Chapter Two
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.