Eleanor.’ He had said that as he’d moved back and away from the kiss she had tried to give him, as if relieved for the space, his glance sliding to the ground.
He had not even stayed to watch her as the conveyance had departed, the emptiness reflected in her own feelings of dread.
So now, here, six years later she could not quite fathom where such an absence left her. What if she went downstairs now and saw this thought exactly on his face? Would her heart break again? Could she even withstand it?
She had to see him. She had to find in his velvet-brown eyes the truth between them. There was a mistake, a misunderstanding, a wrongness she could not quite identify.
Her feet were on the stairs before she knew it, hurrying down. A short corridor and then the library, the door closed against her. Without hesitation she pushed the portal open and strode through.
Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, was sitting on the wing chair by the fire and he looked nothing like how she remembered him.
His clothes were dirty, his hair unshaped, but it was the long curling scar that ran from one corner of his eye almost to his mouth that she saw first.
Ruined.
His beautiful handsome face had been sliced in half.
‘Eleanor.’ Her brother had risen and there was delight in his expression. ‘Nicholas has been returned to us safely from all his years abroad in the Americas. He will be staying here at our town house for a time.’
‘The Americas...?’ She could only stand and stare, for although Nicholas Bartlett had also risen he made no effort at all to cross the floor to greet her. Rather he stood there with his brandy held by a hand that was dressed with a dirty bandage and merely tipped his head.
In formal acknowledgement. Like a stranger might do or an acquaintance. His cheeks were flushed, the eyes so much harder than she remembered them being and his countenance brittle somehow, all sureness gone.
For a second she could not quite think what to say.
‘It has been a long time.’ Foolish words. Words that might be construed as hanging her heart on her sleeve?
He nodded and the thought of his extreme weariness hit her next. Lifting her hand to her heart, she stayed quiet.
‘Six years,’ he returned as if she had not been counting, as though he needed to give her the time precisely because the duration had been lost in the interim.
Six years, seventeen weeks and six days. She knew the time almost to the very second.
‘Indeed, my lord.’ She swallowed then and saw her brother looking at her, puzzlement across his face, for the hard anger in her voice had been distinct.
‘You welcome my best friend back only with distant words, Eleanor, when you seemed most distraught at his disappearance?’
God, she would have to touch him. She would have to put her arms around his body and pretend he was nothing and nobody. Just her brother’s friend. The very thought of that made her swallow.
He had not moved at all from his place by the fire and he had not put his glass down either. Stay away, such actions said. Stay on your side of the room and I shall stay on mine.
‘I am glad to see you, Lord Bromley. I am glad that you are safe and well.’
His smile floored her, the deep dimple in his un-ruined cheek so very known.
‘Thank you, Lady Eleanor.’ He held up his injured hand. ‘Altered somewhat, but still alive.’
The manner of his address made her sway and she might have fallen had she not steadied herself on the back rest of the nearby sofa. His dark brown hair was lank and loose, the sheen she remembered there gone.
‘I heard you had been married to a lord in Scotland and now have a child. Your brother spoke of it. How old is your daughter?’
Terror reached out and gripped her, winding its claws into the danger of an answer.
Without hesitation she moved slightly and knocked her brother’s full glass of red wine from the table upon which it sat. The liquid spilled on to the cream carpet beneath, staining the wool like blood. The glass shattered into a thousand splinters as it bounced further against the parquet flooring.
Such an action broke all thought of answering Nicholas Bartlett’s question as her brother leapt forward.
‘Ellie, stay back or you will cut yourself.’
* * *
Ellie? The name seared into some part of Nicholas’s mind like a living flame. He knew this name well, but how could that be?
He shook his head and looked away. He knew Jacob’s sister only slightly. She had been so much younger than her brother when he was here last, a green girl recently introduced into society. But she had always been attractive.
Now she was a beauty, her dark hair pulled back in a style so severe it only enhanced the shape of her face and the vivid blueness of her eyes. Eyes that cut through him in a bruised anger. He knew she had spilt the wine on purpose for he had spent enough years with duplicity to know the difference between intention and accident.
He’d asked of the age of her daughter? Was there something wrong with the child, some problem that made the answer untenable to her?
Jacob looked as puzzled as he probably did, the wine soaking into his carpet with all the appearance of never being able to be removed.
A permanent stain.
He saw Eleanor had sliced her finger in her attempt at retrieving the long stem of crystal that had once been attached to the shattered bowl. He wished she had left it for the maid who was now bustling around her feet sweeping the fragments into a metal holder.
‘I need to go and see to my hand.’ Eleanor’s words came with a breathless relief, the red trail of blood sliding down her middle finger as she held it in the air. ‘Please excuse me.’
She looked at neither of them as she scurried away.
When she was gone and the maid had departed, too, Jacob’s frown deepened. ‘Eleanor has been sad since the death of her husband. Widowhood weighs heavily upon her.’
‘How did her husband die?’
‘Badly.’ The same flush of complicity he had seen on his sister’s visage covered Jacob’s face.
Since he had been gone the Huntingdon family had suffered many tragedies. Jacob had told him of the loss of Ralph, the oldest brother and heir, and his father in a carriage accident. In the telling of it Nicholas had gained the distinct impression that Jacob blamed himself somehow for their loss.
His friends had their demons, too. That thought softened his own sense of dislocation. The hedonistic decadence of the club had not been all encompassing. Real life had a way of grabbing one by the throat and strangling the air out of hope. Perhaps no one reached their thirties without some sort of a loss? A rite of passage, a way of growth? A bitter truth of life?
He wished Eleanor Huntingdon might have stayed and talked longer. He wished she might have come forward and welcomed him back in the way her brother had directed. With touch.
* * *
She reached her room and threw herself upon her bed, face buried in her pillow as she screamed out her grief. Six years of sorrow and loss and hope and love. For nothing.
Six years of waiting for the moment Nicholas Bartlett might return with all sorts of plausible explanations as to why he’d been away for so very long and how he had fought hard to be back at her side again, his heart laid at her feet.
The truth of tonight had a sharper edge altogether. Was he just another rake who had simply made a conquest of a young girl with foolishness in her heart? She had offered him exactly what it was he sought—the use of her body for a heady sensual interlude, a brief flirtation that had meant the world to her. Had it meant nothing at all to him?
‘I. Hate. Him.’
He had looked at her like a stranger might, no inkling as to what had passed between them in his bedroom at the Bromley town house, when he had whispered things into her ear that made her turn naked into the warmth of him and allow him everything.
Swallowing hard, she thought she might be sick.
Lucy might never have the promise of a father now, a papa who would fold her in his arms and tell her she meant the world to him and that he would always protect her.
The family she’d imagined to have for years was gone, burst in the bubble of just one look from his velvet-brown eyes and his complete indifference. And the worst thing of all was that she would have to see him again and again both here in the house and at any social occasion because he was her only brother’s best friend.
That thought had her sitting and swiping angrily at her eyes.
She would not waste her tears. She would confront him and tell him that to her it was as if he was dead and that she wished for no more discourse between them.
Then she would leave London for Millbrook and stay there till the hurt began to soften and the fury loosened its hold.
She would survive this. She had to for Lucy’s sake. She had seen other women made foolish by the loss of love and dreams and simply throw their lives away. But not her. She was strong and resolute.
Taking in a shaky breath, she walked over to her writing desk and drew out paper. She would ask to meet him tonight in the summer house in the garden, a place they had met once before in their few heady days of courtship.
She would not be kind and filter out any of the ‘what had been’. She would throw his disloyalty in his face and make him understand that such a betrayal was as loathsome to her as it was hurtful. No. Not that word. She did not wish for Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, to know in any way that he had entirely broken her heart.
Chapter Three (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
He was exhausted. His migraine had dulled to a constant headache and all he wanted to do was to sleep.
Tomorrow he would clean himself up. He would have his hair cut, his beard shaved and find some clothes that were not torn and dirty. He would also see a doctor about his hand because it felt hot and throbbing and he was sure an inflammation had set in. But for now...sleep, and the bed in the chamber Jacob had given him on the second floor looked large and inviting.
A sheet of paper placed carefully on the pillow caught his attention and he walked across to lift it up.
Meet me at the summer house as the clock strikes one. It is important.
Eleanor Huntingdon
Surprise floored him. Why would she send him this? Even his own dubious moral code knew the danger in such a meeting.
Her writing was precise and evenly sloped, and she had not used her married surname. He could smell a perfume on the paper that made him bring the sheet to his nose and breath in. Violets.
A mantel clock above the fireplace told him it was already fifteen minutes before the hour she had stated. Pulling his coat from the one bag he had brought as luggage from the Americas, he let himself quietly out of the room.
* * *
Ten minutes later he saw her coming through the drifts of dirty snow, a small figure wrapped in a thick shawl that fell almost to her knees. The moon was out and the wind had dropped and in the silence all about it was as if they were the only two people left in the world.
Her face was flushed from cold as she came in, shutting the glass door behind her. In here the chill was lessened, whether from the abundance of green plant life or just good building practice, he knew not which. When she spoke though he could see a cloud of mist after each word.
‘Thank you for coming.’
‘You thought I would not?’
She ignored that and rushed on. ‘I was more than surprised to see you tonight. I don’t know why you would wish for all those years of silence and no contact whatsoever, but—’
‘It was not intentional, Lady Eleanor. My memory was lost.’
Her eyes widened at this truth and she swallowed, hard.
‘I must have been hit over the head, as there was a sizeable lump there for a good time afterwards. As a result of the injury my memory was compromised.’
She now looked plainly shocked. ‘How much of it exactly? How much did you lose?’
‘Everything that happened to me before I disappeared was gone for many years. A month ago I retrieved most of my history but still...there are patches.’
‘Patches?’
‘The week before my disappearance and a few days after have gone entirely. I cannot seem to remember any of it.’
She turned at that, away from the moonlight so that all her face was in shadow. She seemed slighter than she had done a few hours earlier. Her hands trembled as she caught them together before her.
‘Everything?’
‘I am hoping it will come back, but...’ He stopped, because he could not know if this was a permanent state or a temporary one.
‘How was your cheek scarred?’
‘Someone wants me dead. They have tried three times to kill me now and I doubt that will cease until I identify the perpetrators.’
‘Why? Why should you be such a target?’
‘I have lived in the shadows for a long time, even before I left England, and have any number of enemies. Some I can identify, but others I can’t.’
‘A lonely place to be in.’
‘And a dangerous one.’
‘You are different now, Lord Bromley.’ She gave him those words quietly. ‘More distant. A harder man. Almost unrecognisable.’
He laughed, the sound discordant, but here in the night there was a sense of honesty he had not felt in a long, long time. Even his friends had tiptoed around his new reality and tried to find the similarities with what had been before. Lady Eleanor did not attempt to be diplomatic at all as she had asked of his cheek and his circumstances and there was freedom in such truth.
He felt a pull towards her that was stronger than anything he had ever known before and stiffened, cursing beneath his breath. She was Jacob’s younger sister and he could offer her nothing. He needed to be careful.
‘I am less whole, I think.’ His good hand gestured at his face. ‘Less trusting.’
‘Like me,’ she returned in a whisper. ‘Just the same.’
And when her blue eyes met his, he saw the tears that streamed down her cheeks, sorrow, anger and grief written all over her face.
He touched her then. He took her hand into his own to try to give the coldness some warmth. A small hand with bitten-down nails. There was a ring on the third finger, encrusted diamonds in gold.
‘Was he a good man, your husband?’
‘I thought so.’
‘Then I am sorry for it.’
At that she snatched her fingers from his grasp and turned. She was gone before he could say another word, a shadow against the hedgerows, small and alone.
Why had she asked him here? What had she said that could not have been discussed in the breakfast salon in the morning? Why had she risked such a meeting in the very dead of night just to ask of his health?
Nothing made any sense.
* * *
Everything was now dangerous.
Nicholas being here, the desperate people who were chasing him, the new man he had become at the expense of the one he had been.
She barely recognised him inside or out. He looked different and he sounded different. Bigger. More menacing. Distant. And yet...when he had taken her hand into his she had felt the giddy rush of want and desire.
‘Nicholas.’ She whispered his name into the night as she sat by the fire.
‘Amnesia.’ She breathed the word quietly, hating the sound of it.
Lucy had been her priority for all the years of their apartness. She had risked her social standing, her family’s acceptance and her future for her daughter and if there was even a slight chance that Nicholas could place her in danger then Eleanor was not prepared to take it.
He had said the perpetrators had attacked him three times already and had looked as though he expected a fourth or a fifth or a sixth. What was it she had heard him say to her brother just a few hours ago as she had over-listened to their conversation in the library?
‘But it is dangerous, Jake. If anything were to happen to you or your family...’
If she told him the truth about that week before he disappeared, would he want to be back in their lives? Did she want to risk telling him of their closeness, knowing so little about him? He was a stranger to her now, so perhaps she should wait to discover what kind of man he was before revealing a secret so huge it would change all their lives for ever.
These thoughts tumbled around and around in her mind, going this way and that. If he had just looked at her for a second as he used to, she knew she would have capitulated and let him know everything. But this new Nicholas was altered and aloof, the indifference in his eyes crushing.
Lucy was now her priority. As a mother she needed to make decisions that would protect her child. She had not told another soul about her relationship with Nicholas. Jacob had been distraught from the loss of his friend and she thought he might not cope with another heartbreak and scandal. She had never seen her brother so broken.
And so she had told her family nothing of the father and lover and instead, with their help, had removed to Scotland and away from prying eyes.
Goodness, those years had been hard, she thought, and shook her head. She had been so lonely she might have simply died, there in Edinburgh in the house Jacob had set her up in waiting until she could return to Millbrook for the birth of her child. A terrible secret, a dreadful scandal and all the hope of what could have been disappeared as completely as Nicholas Bartlett had.
Blighted by her own stupidity, she’d lived in sadness until the first look at the face of her daughter had banished any regret.
On her return she found Jacob had concocted a story of a husband who had died and that she was now a grieving young widow with a small child in tow. She had become Eleanor Robertson at the stroke of a pen, the name being a common and unremarkable one, though she never thought of herself as such and used Huntingdon when signing letters to anyone she knew well. Oh, granted, she realised that many people did not believe such a fabrication, but nobody made a fuss of it either. She was a duke’s daughter with land and money of her own and in the very few times she’d returned to the city she found the few friends she still did have to be generally accepting of her circumstances.
A fragile existence that only took the renewed appearance of Nicholas Bartlett to break it down completely. But this missing week seemed well established in his mind and he himself had said it had been a month since any recall had returned.
Which meant no other memories had crept back in. She did not know enough about the state of amnesia to have a certainty of anything, but tomorrow she would go to Lackington, Allen & Co. and look up the files under the medical section of the library. Knowledge would aid her.
Perhaps she could help him redefine his memory. But should she? Would her presence at his side, even in that capacity, put her own self into danger?
She needed to wait, she thought. She needed to see just how the next few days turned out in order to make an informed decision about her and Lucy’s future.
He did not wear his crested ring any more. He did not smile as he used to. She wondered if he was financially strapped with his hair and his clothes and his scuffed old boots. There had been talk of his inheritances passing on to his uncle given the number of years of his being away. Perhaps being presumed dead even negated legal rights to property?
Many had thought him dead, after all. She had heard it in the drawing rooms of society and in the quieter salons of the ton. The dashing and dissolute young Viscount Bromley’s disappearance was mourned by myriad feminine hearts and the gold coins he had lost in the seedier halls of London’s gambling scene had only added to his allure. He was now touted as a legend whose deeds had only been enhanced by the mystery surrounding him.
Eleanor could not even imagine him in society looking like he did now. No one would recognise him. People would pity him. The scar at his cheek, the injured hand and the uncertainty. He would be crucified within the hallowed snobbery of the ton!
How could she protect him?
By staying in London and being there to pick up the pieces, perhaps? By sending Lucy home to Millbrook House with her nanny and maids tomorrow until she was certain which way the dice tumbled?
Oh, God, now she was thinking at the opposite spectrum of what she had started to decide. Stay away from Nicholas entirely or try to protect him? Which was it to be? Which should it be?
Underneath her thoughts a small flame flared, then took and filled her whole body with gladness. These arguments were all academic because now he was alive to her again. Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, was not dead. He was here and breathing, the past covering him like a dull shroud, but nevertheless still quick.
Everything was possible whilst life bloomed and her brother and his friends would not desert him. She knew that from what Jacob had said. Placing her hands together she prayed.
‘Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you...’ Thessalonians again. She murmured the scripture into the silence with an emotion that she found both comforting and worrying.
Tonight she would dream of him just as she had done a thousand times since he had disappeared, his arms around her body and his warm lips covering her own.
But this time it would be different for he was no longer just a ghost.
* * *
Frederick’s carriage collected him the next morning well before the luncheon and when he arrived at the home of the Challengers in St James’s Square, Nick understood just how happy his friend was these days.
Georgiana, Fred’s wife, was gracious and welcoming even with the house in an uproar as it made itself ready for the evening’s entertainment.
‘It is a pleasure to meet you, Lord Bromley.’ A real smile touched her blue eyes and although she did not look at his scar, she did not look away from it either. ‘I have heard much about you for Frederick has spoken of you so very often.’
‘I hope he concentrated on my good qualities rather than the bad ones.’ He tried to keep his tone light.
‘The wildness of youth is never easy, I fear, and often misrepresented, but rest assured my husband has missed you.’
In such wisdom Nick detected that Georgiana’s life might have had its own complexities and he wondered about her story.
* * *
Half an hour later when he and Fred were alone in the library and a drink had been poured, Nick put his head back against the leather rest of a large wing chair and took in breath.
‘Your wife has the knack of making this all look easy,’ he said finally. ‘A house of things being both interesting and alive, but without the chaos of your upbringing? Where did you meet her?’
‘I first saw her at Vitium et Virtus late one night when she was auctioning off her virginity to the highest bidder, wearing nothing more than a silk concoction that was barely decent.’
Nick laughed at that and liked the sound of it. ‘And I gather that the winner of such an unusual prize was yourself?’
‘Fortunately.’
They both took a drink and listened to the low rumbling noise of the busy house.
‘Georgie was promised in marriage to Sir Nash Bowles and doing her level best to get out of it. It was the only plan she could think of. Unwise but spectacularly successful.’ Frederick’s laugh was deep.
‘Bowles was there? At the club?’
‘He was.’ Fred had sobered now at mention of that name, the good humour of a second ago fading markedly.
‘One of the last things I remember is warning him to never darken its door again, but he obviously returned.’
‘My wife sees him as perverted and cruel.’
‘And I would agree with her.’
‘Well, the one thing I do thank him for is his threats to unmask her completely. It was only because she thought she might be shunned as a pariah when the ton got wind of her improper plan that she agreed to marry me.’
‘A wise choice.’ Nick lifted his glass and finished the brandy before placing it down on the table beside him and refusing Frederick’s offer of another. ‘The world you all live in has changed a lot since I have been gone.’
‘And you have changed in appearance since last night. Jacob’s barber is a magician, by the way.’
‘The bath helped, too. The Westmoor physician also came this morning to see to my hand. He says he expects it to heal completely if I am careful.’
‘Knife wounds can be difficult things.’
‘The blade hit the bone at the back of the wrist, but at least it did not break.’
‘Which explains the sling. If you don’t want to be thrown into society so quickly by coming tonight, Nick, I will understand. After the army it was hard for me to fit straight back in.’
‘Because you felt different? Out of place?’
‘Yes, and because I had seen things that no one else could even imagine.’
Frederick was quiet then and Nicholas was glad of it.
‘I had thought to go to ground, but if I don’t come tonight it will only get harder. Better to get it over and done with. I saw Lady Eleanor yesterday, too, by the way.’ He tried to keep interest out of his words though he was not certain he had succeeded as Frederick looked up. ‘What is her story?’
‘Jake is very tight lipped about his sister, but from what I can gather the man she married was from a well-thought-of family in Edinburgh. The Robertsons.’
‘Was it the family of the Robertson boy we knew at school, then?’
‘No, by all accounts he was not related to them. Douglas Robertson, Eleanor’s husband, was killed falling off a horse, apparently in some hunting accident, and when Eleanor found out she was pregnant she came home to Millbrook to have her baby daughter, Lucy. And to grieve.’
Lucy. Nick stored the name inside him and thought how hard a path that must have been for a sheltered duke’s daughter with all the promise in the world.
A bit like him, perhaps, although his promise had been dimming even before his absence from England. His uncle had encouraged him into the profligate and debauched underworld of the ton and he had gone in to welcome the inherent risks with his eyes wide open.
‘Do you ever think, Fred, that maybe we were fools back then, playing so hard and fast?’
‘I think you and Oliver were the ones who were the worst of us although you held the biggest share in Vitium et Virtus and gambled away the most money.’
‘It was fun until it wasn’t,’ he returned and stood to look out of the window. ‘I will go up to Bromworth House tomorrow and see my uncle.’
‘Take my carriage.’
‘Oliver offered me the use of his yesterday.’
‘Will you live there this time, do you think? Put down roots and stay?’
Nicholas shrugged his shoulders because he truly did not know.
‘My advice would be to find a wife like mine, Nick. A woman who can be the better half of you, for without Georgiana at my side I’d still be lost.’
As I am, Nicholas thought, and felt the shiver of ghosts walk down his spine.
Frederick leant forward, swirling the brandy around in his glass. ‘We can move the club on into other hands, younger ones. It’s probably past time.’
‘Do you have anyone in mind?’
‘Half the upcoming bucks of the ton would jump to it in a second, but it has to be the right people. A group of friends like us maybe, people who could work together.’ He smiled, his brown eyes soft. ‘For so long we all feared you were dead, Nick. For so long we talked of you with sorrow and regret even as we relived your wildest exploits. It is good to have you back again and in one piece.’
‘Well, perhaps not quite one piece, Frederick.’ That truth settled between them.
‘The bits will come back to you, but give it time and don’t force it. One day you will rise in the morning and realise life is easier and that the demons that once threatened to engulf you are more distant.’
‘Less insistent?’
‘Then you will also understand that life carries on, different from before maybe but still valuable, and that there are people in the world who never stopped loving you. Myself included.’
Frederick waited until he nodded before carrying on.
‘But enough of this maudlin emotion and confession, for I think we now need to get down to this afternoon’s business and find you some more appropriate clothes to wear.’
Thus the mundane allowed an end to the extraordinary truths of the conversation.
* * *
Nicholas could not remember ever taking this long to dress, but the Challenger valet was both insistent and persuasive and, although he had no clothes of his own to speak of, the man soon conjured up an array of cast-offs that fitted him well.
‘Just a slight tuck here, my lord.’ His grip was firm on the side seam of the jacket. ‘You don’t quite have the girth of Major Challenger. The trousers have been lengthened, but a good steam has taken care of any tell-tale signs of alteration. They give a fine impression of being your own clothes, Lord Bromley. Tailored to perfection if I might say so myself.’
‘Thank you.’ He gave this quietly. It had been years since he had had a servant fuss over him in such a way and it made him feel strangely odd. He had never given those who worked for the Bromley estate much thought before, but now he did. He hoped his uncle had treated them well and that there might be a few familiar faces at the Manor when he went up there on the morrow.
The luxury of London unsettled him and he fought for a touchstone. He wondered if Eleanor Huntingdon might come to Frederick’s soirée with her brother. He would like to see her dressed in finery with her hair arranged to show off the colour of it. He would like to dance with her. He would like to have her near.
Frederick came into the room he had been assigned just as the valet had finished the last stitch and broken off the thread, smoothing down the fabric.
‘A fine job, Masters. The Viscount looks as though he should fit in nicely.’
When the man collected all the assorted spools and left, Fred poured them each some wine in ornate cut-crystal glasses.
‘For fortification,’ he said and raised the tipple. ‘Most of those present tonight are friends and acquaintances, but there are always the certain few outsiders who might want to rock the boat.’
‘Are you warning me, Fred?’
‘You’ve been away a long time and stories have formed around your disappearance that have no bearing on the truth.’
‘For that I am glad.’
‘But a word of advice. If you do not wish to be the continued censure of the gossipmongers perhaps you could think of a reason for your injuries that may be more palatable. An army wound? The sanctity of government violence goes a long way in suppressing criticism, I have always found. The Seminole Wars, perhaps? The time frame would fit.’
‘You have thought about this already?’
When Frederick began to laugh he did, too.
‘The legends that abound about you as the reckless and dissolute Viscount Bromley are also a protection. No one will know quite who you are.’
‘Including me.’ He said the words quietly and finished his drink.
Frederick’s frown was deep. ‘You can’t do this alone any more, Nick. You have to let us all help you.’
‘You are already doing that and I will be fine.’
Chapter Four (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)
Eleanor had dressed as carefully as she ever had, her maids watching her with puzzlement on both their faces. Usually she barely cared. Normally if she went out it was only with much chagrin that she suffered even an hour of the business of ‘getting ready’.
Today she had spent most of the afternoon changing her mind from this dress to that one, from a formal hair style to a far less structured one. Even her shoes had been swapped from one pair to the next.
And now with only a few moments before she needed to go downstairs and join her brother and sister-in-law she was still unsure. Was the gold of her gown a little gaudy? Did her hair, set into up-pulled ringlets, look contrived? Was the diamond choker at her throat too much of a statement for a woman of her age?
She looked away from her reflection and breathed in deeply. No more. No other changes. She was exhausted by her uncertainty.
Jacob smiled as he saw her descending the staircase.
‘I have not seen you look quite as beautiful for a very long time, Ellie.’
Rose beside him looked as pleased as her brother did. ‘It is going to be so lovely to have you with us at Frederick and Georgiana’s, Eleanor. I wish you were with us more often in London.’ Her sister-in-law was in blue tonight and her fairness made her look like an angel. Every time Eleanor saw Rose she could understand exactly what her brother had seen in her as a choice of wife. She was kind and quiet, a woman who did not push herself forward, but waited for others to come to her.
With a laugh Eleanor took the offered hand and felt immeasurably more confident, an emotion she would need if she were to be any help to Nicholas Bartlett.
‘Nick has gone on already,’ Jacob said. ‘Frederick had a set of clothes that he needed to see if he fitted and he wanted Nicholas to meet Georgiana before this evening’s function.’
‘I am sure the Viscount will look well in anything he chooses. From all the accounts I have heard from my maid this morning as I was dressing he is a most handsome man.’
Rose’s statement was firm and Eleanor glanced at her. She herself had not seen Nicholas Bartlett in the house all day as he had left in the mid-morning for the Challengers. She hoped he had found a barber at least to shave off his beard.
Her nerves started to make her worried again. If people were rude or worse to him she could not quite think what she would do. Her brother would hardly tolerate such behaviour, of course, but still there was a difference between being accepted for who you were and being gossiped about behind raised fans and turned heads.
‘I hope Lord Bromley will enjoy himself,’ she finally said and left it at that.
It was only a short ride from Chelsea to St James’s Square and the rain and wind had held off enough to allow them a quiet passage into the house. After the death of her brother and father the family had been largely in mourning so it felt good to be able to go out again. The Challenger soirée would have a lot of people who were known to them attending, but it was not as formal as some of the grander balls.
Frederick and Georgiana Challenger were there to greet them after their cloaks, hats and gloves were seen to. Eleanor was, as always, struck anew at just how fine they looked together as they welcomed the newcomers.
‘Oliver was unable to make it tonight, Jake, because Cecilia is not very well. Nick is inside, but the doctor wanted his hand up in a sling so we had to rearrange his shirt and jacket somewhat.’
Another problem, Eleanor thought. A further way to draw attention to his differences. She suddenly wished she had stayed home.
The large downstairs salon of the Challenger town house was completely decked out in yellow, the colour lightening the space and making it seem even bigger. Numerous people milled around the room in groups and at one end an orchestra was tuning up with a Christmas song, ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’. Eleanor had always liked the melody.
‘I thought Frederick said this was to be a small gathering,’ Rose remarked. ‘It seems half the ton is here tonight.’
Eleanor looked around trying to find the figure of Nicholas Bartlett. At six foot two his height should have had him standing a good head above many of the others, but she could not see him.
Perhaps he had cried off and left?
‘There is Nicholas. Over by the pillars.’ Her brother’s voice penetrated her reveries as he pushed through the crowd and once the crush thinned a little she saw the Viscount surrounded by women and men all hanging on to his every word.
Her first true sight of him took her breath away. He looked completely different from yesterday. Menacing, dangerously beautiful, the boy she had known fashioned into the man before her, the harder lines of his face without the full beard suiting him in a way she had not comprehended before.
He was all in black, save for the snowy cravat at his neck, folded simply. His hair was pulled into a severe queue and she could see the sheen of dark brown picked out under the chandeliers above them.
His left hand was fastened into a sling of linen, the small vulnerability suiting him in a way she had not thought would be possible—a warrior who had been into battle and returned triumphant. She could see in his velvet eyes an apartness that left him unmatched. Every man near him looked soft, tame and pliable. Untouched by danger and hardship.
Their party had to squeeze into the space about him and Eleanor noticed the frowns of those women who had hoped for a closer acquaintance as they were ousted back.
‘You have cleaned up well, Nick. I hardly recognise you in the man we saw yesterday.’ Jacob sounded relieved. ‘I would like to introduce you to Rose, my wife. You did not meet her this morning before you left.’
Rose looked tiny compared to the Viscount, his darkness contrasting, too, against her light hair and eyes. Eleanor watched as Nicholas Bartlett brought up her sister-in-law’s hand and kissed the back of it, his gallantry reminiscent of the younger man who had left them all those years before. A slide of anger turned inside Eleanor as he acknowledged her with a mere tip of his head and yet he made a space at his side and she came to stand there, making very sure that she did not touch him.
‘I hope you slept well last night, Lady Eleanor.’ He said this to her as Rose and Jacob were busy in conversation with an older lord they knew well. An allusion to their late-night meeting, she supposed. Unexpectedly she coloured and hated herself for doing so.
‘I did, thank you.’ In truth, she had gained about three hours’ sleep and it probably showed in the darkness under her eyes. He, on the other hand, looked as if he had slept like a baby.
‘Frederick said there would be dancing later in the evening. Might I petition you to save one for me?’
‘I am rather out of practice, my lord.’ She could not keep the surprise from her tone.
‘And you think I wouldn’t be?’
‘I do not know. I have no idea of what sort of life you lived in the Americas.’
At that he sobered.
As the crowd about them jostled slightly Mr Alfred Dromorne and his daughter broke in on their conversation.
‘Bromley. It has been a long time. May I introduce my daughter to you. She is recently out in society. Susan, this is Viscount Bromley.’
Nicholas Bartlett inclined his head at the beautiful girl standing next to her father, though his eyes were far less readable than they had been a second ago. It was as if a shutter had been placed over any true expression and the fingers she could see that were visible in the sling had curled in tension.
The vibrant red head smiled in the way only the very young and very beautiful know how to. All coquetry and cunning. Eleanor felt instantly older and a lot more dowdy than she had even a second before.
‘I am pleased to meet you, Miss Dromorne.’
‘And I you, my lord.’ She brought her fan up and twirled it a few times, the art of flirtation both complex and simple in its execution.
‘You will be going home to Bromworth Manor, no doubt, now that you are back. You might notice some changes to the place.’
Her father had taken up the conversation and his statement produced a flicker of genuine interest in Lord Bromley’s visage. Eleanor saw the eagerness even as he sought to hide it.
‘In what ways do you mean?
‘Your uncle has the run of the estate these days and he has made certain to stamp his authority on to the place. Last time I was there I rather thought that those still serving him were not entirely happy.’
‘Large estates have their problems,’ Nicholas replied, giving the distinct impression that he did not wish to discuss such personal matters with a stranger. Eleanor noticed, too, that the pulse at his throat had quickened markedly.
‘You promised Lord Craybourne that you would be back to talk with him and I see he is free now, Lord Bromley. Perhaps this would be a good time.’
‘It would.’ With a slight bow to the Dromornes he allowed Eleanor to lead the way across the floor, though once they were out of sight she felt his hand on her arm stopping her.
She turned and saw right into his tortured soul, the lack of reserve astonishing.
‘Are you ill, my lord?’
He looked away and swallowed hard. She had the distinct impression that should she leave him here in the middle of the crowded floor he might very well simply fall over.
Knowing the Challengers’ town house as well as she did, she gestured to a room off to one side, glad when he followed her and the door shut behind them.
‘I think you should sit down, Lord Bromley.’
He did that, immediately, and closed his eyes.
‘I have been alone for a very long time. It takes some getting used to, this crush of people.’
‘It was not like this in the Americas?’
‘I kept away from others there.’
His words to her brother in the library last night came back. ‘It is dangerous, Jake. If anything were to happen to you and your family...’
He was trapped in his life as surely as she was.
‘You think you might cause those around you harm? Even here in England?’
At that he opened his eyes and leant back. ‘I know so.’
‘Is it your uncle? Is it his doing?’
‘He has the motivation, but...’
‘You think it is another?’
* * *
For the first time in a long while Nicholas felt his intuition kick in fervently. Eleanor Huntingdon made him alive again in a way no one else did. He barely knew her, but there was something between them that felt right and strong.
‘I have many other enemies. Some I probably don’t even remember.’
‘That sounds dangerous. To not have recall of people who might hurt you, I mean. Is Dromorne one of those enemies?’
‘Perhaps. He is a friend of my uncle, Mr Aaron Bartlett, who now sets himself up in Bromworth Manor with the intention of taking both my title and inheritance.’
‘Why would he introduce his daughter to you, then? He looked as if he wished for you to take the acquaintance with his offspring a lot further.’
‘To hedge his bets, perhaps. A pound on my uncle and another on me. The Bromley assets are substantial.’
‘A gambling man? No true morality in him?’
‘I remember that I owe Dromorne money. No doubt he will be calling upon it as soon as he can.’
There was now a dark cloud of worry in Eleanor’s eyes as he told her this.
‘Could I give you some advice?’ He fashioned the words with care and was pleased when she nodded.
‘You should probably stay well away from me, Lady Eleanor. The man I used to be was not much, but this one is even more...’ Struggling for a word he gave up and left the implication hanging.
‘Perilous?’ Her smile surprised him as did the quick flare of anger. ‘That may very well be true, but you offered me a dance a few moments ago and I shall hold you to your promise. The quadrille is my favourite, Lord Bromley.’
He felt better even looking at her, the gold of her gown picking up the sky blue of her eyes. ‘I shall find you then when I hear the tune struck. And thank you.’ He gazed around the room.
‘My pleasure, but I think I must go now or the others will miss me.’
She had left before he could give her his response and the night dulled with her absence, but he needed the solitude, too, to recoup and recover. He hoped that there were not others here who would pounce on his memory. The medicines Jacob’s physician had given him for his arm were making him feel sick. Sick in body and in mind. This evening was a lot more tiring than he had thought it would be and he was only glad that Eleanor Huntingdon had recognised the desperation in him and found him sanctuary.
He tried in earnest to bring to mind the steps of the quadrille she had mentioned, hoping that he might manage it without tipping both of them over.
The face of his uncle also hovered above him, a man whom he had never liked. Looking back, Nick knew he should have heaved him out of his life when his majority was reached, but he had been too self-destructive to even bother, his days revolving around the fast London set, Vitium et Virtus and gambling.
A mistake, he thought now, looking back. He would see his man of business and his lawyer as soon as he could to find out where he stood with his inheritance. But a day or two away in the quiet English countryside might be just what he needed and the sooner he got rid of his father’s scheming younger brother from influencing any part of his future, the better.
* * *
The hours seemed to have flown by at this soirée of Frederick’s. Nicholas Bartlett had not come near her again, but she had watched him across the other side of the room, ensconced in a group of admirers both female and male.
He looked much recovered, she thought, and the fact that her brother and Frederick Challenger were there beside him probably had something to do with that.
Rose, next to her, saw where she was looking. ‘There is something about Lord Bromley that makes him fascinating, do you not think? He looks both vulnerable and dangerous, a man whose history sits upon him with weight.’
‘Did Jacob tell you of his time in the Americas?’
‘A little. He said the Viscount was always moving to the next place of work and that he had a hard life there. I think people here are watching to find the careless dissolute lord they used to know, for the young girls certainly have their eyes on him. But he does not seem to be rising to any expectation and that is what is causing a quandary. Who is he now seems to be the general question. Did you know him well before he left, Eleanor? Can you see similarities with who he is now?’
Eleanor ignored the first question and answered the second. ‘I think he was a lot less dangerous and more easily swayed perhaps.’
Nicholas Bartlett tipped his head as she said this and looked straight at her, across the distance of the room, across the music and the movement and the chatter and it was as if the tableau of everything faded. Only him. Only her. Only the memory of what had been. Her memory, but not his. She looked away and fidgeted with her reticule, hating the way her fingers shook as she reached for her fan.
‘Do you ever imagine yourself marrying again, Ellie?’ Rose’s voice was soft.
‘Why do you ask?’
‘Because you are a beautiful woman with much to offer a man.’
‘No.’ The word burst from her very being, the truth of such emotion worrying. Because she did not. If she could not have Nicholas Bartlett to love her again as he had done before then she did not want anyone. Ever.
‘Secrets can be lonely things, Eleanor. If you wish to talk...’
Rose left it there as they both looked across to watch the orchestra tune up for their next round of songs and then the Viscount was right next to her, holding out his hand.
‘You promised me a dance, Lady Eleanor, and I have come to claim it.’
‘I think this one is a waltz, sir,’ she clarified, hearing the tell-tale three-beat music.
‘Good,’ he returned, ‘for I am sure I can remember those steps.’
‘And your injured hand?’ When she looked she saw he had taken off the sling in readiness, only the bandage left, a snowy white against the dark edge of the cuff of his jacket.
‘The doctor assured me that if needs be I could remove the sling without too much harm.’
He had not danced at all that evening and she could see the interest in those around them as he made his way to the floor with her in tow. Her brother was watching, as was Rose and myriad other faces from further afield.
‘One turn about the floor shall not drag you into the mire of who I am, I think. It should be safe.’
His fingers were at her side now, the other injured hand coming carefully on to hers. She could feel his breath in her hair as he counted in the steps and see up close the damage done to his face.
He did not try to hide it from her and she liked that, but the scar was substantial and recent, the reddened edges of it only just knitted.
‘The wife of the owner of the tavern I worked at sewed it up for me.’ He said this when he saw her observing him. ‘She was an accomplished seamstress so I was lucky.’
‘Lucky...’ she echoed his word.
‘Not to die from it. Lucky to have escaped a second blow and still live.’
‘What happened to the man who did this to you?’
When he glanced at her and she saw the darkness in his eyes she knew exactly what had happened to his assailant.
A further difference. Another danger.
‘Scars can be hidden, too, Lord Bromley.’
The upturn of his mouth told her he had heard her whisper even when he did not answer.
‘And rest assured that in a room like this there will be people who have been hurt just as surely as you.’
‘But they have not the luck to dance with the most beautiful woman in the house.’
‘I think your eyesight must have suffered with your injury.’
‘Gold suits you.’
She was quiet.
‘So does silence.’
At that she laughed, because thus far since meeting him again she had voiced her opinion without reserve. He made her talk again. He made her take risks.
He was quickly catching on to the rhythm of the dance and manoeuvred her easily about the room despite the number of others on the floor. She could feel hardness in his body where before there had been softness. He smelt of lemon soap and cleanliness, the lack of any other perfume refreshing.
At five foot six she was quite tall for a woman. With him she felt almost tiny, her head fitting easily into the space beneath his chin. Breathing him in, she allowed him to lead her, closing her eyes for a second just to feel what she once had at the Bromley town house the night before his disappearance. The night Lucy was conceived.
She had sent Lucy away today, back to Millbrook, just so that as a mother she might understand the road she must now travel.
Towards him or away? The quick squeeze of his fingers against hers brought her eyes up to his own, an emotion there she could not interpret.
‘A lack of memory is a hard taskmaster,’ he whispered, ‘because sometimes I imagine...’ He stopped.
‘What? What do you imagine?’
‘That I have danced with you before.’
She looked away and hated the lump that had formed in the back of her throat.
The night lights of the city had glowed through the large sashed windows of his town house as he had taken her into his arms and danced her to his bed.
Please remember, she thought. Please remember and love me. Then Mr Dromorne’s face at the side of the floor came into view, watching with eyes that held no warmth whatsoever and as the music ran down into the final notes Nicholas escorted her back to her brother.
She did not see him again that evening, but knew he had gone into the card room because the whispers of his luck there began to float into the salon.
An hour later when Rose pleaded tiredness, Eleanor was more than grateful to accompany her home.
* * *
Nicholas sat with a whisky in his room and listened to the clock strike the hour of five. The fire in the grate was still ablaze for he had fed it for all the small hours of the early morning with the coal piled near the hearth in a shining copper holder.
Eleanor Huntingdon was asleep somewhere in the house and close. He wished they could talk again. He wished he could see her smile and hear her clever honest words.
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Sophia James
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: An unexpected Christmas gift…Like all of London society, Lady Eleanor believed Viscount Bromley dead. Now, after six years, he has returned a changed man. Brooding Nicholas Bartlett has no memory of their one night of incredible passion – so how can she tell him he fathered a child…?As Nicholas starts to regain his lost memories, he realises the true reason he feels so drawn to beautiful Eleanor and her young daughter. And with the danger from his past threatening to rear its head, it’s up to Nicholas to protect his newly-discovered family!