A Secret Consequence for the Viscount

by Sophia James

  ‘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

  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.