Chapter Seven
Eleanor found her grandmother in the library the next morning as she came down to breakfast.
‘You look busy, Grandmama.’ Her eyes fell to the large pile of books stacked in the middle of the table.
‘That is because I am trying to understand the world that Nicholas Bartlett inhabited during his time away.’
Of all the things she had expected her slight and frail grandmother to say that was the very last of them.
‘You have spoken with Viscount Bromley since he has been back?’
‘Briefly. The first night he came home with Jacob I saw him in the hallway and he told me he had just returned from the Americas. His grandmother would have been saddened by his losses, I think, God bless her soul.’
‘You knew his grandmother?’
‘Anna Bartlett? Yes, she came out the same year that I did and I was glad that she died before her son and her daughter-in-law went. A terrible death and I was always glad that Jacob was Nicholas’s friend when they both were sent up to Eton. You were his friend, too, if I remember rightly, Eleanor. That day in the Vauxhall Gardens just after you’d come out into society and I’d lost sight of you for a little while, I was certain he was there.’
‘There?’ Her heartbeat quickened.
‘Watching the fireworks and speaking with you. He was always a beautiful child and he became a beautiful man even with his wild ways and a weakness for gambling. But then he was a boy. Now he is a man.’
Her words flowed around the alarm that Eleanor had felt ever since Nicholas’s disappearance. Her grandmother was a woman who noticed things in a way others did not.
‘I’d hoped perhaps...’ She stopped, the crinkles at each eye deep.
‘What? What did you hope?’
‘That the happiness Anna always prayed for would be bestowed upon him. Did you know Richmond is a town in Virginia, too, Eleanor? A beautiful place by the sounds of it.’
The juxtaposition of these words and Nicholas’s at the tea shop made her head spin.
Once a travelling woman in Richmond told my fortune from a pile of sticks she carried.
How much of a conversation had her grandmother held with him?
‘If he returns again, my love, could you ask him if he might come and see me and have a proper visit? I would like to chat further for old time’s sake.’ She took a breath and turned the page on a large atlas. ‘You are looking lovely today, Granddaughter. It is a relief to see the fire back in your cheeks.’
Was it just coincidence, her grandmother’s chatter, or was there some other purpose underneath her words?
The Huntingdon family sorrows had overshadowed joy for such a long time now: her mother’s fatal illness, her own shame with an unmarried pregnancy and a lover whom she refused to name. The more recent deaths of her father and brother had been another blow and Jacob’s tendency to blame himself for everything had left them struggling.
‘I hope Lucy will be back in London in time for the New Year? I miss her chatter and her laughter.’
‘She is due back here tomorrow, Grandmama, for Jacob and Rose have a small family party planned for the evening of the first of January.’
‘And Nicholas Bartlett will be here, too?’
‘I am not sure. Why?’ These words broke through restraint and caution, and were harsh and discordant.
‘Because it is simply nice when the parts of one’s life come together, Eleanor. The old and the new. All the pieces of it finally making sense.’
‘Sense?’
‘There is a time for sadness and also one for joy. It is our turn as a family to find some happiness now and to look to the future. Had your father been here he would have been saying exactly the same thing.’
‘I am glad I like you so much, Grandmama.’
Kissing her grandmother on the cheek before walking away, Eleanor recited the words of Ecclesiastes under her breath.
A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance.
She wondered which time it was now for her.
* * *
The place was as odd as she had remembered it, she thought, as she walked through the solid Egyptian doors of Bullock’s Museum in Piccadilly. The inside was even stranger, large stuffed animals in a fenced-off enclosure and trees towering above that looked as if they came from some ancient and long-lost world.
Nicholas was waiting next to a glass case, glancing not at the artefacts but at the light that spilled in through the window above him. The sight caught at Eleanor with a poignancy that made her stop still and simply watch. He looked as out of place here as he had done at Gunter’s, the danger in him only thinly veiled and a sense of carefully checked distance overlaying that. He had not seen her yet, one arm held against his chest as though it was painful, the opposite hand anchoring it.
Mr William Bullock’s artefacts were many after a lifetime of travelling abroad and Eleanor wondered what Nicholas Bartlett’s treasure trove might look like had he gathered small tributes from all his years in the Americas.
He seemed like a man who travelled light. Her brother had said he’d had one small leather case with him when he had come straight from the ship to the door of Vitium et Virtus on Boxing Day.
He had caught sight of her now, the wounded hand replaced at his side as he walked over. It shook slightly against his thigh.
‘Surely this museum brings back some memories?’ She said this when he stood next to her, hoping that humour might lighten the mood. ‘The naked Hottentot Venus smoking a pipe and the Polish dwarf are not sights easily forgotten, after all. If anything were to jolt your memory, it might be them.’
He laughed at her words, all the lines on his face softening. ‘Did you make me laugh like this before, Eleanor?’
The world around her stopped, just slowed down and stood still because there was a look in his eyes that she recognised. A hunger that made his dark eyes darker.
‘I think that perhaps I did.’
He glanced away then, a frown deepening as he moved back a pace.
* * *
His lack of memory was more irritating today than it ever had been before because he knew suddenly he would have found Lady Eleanor Huntingdon as charming and fascinating six years ago as he did at this moment and he did not know what he had done about that fact.
Had he kissed her? Had he taken it further? That thought made him step away just so that he did not reach out because he could not trust himself as to what might happen next. The memory of the women he had bedded in the Americas also sat there in the equation. He was damaged goods. Eleanor deserved a man who was exemplary in every way, not one whose life had been marred irreparably in the messy business of surviving and who still did not know if he brought danger to those he had contact with.
He needed to keep things light to allow her an escape. A sign at the doorway gave him a subject.
‘Napoleon’s travelling carriage is here at the museum?’
The flare in her eyes dimmed at his query.
‘The French General’s personal belongings have been a very popular exhibition by all accounts, my lord.’
‘A gamble that has paid off, then?’ He was barely thinking of Bullock as he said these words and he had the impression that she might have known this. ‘The risk of the unknown to fill one’s heart’s desire?’
‘There is also a nightgown, a set of pistols, his boots and a cloak amongst other things. With the numbers who have come to view them it’s said that Bullock has made a small personal fortune from the ticket sales. Many people have been speaking of it and I have only heard interest and fascination.’
Her words ran on, one over the other, giving an impression of nerves. He thought he had never met a woman who was more fascinating. They were passing tall cabinets now which were full of more of the sort of insects he had seen before in the front room.
‘Your eyes are exactly the shade of that butterfly wing, Lady Eleanor. “Morpho paleides”.’ He read this slowly. ‘One of the largest butterflies in the world apparently with wings of iridescent blue on one side and an ordinary brown on the other. It allows the insect the ability to disappear at will if you like. A camouflage against predators?’
The sort of disguise she used, he thought. At Frederick’s soirée she had looked unmatched in a deep blue gown. Today she sported a coat of dull beige, an ugly hat jammed tightly over her head. Why?
‘I have always been careful.’ She had told him this in the carriage as they had made their way to Berkeley Square. ‘So careful that perhaps...’ She had not finished.
So careful that perhaps life had passed her by? A beloved husband whom she pined for and a daughter who had kept her away from the London social scene? So careful that she saw him as only a risk?
‘How old are you now, Eleanor?’
‘Twenty-four. Almost twenty-five.’
She said it as if it were a great age and he smiled.
‘Young then?’
‘Sometimes I feel like I am a hundred.’
He swallowed because she kept doing this to him. Allowing him a small window into her soul that showed only a truth.
* * *
She had hurt him, she thought, in some way. Again. Perhaps her honesty was something he did not wish for. Perhaps in the aftermath of the lies he had lived with he now held a discomfort of the truth? Especially her truths, with all their corresponding sadness.
His hands were running across the door of Napoleon Bonaparte’s carriage as if such a treasure was the only thing he wished to think about. Another couple lingering next to the conveyance watched him with interest and the man spoke suddenly.
‘Bromley. My God, I had heard that you were back from the dead. David Wilshire.’
Nicholas looked at him for a second as if trying to place him. Finally he seemed able to. ‘You knew Nash Bowles if I remember rightly and I beat you in a card game which you did not take kindly to?’
‘I used to take losing more seriously than I do now,’ the man said, ‘though Bowles has not forgiven you. He still proclaims weekly that he is no friend of yours.’
‘There are many more who might claim that honour, Mr Wilshire.’ Nicholas’s voice was tight, the tone in it hard.
‘You are meaning those to whom you owe large debts at the gambling table, I suppose, though it is said now you are more proficient at winning than you once were.’
‘Word travels fast in London. Did you also hear I suffer fools less gladly?’
Wilshire frowned and stepped back, tipping his hat in leave and dragging the woman he was with from the room. The Viscount looked after them with a frown.
‘At school there were those students who were bullies, cheats and troublemakers and he was one of them. I doubt he has changed.’
‘Who is Nash Bowles?’
‘A miscreant who wanted to be a partner in Vitium et Virtus in the early days and who was not pleased to be turned down.’
‘By you all.’
‘By me, in particular.’
Eleanor had the impression he was not telling the whole story, but she did not feel comfortable to press further, so she was surprised when he continued talking.
‘Some of the men who hate me probably have good reason as there’s only a certain amount of arrogance people can stomach before the bile begins to work.’
‘People like Bowles?’
‘No. Not him. His animosity comes from a whole different place altogether.’
* * *
There it was again, that uncompromising anger, that hard flash of steel in him that was so much different from the man he had been. But if she was truthful that same resoluteness was also a part of her character now. She and Nicholas Bartlett had been transformed in a way that was similar, hardened by life but still trying to live.
She liked the way he took her arm, after they exited Bullock’s, and helped her across the road as they walked towards Green Park, though once on the other side he let her go.
‘Did we walk much, then?’ There was now decided interest in his words.
She wanted to say that they hadn’t had time, particularly after the first few days when all they looked for were secluded and quiet areas to be alone together, to whisper and to touch.
To kiss for the first time in the back room at Lackington’s when Nicholas had simply leaned over the dusty scientific tomes nobody ever looked at and taken her mouth beneath his.
A pure pain of shock ran through her at such a reminiscence. He had been slender then, softer. Just a youth. What would it be like to kiss this man he had become?
Could she risk taking him there tomorrow? To Lackington’s? Part of her wanted to, but the other part felt only fear. What if he remembered and then scorned her? What if this new Nicholas wanted nothing to do with a woman who had thrown herself into his bed after only four days of knowing each other and had conceived an illegitimate child in the process?
‘You seem quiet.’
‘Oh, I am often that now, my lord.’
Love me, Nicholas, my love. Love me until we both die from the feeling.
She’d said that to him at the Bromley town house. Said other things, too, full of girly pathos and rampant exaggeration. She’d laid her heart on her sleeve and told him every little thought, every sorrow and hurt.
Now she could barely admit to anything because in the tiniest clue he might guess it all. Glancing across at him, she saw he looked full of thought, though he began to speak again after the short silence.
‘For the first five weeks after I got to the Americas I lay in a poor house in Boston with fever until a reverend took me home and fattened up both my body and soul.’ When he shrugged she could see the line of tension in his shoulders. ‘That was the only time in all the six years I was away that I thought I was safe.’
She was astonished by such honesty.
‘I tell you this because I am still not safe and that if you should wish to reconsider your kindness I will understand why.’
‘My kindness?’ She didn’t quite know what he meant.
‘Squiring me through these events that I have long forgotten. Truth be told, perhaps they are better left unremembered.’ The flatness in his eyes was familiar and dragged at Eleanor’s own protected sorrow.
‘I used to think that after my mother died, my lord. I wished for no recall of her whatsoever because I had been hurt too much. Now, I struggle to remember her face, her voice, her smell and the irony is that I would give anything to have her visage back again.’
‘Jake talked of her all the time at the club in the months after her death. You were lucky with such a mother.’
‘How old were you when your own died?’
‘Eight. Young enough to forget some things and old enough to remember others.’
‘Seventeen was no better, I assure you.’ She still remembered the shock and grief as if it were yesterday.
‘My mother had hair exactly the colour of your own. In the sunshine there were threads of gold amongst the brown just like yours.’ He smiled as he said this.
‘I will take such words as a compliment, Lord Bromley.’
‘Nicholas. Or Nick. And it was meant as one.’
There it was again, the difference in him that she could not quite pin down. He was less evasive than he had been once and much more to the point. The flowery rhetoric of the past was well gone and in its place sat an honesty that was borne from adversity. She wished she might be brave enough to simply step forward and lay her hand upon his chest and tell him everything, but a vendor of hot chestnuts called out to them from further afield and her own sense of place and time was re-gathered.
‘Are you hungry?’ He looked altogether younger as he asked this of her. ‘In New York they sold chestnuts, too, but they never tasted quite right. And now I know why. They are different from the ones here in England.’
Perhaps confessing past problems had been good for them both because she was starving and even from this distance the smell of the roasted nuts was delicious.
‘Give me a moment, then.’
As he walked away to procure the treat another man coming through the park stopped before her. Swarthy and thickset, he had the look of a gentleman out of sorts with his world.
‘You are Lady Eleanor Robertson, the Duke of Westmoor’s sister, are you not?’
Flustered, Eleanor nodded.
‘I was introduced to you once at a ball in Chelsea and I seldom forget a face, particularly one as beautiful as your own.’
The slight lisp he had was as disconcerting as his words. She looked over towards Nicholas Bartlett, but his back was to her.
As the newcomer followed her glance, he, too, registered Lord Bromley’s presence and the blood simply drained from his face to leave him decidedly pale.
‘You are with Bartlett?’
Nodding, she looked away, certain that he must now move on and surprised when his hand covered her own.
‘Gossip has it you are an experienced and generous woman and he is a cad and a spendthrift. If you would like to pass some time in my company, I am certain you would not regret it.’
Snatching back her hand, she stepped away. Was this person mentally sick? Could he hurt her? Should she run? Nicholas was back now and her first thought was that he had not waited to collect their chestnuts. Her second was more along the lines of amazement. He looked nothing at all like he usually did, the disdain in his face showing every feeling.
‘Get away from her, Bowles.’
Nicholas’s hand was in his pocket now and Eleanor had the impression that he might have held a weapon there. In the mood he was in she was more than certain he would use it should this stranger be difficult.
The fury in Bowles was magnified as he spat out his words. ‘Bromley. I had heard you were back, of course, but I scarcely believed it. Back from the dead like a cat with nine lives, though I have to say your appearance is altered for the worst. More contretemps in America? The result of your arrogance and your reckless testing of boundaries?’
‘Stay away from me and from my friends. If you decide not to take this advice, then expect retribution.’ Nicholas spoke quietly but there was a threat in every single syllable that was unmistakable, the echoes of an old hatred more than evident. He’d gained control of himself now, a stillness in him that was decidedly menacing and any emotions upon his face well hidden.
All fight seemed to go from Bowles and he turned on his heels and left them, the tap of his shoe plates distinct against the stones on the ground.
* * *
Nicholas bit back a curse. What the hell was Nash Bowles doing talking with Eleanor? He didn’t want that crawling amoral mongrel anywhere near her, his mind returning to the woman he’d found the bastard with in a back room of Vitium et Virtus just before he had disappeared all those years ago.
Nick had seen exactly what a madman was capable of then, the lines of carefully placed cuts on the girl’s bottom weeping blood.
‘It’s a place of fantasy,’ Bowles had shouted, his fists flying. ‘And you have no business being in here and spoiling it. She’s a serving maid, for God’s sake, and will be well pleased with the trinket I shall leave with her as payment. Besides, the pleasure of pain is underrated.’
His victim’s face told him exactly the opposite.
‘Is that true?’ As he’d asked the small dark girl this question she had simply shaken her head and burst into tears, trying to pull her clothes up to cover her shame in the process. There were more wounds on her fingers.
Without another thought Nicholas had picked up a much thinner Bowles by the scruff of his neck and thrown him out the front door, uncaring of his lack of dress and his plethora of threats. He fell in an untidy heap on to the pavement below.
‘Never come back. If you do I will kill you slowly with as much pain as I can administer.’
‘You will regret this, Bromley,’ he had replied. ‘See if you don’t.’
Nick had laughed at that and lifting the small knife that the other had dropped threw it in an arc so that it landed within an inch of Nash Bowles’s right hand.
‘The only thing I might regret is not aiming that blade squarely into the space between your legs.’
That day long ago morphed into this one as Nicholas felt a warm hand tuck into the crook of his arm, his mind brought abruptly back from the past to the present.
The wind had risen and the grasses under the trees were being tossed in a silky blanket.
‘I thought he might even have tried to drag me off with him.’ Eleanor sounded breathless. ‘I think he is deranged.’
‘I am sorry. He won’t hurt you.’
‘He has hurt others?’
‘Many, probably.’
‘Then what is it he wants from you?’
‘Revenge or the promise of silence? He is a bully and a coward and as he was interested in a stake of Vitium et Virtus for himself he was always hanging around the club.’
Her teeth were worrying her top lip. ‘He would be a horrible person there, for there is something frightening about him, something broken.’
‘You are right and I have first-hand knowledge that he does not truly comprehend the notion of a line between yes and no. He was an only child and more than spoilt so he imagines the world should be exactly as he should want it.’ Nick breathed in deeply, trying to disperse the alarm he had felt when he saw Eleanor with Bowles. If she were to be hurt because of his past...?
‘Will you play a part in the club’s running now you are back?’
‘No. I’m thinking of giving my share to the others if they want it.’
‘I doubt Rose would like to see my brother more involved. The same might go for Georgiana and Cecilia.’
At that he laughed, the worry of the past few moments dwindling as he saw her smile. ‘For a club steeped in secrecy there are now many who know the names of its founders.’
‘Frederick’s youngest brother keeps harping at them all for the chance of it, too. He is just finishing at university and is as wild as the rest of the chaotic and out-of-control Challengers. You might consider him? He’d undoubtedly be perfect.’
As she moved closer it was as if everything in the world was better. He liked her near. He liked the way it felt when her thigh came into contact with his own as they walked across the grass.
He liked her questions and her truth. He liked how she had put all the facts of things together to come up with a portrait of now. He liked how she made him happy.
If he had Eleanor Huntingdon in his bed he would feel as if he could conquer the world.
He cursed under his breath and decided such invented fantasies might rival any thought up in the passion of the moment at Vitium et Virtus.
* * *
She felt him withdraw, just as he had done every other time they had come closer. Did he think she might deceive him in some way or harry him into making a decision he would come to regret.
Nash Bowles had riled him and yet it was more than that. Nicholas Bartlett’s touch was tight as he took her arm and turned towards the road, chestnuts forgotten in his haste to be away. He also vibrated with an anger that was unfathomable.
‘What did he do to you? This Bowles?’
He needed to talk so when silence was his only answer she kept on speaking.
‘In the times that I thought the world was landing on my shoulders I realised confiding in someone trusted is often a helpful thing.’
His glance came around to her, wary and suspicious, full of the ghosts she could only guess at. The damage on his face today was so very easily seen in this light. She could imagine the force of the blade that had come down upon him and the pain he must have endured afterwards.
‘Jacob was my confidant and he was a good one, too, because he mostly listened. As you are. To me, I mean. Listening.’ Now she was flustered, his very presence warming her insides. It was confusing, this strength he had, this power to make her unsettled. She could not remember it before.
Finally, a smile curled at the end of his lips. ‘I doubt some of my stories would allow you to sleep at night, Eleanor, were I to unburden myself of the past. You might be well pleased never to hear them.’
But she did not allow him that excuse. ‘After being ill in the home of the Reverend in Boston, where did you go?’
‘South.’ The word was flat and quiet.
‘Because you had to leave?’
‘The Reverend had a daughter. A small child called Emily. When I was walking along the cliffs one day she followed me and was hurt.’ He swallowed and she could see the strength of emotion in the grinding action of the muscles in his jaw. ‘She was pushed,’ he finally uttered.
‘So you went south to protect them? To draw off the one who had pushed her. Was it the same man who hurt your arm and face?’
‘I hope so because he is dead. I killed him.’
He looked at her directly as he said this, refusing to allow for misinterpretation, ensuring her understanding in a way he had not when they had talked during the waltz at Frederick Challenger’s party. There was no line of apology or uncertainty anywhere. She could imagine a weapon in the ruined fingers of his left hand raised against evil. She hoped the death had been quick. Nicholas Bartlett was a warrior wrought from the softer bones of an English aristocrat. How different would he feel from each and every other coddled lord of the ton? A man who had been places not one of them would have the misfortune to venture or the endurance to see himself safe. She could not quite leave it at that, though.
‘Would he have killed you?’
‘Pardon?’
‘The man who hurt you. Would you have been dead had you not fought back?’
He nodded.
‘Then my opinion is that evil does not deserve to win out under any circumstance and he warranted his fate.’ Her words held that certain conviction she heard herself use in some of her dealings with her daughter. An unequivocal truth. An unarguable logic.
She watched him run his hand carefully through his hair, pushing the long and untidy fringe from his face. ‘I am glad, Eleanor, that you have been safe here in England.’
Safe? Six years of the cutting words of others. Six years of pretence. Six years of lonely isolation. Six years of carefulness tempered by politeness and manners. She was so safe she could scream with the cloying breathlessness of it. Better a cut like his to the very bone and then an ending. Quick. Final. Though in all honesty it seemed that the wolves might still be circling.
A small summer house hidden amongst the trees to the left of the path suddenly caught her attention. They had come here once in their effort to find quiet and out-of-the-way places and although the green shields of the summer trees were no longer in place the park was also far less peopled in winter than it had been back then.
‘I want to show you something,’ she said and was pleased when he followed her over the grass and came up the steps to the circular platform which sat above the Serpentine.
Greyness surrounded them. The sky. The water. The trees with their mottled winter bark.
Nicholas had to duck as he came beneath the boarding around the roof and she smiled at him even as she shivered with the cold.
‘This whole winter has been freezing.’
She felt him there next to her, touching warmth along the length of their arms. A small intimacy in a large landscape and a connection that felt so right and true she made no attempt at all to pull away.
* * *
She was shaking.
He wanted to bring her full into his warmth, but he also did not wish to frighten her.
‘I should have remembered the chestnuts,’ he said and liked the way she laughed. ‘But I do have this.’
Pulling his flask from a pocket, he screwed open the top. ‘It will warm you up at least.’
When she took it she sniffed at the top of it in a way that told him she did not quite trust what was inside.
‘Is it strong?’
Before he could answer she took a swallow and began to cough, the purity of the liquor making her hand the flask back.
‘Scottish whisky and the best my uncle could buy.’
‘I have heard it said that Aaron Bartlett has left the country having taken money from the Bromley coffers.’
‘In truth I don’t care what he took, it’s only good to be rid of him. Bromworth Manor is being cleaned of his presence, just as the town house was, and soon there will be nothing left of his legacy there at all. His son has followed him by all accounts so there is another worry gone.’
He tried to keep the bitterness from his words, but did not think he had succeeded when Eleanor looked at him with sorrow in her big blue eyes.
‘How was your guardian related to you?’
‘He was my father’s brother and I hated him right from the start. He was never a kind man or a good one and young children, for all their innocence, easily recognise duplicity when confronted with it.’
There it was again, a truth he had given to very few others. His hand tightened on the wooden handrail that he leant upon, but he liked how her warmth fastened him to goodness and hope. An anchor to a world he had been gone from for so long.
With Eleanor the shadows lightened and the demons that rode on his shoulders daily were less heavy. Frowning at his flowery thoughts, he scuffed at a broken baton at his feet.
‘Do you have any family left now? Anyone at all?’ She looked stricken as she asked her question.
‘None.’ The word was bare of emotion. He no longer craved the tie of blood as he once had as a child and even as a youth.
‘You could share mine, then. Grandmama is most adamant that she needs to keep an eye on you and you have always been Jacob’s best friend.’
The sweetness of her offer astonished Nick, though he did wonder where she herself stood on the spectrum. He suddenly wanted to kiss her, to bring her into his arms and take her mouth in a hard stamp of ownership and possession. The feeling was so strong he turned and moved away, a flurry of freezing cold wind and rain aiding his want to escape.
‘Come, Eleanor, I think I should take you home.’