Knowing the man needed more assurance, Nathaniel eventually offered, “From what I remember, you’d take a rose from my mother’s garden every Friday afternoon during the summer and deliver it to a young woman at the market. Miss…Folding? No. Miss…Golding I believe was her name. Wasn’t it? Whatever became of that?”
Wilkinson’s eyes dewed. “She married someone else.” He sounded haunted. “’Tis truly you, then. ’Tis truly you.” A trembling hand clamped over his mouth.
Nathaniel leaned in and said in a low tone, “It is. And sadly, I have nothing but memories to prove who I am. Now that we have been reacquainted, I am asking you give me an audience with my father. I have waited thirty years for it.”
The old man blinked rapidly, lowering his hand. Glancing toward the street, he pulled the door wider. “Yes. Of course. Please. Do. Come in. I… Come in, come in.”
“Thank you.” Nathaniel stepped into the large foyer.
The door closed, darkening the hallway. Several lit candles illuminated the honey-colored silk-brocaded walls that clothed the expanse of the dim foyer. He remembered this entrance. Not even the paper on the wall had changed.
To his astonishment, Wilkinson grabbed him and yanked him close. “This house hasn’t been the same without you, my lord,” Wilkinson choked out. “Perpetual sadness has haunted us all.”
Nathaniel stiffened against that unexpected hold but gave way to patting the old man. The man who used to sneak him strawberry-covered crumpets out of the kitchen. “I appreciate the warm welcome, Wilkinson. I honestly didn’t expect you to even recognize me.”
“You were the boy I never had, my lord. How does a man forget the son he always wanted?” Wilkinson drew away with a hard sniff and gestured toward a room whose curtains had yet to be drawn. “I will ensure his lordship sees you at once. I cannot even imagine what he will… I am beside myself. Absolutely beside myself.” Wilkinson eyed him one last time and hurried up the stairs as best his aged body would allow.
Slowly walking into the dimly lit receiving room, filled with furnishings and large portraits and mirrors, Nathaniel wandered toward a French writing desk. The same desk his mother used to sit at and accept or decline invitations and write letters. Back in the day, he clung to the edges of that desk, asking her countless questions about everything she did before the governess tugged him out of the room. Eerily, even the inkwell was still sitting in the same place. His mother had always been one for perfected routine. He remembered that much about her.
A single invitation that had been set out atop a pile of parchment paper made him lean toward it. Recognizing the name of the host, he plucked it up.
Imagine that. His brother-in-law, the Duke of Wentworth, was hosting an event. He set the invitation back on the desk, positioning it exactly where it had lain.
Finding nothing else of interest, Nathaniel strode toward the middle of the room and, easing out a shaky breath, faced the open doorway. Setting both hands behind his back, he dug his fingers into the skin of his wrist below the cuff of his coat and locked it hard against his back.
He could hear the clock on the mantelpiece behind him click another hand into place. It had been thirty years since he took his father’s pistol, loaded it and used the panel in the wall to sneak outside the house under the moonlight and face the man with the cigar who had been intimidating his family—the man whose ties to his father he couldn’t have imagined. Unbeknownst to him, the pistol’s hammer was broken and unable to fire when he needed it to.
He had spent thirty years regretting it, and took up boxing to ensure he’d never be without weapons again.
Steady footsteps echoed down the corridor, making him fist both hands. His jaw tightened.
A stout, white-haired man in a Turkish robe and slippers appeared and stood motionless in the doorway. Grey, inquisitive eyes settled upon him, that sagging, round face no longer resembling the dashing, rugged face of the Earl of Sumner.
This was his father?
Jesus fucking Christ.
It was anticlimactic.
This was but an old man he could easily snap between two knuckles and flick away like dust. And he wanted to do just that. “You’ve aged, Father. And not very well, at that.”
Those lips parted. The earl entered the room, his movements staggered and uneven, as if age had made his limbs brittle. “Who are you?” he rasped.
How Nathaniel had managed to even breathe knowing he was standing within a swing of his father was beyond his own understanding. “I think you know who I am.”
“Who are you?” the earl demanded, his voice now returning with more strength.
Nathaniel tried to keep his voice calm lest he give in to riling himself too much. “Your son. Your heir. Your blood. Your kin. Do you need a full name and a birthplace to go with it?”
His father’s grey eyes widened as he scanned his appearance. “You look nothing like him.”
Nathaniel set his jaw. “What did you expect given I spent most of my life on the streets of New York where you abandoned me?”
The earl grew quiet.
“Do you require proof?” Nathaniel pressed. “I can answer any question you want. About you. About Mother. About poor Auggie, who is no longer with us. We can even take out portraits of me as a child and hold them to my face. Eyes don’t change.”
“There aren’t any…any portraits of him left. I removed them when he— I couldn’t bear to look at him.”
“I bet you couldn’t.” Nathaniel chanted for the strength not to send a fist through his father’s skull. If he gave in to raising his voice, his control would be lost. That much he knew. “How is your reputation these days? The same as it was back in New York?”
A trembling, vein-ridden hand pointed to the doorway. “Leave. Leave, before I—”
“Before you what? I would think twice before issuing threats, old man. All it takes is these two hands—” Nathaniel held them up “—and the snap of your neck and it’s done. You wouldn’t even have time to scream.”
The earl stared, his aged face paling to paste.
More than ready to deliver the message from the boy whose life had been murdered between four dank walls and a bolted wooden door, Nathaniel dropped his hands and his voice to lethal. “I could have easily forgiven what Casacalenda did to me. After all, I was the one who stupidly left the house and put a pistol to the man’s face demanding he never intimidate us again. How was I to know there was a much bigger story? I was astounded to no end he treated me as well as he did given what you did to him and his life. He never touched me. He never beat me. He gave me everything I wanted, except my freedom, for years. He even dined with me every night in the cellar when he wasn’t traveling and taught me how to paint and sketch. He was a good man. A very broken man, but a good man. I’ve long since forgiven him. I had to, given his misery and his own loss. But how am I to forgive you? How do I forgive what you did to not only him but me?”
The earl shook his head ever so slowly from side to side and whispered, “You speak of things I know nothing of.”
Nathaniel narrowed his gaze. “Lie to the world and to God who is watching and waiting to judge you when your time has come, but not to me. Casacalenda told me everything. And I do mean everything. Every one of your secrets and every one of your lies. There isn’t a thing I don’t know and the only reason I never came back was to protect mother’s and Auggie’s name from rotting before all of society.”
The earl blinked rapidly, his lips tightening. “I refuse to stand here and submit to this vile form of intimidation.” The earl swiveled toward the doorway. “Carter! Dixon! Come at once. At once!”
“It’s going to take more than two men to get me out of the house.” Nathaniel widened his stance and set his shoulders, trying to exude a level of calm he didn’t feel. “I want to see my mother. Now.”
The earl’s face had bloomed red to the roots of his white hair, his body trembling as if he were about to burst. “What do you mean to do? The doct
ors say any undue stress might end whatever is left of her life. Is that what you want? To kill her? The poor woman has suffered enough. Leave her in peace. Leave us both in peace. Whoever the devil you really are.”
Nathaniel stared, sensing that the man was in earnest. Was his mother truly that ill? “What is wrong with her?”
Two well-built footmen rushed into the room. “My lord?”
The earl snapped a hand toward him. “Get this bastard out. Get him out! And don’t ever allow him entrance into this house again lest Lady Sumner’s very heart stops. Is that understood?”
“Yes, my lord!”
The two footmen darted toward Nathaniel and grabbed an arm each, shoving and muscling him hard in the direction of the foyer.
Nathaniel couldn’t breathe, knowing his father had betrayed him. Again. In a whipping blur, Nathaniel viciously snapped out a fist at the face closest to him and crunched into a set of teeth with the bridge of his knuckles. A choked cry filled the room as blood sprayed and he shoved the man hard. Jumping forward again, he delivered the same rigid blow to the other, snapping that head to the side.
Both footmen fell away like stone pillars, one collapsing onto a walnut table that smashed a vase into powdery shards, the other tumbling down into a dazed heap against a chair that flipped right along with him.
His chest still heaving, Nathaniel jumped toward his father and grabbed him hard by the neck with a hand.
The earl gagged, those eyes wide.
Tightening his rigid hold on that weathered neck he wanted to annihilate, Nathaniel seethed out through bared teeth, “I will spare my mother from seeing me until I am presentable in both my appearance and in my life. Because heaven forbid she see what you have reduced me to. I will also spare her from knowing the truth I have carried with me these thirty years. Because I don’t want her last moments spent in hateful regret. She deserves peace. But you? Oh, no. If you think I plan on forgiving you for what you did to me and my life in an effort to protect your fucking name and your fucking life, that is where you’re wrong. I will haunt you until you beg for forgiveness upon both knees or are dead. Whatever the hell comes first.”
The earl’s veined hand reached up and attempted to touch his face. “No one needs to know,” he whispered hoarsely, those panicked eyes acknowledging the truth. “Let me die first. Then the world can know.”
It was like the man wanted to die. Releasing his father with a shove, before he himself submitted to something insane, Nathaniel swung away and stumbled out of the room and the house.
Through a pinching haze that barely allowed him a steady gasping of breaths, Nathaniel wandered down endless London streets he didn’t know, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
When he eventually found his way into his hotel room at Limmer’s, he walked past the crowded entrance and shoved any men who wouldn’t move toward the walls. They scrambled back and stared as if he were mad. In that moment, he was.
Nathaniel quickly made his way through the trash-strewn lobby and hauled himself up the steep, wooden staircase. He needed to talk to Matthew and straighten out his thoughts. Before he did something stupid.
He tried Matthew’s door only to find it locked. He knocked. “Milton?” he called out. “Milton, I need to talk to you. Are you there?”
No movement came.
Nathaniel dug trembling fingers into the side of his head, trying to remain calm. A few weeks ago, Matthew had met some aristo widow on the riding path, and ever since it was as if the man had no intention of going back to his real life. Even though the swipe on his life was over and the boys were waiting for his return. God. If Matthew didn’t go back to New York, it would end more than the Forty Thieves. It would end what little virtue remained within the Five Points.
Nathaniel was to blame for all of this. He had brought Matthew here and had made a mess of not only the man’s life but his own. And for what? To face a father, who was waiting to die? To face his mother and his sister’s son and husband, who would only suffer if the truth about why he disappeared ever got out? All he wanted was for his father to admit his guilt and he could let it go. The past, after all, was done. Over. But how could he let go of a past that refused to be acknowledged?
Nathaniel unbolted his own leased room and whipped the door shut. Stripping his great coat and shirt, he dropped to the floor, planting both hands flat apart. Gritting his teeth, he commenced pushing his entire body up and down, trying to huff out the tension in his muscles.
He eventually lost count of body lifts at one hundred and eighty. His bare, sweat-sleeked shoulders, chest and arms burned in protest as he pushed on. When he could no longer lift his body in even takes, he rose to his feet and hissed out a harsh breath.
Swiping up his shirt, he buried his drenched face in it. Whipping it over his shoulder, he veered to the corner of the room and squatted, digging his fingers between loose floorboards. Prying one up, he reached into the narrow space beneath and carefully pulled out his sister’s diary. He had learned to depend upon holding it and touching it whenever he desperately needed to remind himself that someone had once thought him worthy of being in existence.
Smoothing a hand over the leather and sash, he veered back to the other side of the room and collapsed onto the sunken straw tick on the floor, his entire world swimming.
Digging his fingers hard into the leather of the diary he wished to God he had the strength to read, he tucked it beside him and whipped off the linen shirt from his shoulder.
He could still see his father’s veined hand reaching up, attempting to touch his face. He could still hear those hoarse, broken words. “No one needs to know. Let me die first. Then the world can know.”
Nathaniel lay there, staring unblinkingly at nothing, unable to push out the reality that his father had indeed knowingly left him in that cellar to rot.
Dazed, Nathaniel drifted into a deep sleep he hadn’t known in years. When he eventually awoke, he found himself staring at a cracked, mud-smeared window. The light of the day filtering through that window was fading and edges of impending darkness fingered their way across the dank room.
The cellar.
Nathaniel gasped, his chest too tight to let in any air, as perspiration beaded his upper lip and forehead. He almost screamed in riled disbelief until he realized there was a window. Not just walls and a door. There was a window.
He drew air into his lungs, trying to steady himself and his mind. Jesus Christ. Rolling onto his back, he blankly stared up at the ceiling, knowing his father and all of London would be at the event the duke was hosting.
Nothing would ever be able to make him forget his days and years spent in that cellar. Not whilst he lived. And not whilst his father lived.
A large roach crawled in tick-tick-ticks across the uneven planked floor, taunting him into joining the lower species. Picking up Auggie’s diary, Nathaniel rose onto booted feet. Striding over to the wooden crate where he kept his leather belt, pistol and dagger, he knew what needed to be done.
CHAPTER EIGHT
What Devil could have provoked him to exhibit his wonderful stock of honour, virtue, and benevolence in so public a manner, I am at a loss to divine.
—P. Egan, Boxiana (1823)
The following night
AS IF ON CUE, eight well-muscled footmen in powdered white wigs scrambled into a firm shoulder-to-shoulder body wall, preventing Nathaniel’s entry to the vast ballroom beyond the foyer.
He stared toward that glittering world majestically showcased by shimmering crystal chandeliers and oversize gilded mirrors that reflected rows and rows of candlelight and silk and color. Refined music from violins and flutes mingled with the thrumming gaiety of countless cultured voices that drifted out toward him into the corridor.
It was the life he had been born into.
Once upon a fucking time.
He tightened his gloved hold on the hilt of his dagger sheathed within the scabbard belted to his hip and knew the only way he was go
ing to get in was by announcing himself. “Inform His Grace that Viscount Atwood has at long last arrived in London and wishes to see him.”
One of the footmen squinted, clearly doubting his intentions based on not only the dagger but his appearance.
He knew he should have brushed his hair. “His Grace is expecting me.”
The footman hesitated.
“The duke married my sister,” he added with hardened authority. “That makes me his brother-in-law. Now take your fancy prick of a wig and get him before I put your liver into your hand and make you swallow it through your nostrils.”
“Stay here,” the man ordered, jogging down the corridor and disappearing into the ballroom.
The line of footmen rigidly held their place but didn’t meet his gaze.
He obliged them by doing the same.
Hurried steps eventually made him glance toward the direction of the ballroom. The Duke of Wentworth darted out of the masses, followed by the footman.
Dressed in full evening attire that made the man look strong and debonair, the duke waved aside the line of footmen. “Stand back. All of you.” He reached out and squeezed his arm, his aged face and dark eyes brightening. “By God. Atwood. You do us great honor.”
“I wish I had come in better spirits.” Nathaniel set his shoulders and stepped outside of the duke’s reach, trying to stay focused. “Is my mother here?” He wanted to make sure she wasn’t.
“No. She left a short while ago. She wasn’t feeling particularly well.”
Nathaniel swiped his face. “Is she very ill? How serious is it?”
“The doctors aren’t certain as to what happened, but one side of her face collapsed. The poor woman hasn’t the means to even smile and suffers from severe headaches.”
Nathaniel’s shock yielded to fury. “Jesus Christ. And you’re letting her attend events?”
Forever a Lord Page 8