A Secret Consequence for the Viscount

by Sophia James

  A dubious talent and one that told others much about the life he had lived in the interim. He had seen Jacob and Frederick watching him with questions in their eyes. He was only glad that Jacob’s sister had retired early because this acquired skill was not attractive.

  He would need to leave for Bromworth Manor soon. That thought had him swallowing more of his whisky and standing to look out of the window.

  The orderliness of London was what had struck him first on his return. The neat lines of houses and the straight roads. The lights added to the illusion that the city went on for ever, stretching from east to west in a long and unbroken tableau. Virginia and Georgia and the Carolinas had been wild and lonely places. Sometimes he had walked between settlements for a week or more and seen no one.

  Tonight he had panicked badly in that room of Frederick’s with almost a hundred people in it and Eleanor had noticed and helped him. If she had not been there he wondered what might have happened. If she had not led him to that secluded room, he had no faith in thinking he would have coped.

  He did not trust himself any more to act accordingly, to function here, to blend in with the ton whilst he tried to understand just who it was here who meant him harm.

  If it was his uncle then it would be easy to negate any danger, but Eleanor’s question had set his mind running in other directions.

  ‘You think it is another?’

  His father’s brother might have the motivation to see him dead in England, but he doubted the man had the drive or the contacts to send someone after him to the Americas. If it was not him, then it would need to be an enemy with a good deal of money to spare and a large axe to grind. He could think of any number of past acquaintances who might have fitted that bill given his debauched behaviour as a young viscount of means.

  His sins were returning to roost. If he could only remember his missing week, he thought, he might know the perpetrator, but not one drip of recall had come through the solid curtain of mist.

  He needed to sleep to be focused on his journey later that day and yet he did not seek his bed. Rather he stood and watched the moon and the sky and the cold gleam of freshly falling snow on the roadway in front of the Westmoor town house, his isolation making him shiver.

  Chapter Five

  Bromworth Manor was exactly as he remembered, the dark trees that ran along the drive towards it as forbidding as they always had been with their twisted limbs and branches.

  The family seat stood proud before a wooded hill overlooking an ornamental lake. Built for defence in the early fourteenth century, the remains of a moat and drawbridge could still be seen to one side, the stonework on this part of the building cruder and darker than its paler, more modern counterpart.

  After the onset of the Palladian style a different profile had arisen around the fortress that was more beautiful and substantial. With its pale stone, large rounded windows and double-storeyed wings, Bromworth held the semblance of grandeur, history and wealth.

  His direct ancestors had lived here for hundreds of years. It was an estate that spoke of family and celebrations as well as defeats and tragedy. He remembered some of the portraits that lined the walls in the lower hall with a smile. Lovers, soldiers, keepers of the law were displayed there, each Viscount and his family afforded a position in the marching changes of history.

  His own visage had not been recorded. He had been very young when his parents had died and later, when a portrait might have been commissioned, he’d wanted little to do with the place at all.

  He remembered the local chaplain coming with one of the women from the church in the nearest village, their faces strained in concern as their words tumbled out, banishing his parents to another realm. A quick and final malady that had come on late one night while they were from home and left them both dead by the next. No hope to it. He was an orphan now with a guardian in the form of an uncle he barely knew.

  At eight he had had a hard time of imagining the concept of ‘for ever lost’ though it had soon started to impress itself on all the various strands of his life and he had rebelled against his new punitive reality with every fibre of his being.

  The first loss was the hardest, but there had been so many more since then. He was wearing Jacob’s boots and Frederick’s clothes and the winnings left over from yesterday’s card game was the only money in his pocket. Oliver had lent him a carriage and driver for the journey to Essex.

  He’d become a jigsaw of other people’s lives, the hard, distant core of him hidden from everyone. A man alone and struggling with it.

  The front portal creaked open before he had knocked and old Ramsey the butler stood there, his face showing a number of emotions before settling into a smile.

  ‘Lord Bromley.’ The man’s mouth worked as he tried to say other things, but could not. In the end the servant stepped forward and grabbed his hand, the tight warmth in the shake reassuring. ‘I cannot believe it is you, my lord. After all this time you are finally come home.’

  ‘Is Mr Bartlett in, Ramsey?’

  ‘He calls himself Lord Bromley now, my lord.’ That was given with a worried glance. ‘He believes you dead.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘In bed, I should imagine. He rarely rises before the noon hour and it is not yet that.’

  ‘Can you take me to him?’

  ‘With pleasure, my lord.’

  The man waved away a younger servant who stood behind him, stuck out his chest and walked to the large and winding staircase. ‘He has your old suite of rooms, Lord Bromley.’

  As they went Nicholas saw many of the paintings that lined the stairway had been changed. Dark, sombre strangers now peered down at him. After he tossed his uncle out of Bromworth Manor these would be the next things to go.

  The bedchamber was dull and muted, the curtains not yet drawn. Without glancing at the bed, Nick crossed to the windows and threw the shades back. The light fell on the man resting against his pillows, older now, but still as mean spirited and bad tempered as he always had been, his face suffused by a number of changing emotions.

  ‘You. But you are dead.’

  ‘Not quite, Uncle, though I imagine you to have had some say in the fact that I nearly was.’

  ‘Some say? Says who?’ Aaron Bartlett threw his head back and frowned as he pushed back the covers. Both cheeks were aflame with rosacea and his jowls had markedly thickened. He looked nothing at all like his brother.

  ‘Those who hit me in the back alley of Vitium et Virtus mentioned your name. They said it was you who had sent them.’ It was a lie, of course, as Nick had no memory of any of it, but his friends had told him the story of the pool of blood and the retrieval of his signet ring so he took the gamble. ‘You wanted the Bromley inheritances enough to kill for them.’

  The man opposite him had his feet to the floor now and sat. The shake in his hands could be seen easily even at this distance across the room. In his white nightgown he looked both a pathetic figure and a powerless one. For the first time he also looked frightened.

  ‘The men I sent to the alley were paid to merely scare you off. You cannot prove I meant to kill you. No court in the land would try me on that. You were out of control with your gambling and I was trying to stop you from ruining everything.’

  ‘After encouraging me in it for all the years before?’

  ‘The Bromley fortune, whilst rich, was not limitless and you rarely won after the first few flushes.’

  ‘So you sent assassins after me to the Americas in order to keep what was left?’

  ‘I dispatched no one across the ocean. Why should I have done so? You were already gone. Drowned in the Thames.’

  Such a confession sat congealing in the thick air of the chamber, a truth that held nothing in it save betrayal.

  ‘Get your things and leave. You have my p
ermission to use the Bromley carriage to take what you can carry away from here, but after this there will be nothing.’

  Nick was furious and shocked, the numbness of his uncle’s treachery creeping into coldness.

  ‘Nothing? Nothing?’ Bartlett stood now and bellowed the two words.

  ‘Less than nothing if you argue.’ His reply was quiet. ‘You have half an hour. After that I will have my servants throw you out.’

  ‘You cannot do that, for God’s sake. Your father wished for me to be a figure in your life...’

  ‘A cantankerous, avaricious greedy bastard is not what I imagine he had in mind and I owe you less than nothing. You are dead to me. A man who could have chosen a better path, but didn’t.’ He pointedly looked at his timepiece. ‘Twenty-nine minutes now.’

  At that Nick turned, ignoring the run of insults that followed him to the door as he shut it behind him and took in a breath. It was over. Aaron Bartlett was out of his life.

  * * *

  Exactly half an hour later his uncle stood before him, hastily dressed and furious.

  ‘This is not the end of this, mark my words. There will be legalities to deal with and the fact that you were all but dead for so many years—’

  Nicholas had had enough of his threats and, grabbing him by his shirt front, he hauled his uncle off his feet.

  ‘If you ever darken my door again, I won’t be as kind as I have been this time, do you understand? My advice would be to leave England before any creditors know you have gone, for this way you have a chance of leaving the country alive. If you stay, I will find you and deal with you as you dealt with me.’

  ‘You were out of control and reckless...’

  ‘Enough.’

  This time Bartlett blanched white and was silent and Nick, releasing his hold, allowed the butler to show Bartlett out. A few moments later Nick heard the movement of the carriage and the call of the driver.

  Gone.

  He thought back to all the moments he had hated his uncle and felt no remorse at all. His guardian was a heart-dead greedy sycophant, but worse than that he was immoral. He still held the thin scars on his arms where he’d been whipped time after time as a child when he had refused direction.

  The grave of the family dog his guardian had had shot was marked in the woods by all the shale and stones that Nicholas himself had buried him under, each one drenched in tears.

  His uncle had made him into a young man of wildness and anger, the responsibilities of love and family lost under greed.

  ‘Could I pour you a drink, Lord Bromley? There are some fine reds from your father’s collection that we managed to hide.’

  Ramsey looked both worried and relieved. ‘We have been waiting for your return, you see, my lord, for the reappearance of a master who was not...so immoral, I mean. Mrs Ramsey has ham and fresh bread in the kitchens should you wish for it and the chutney this year was particularly tasty.’

  ‘Thank you.’ When Nick looked at him closely there were tears in the old butler’s eyes. ‘I would like that.’

  * * *

  Ten minutes later he was sitting in front of a roaring fire in the large kitchen, the fare of the county on the table before him and an uncorked bottle of his father’s burgundy.

  A row of servants stood behind him, some known and some new. All looked tense and uncertain.

  ‘Find another few more glasses, Ramsey, and we will all partake in a toast.’

  He had never once in his years at Bromworth Manor spoken so familiarly to the staff and he had never before been in this room, the very heart of the place.

  He was once again lord of Bromworth Manor and lord of these lands, but there had been a shift inside him. He felt more comfortable with these people than he did with the gossiping aristocrats of the ton. He felt at home here, a belonging, a place to put down roots and stay.

  The very feeling calmed him and made him lighter. For the first time ever he felt he was following in the footsteps of his beloved father.

  The land held an ancient history, carried down by the centuries, of planting and nurturing. Perhaps it was the same with people? The rain, the soil, the forests, the hills. They were imprinted within him, known and familiar, a part of his understanding in the translation of life.

  In the Americas it had all been so foreign. Different seas and rivers and plants. Foreign languages and foods that he had no understanding of or liking for.

  The codes for being a Bromley had been ripped out of him, forgotten, lost in violence and circumstance. Here, the pattern reformed and carried on, the smells of the place, the sounds, the shadows and the light.

  A comradeship. A rightness.

  He picked up the cheese knife and looked at the crested end of it. Servire Populo. For the first time ever he understood exactly what it meant.

  * * *

  Much later he walked down to the small graveyard behind the ruined chapel, the stones of commemoration ill kept and unweeded.

  He found his parents’ graves side by side in one corner, the late winter sun still upon them, and he was glad for it.

  His fingers traced the words that he knew by heart. Their names. The dates of their births and deaths. The epitaph was short. Chosen by his uncle, he guessed, and conveying little.

  Until we meet again.

  The words made him smile as he imagined his father with his hands around the throat of his brother in an eternal celestial retribution when he arrived at the heavenly gates for judgement.

  Placing the wildflowers he had gathered on his mother’s stone, he bowed his head.

  Today he felt closer to them than he had felt in years.

  ‘I will become a better man.’ The words were out before he knew them said, slipping into the breeze, though when his good hand dug into his pocket to try to banish the cold he felt the hard outline of a set of dice. His injured hand ached with the effort of lifting Bartlett, but it was worth it.

  People arrived at the place they were meant to be even if they came with a past. It was how life worked. But the past did not have to define one just as the present did not. The future was his, here in Essex, in the ancient seat of the Bromleys. It was his to nurture, grow and tend to.

  Hope filled him. For Bromworth, for a new direction, for his friends and their support.

  For Eleanor Huntingdon.

  That name had him tensing. They barely knew one another, but she was there none the less in his mind, her smile, the way she spoke, the vivid blue of her eyes and the dark of her hair.

  He would like to show her this estate. He would like to walk with her and tell her all that had happened to him, as a child, as a youth, as a man, so that she might know of the darkness inside him.

  Of all the people in the world he thought she would be the one to understand.

  * * *

  Eleanor sat in the library at the Westmoor town house, stitching a complex tapestry of colourful nasturtiums, although her heart was not in it.

  At every noise outside she stopped to listen, every sound of horses and carriage, every call of a night bird or the far-off ringing of bells.

  Her brother and Rose had gone to a play at the Royal Coburg Theatre, but she knew Nicholas Bartlett was expected back from Essex tonight. She hoped it might be when the others were absent for she wanted to speak with him privately and make him an offer.

  An offer. Even the words sounded impossibly difficult.

  Placing down her stitching, she pulled back the fabric of her bodice and lifted up the gold chain that she always wore around her neck. The small ring brought a smile to her lips as her fingers closed about it.

  Blue zircon had a charm more captivating than the sophisticated diamonds which it sometimes imitated.

  They had found it in a jewellery shop in Piccadilly on the day they
had visited Lackington, Allen & Co. and Nicholas had purchased the trinket because the colour matched her eyes exactly.

  ‘Like blue starlight,’ he had said and she’d laughed, because of the fancy and daydream.

  She had worn it then on the third finger of her right hand, a troth, a promise, a way to the future that she could see so very easily before her.

  And even when he had disappeared she could not bear to have it away from her skin and so she had fastened it to a fragile chain her father had made her a gift of on her fifteenth birthday and she had worn it there every day since.

  She looked at the clock. Half past nine. Perhaps the Viscount was not returning from Bromworth Manor tonight after all. Perhaps things had gone awry with the uncle that her brother had said Nicholas had gone to expel from the family estate. Perhaps there had been a fight or an accident on the road like her father and Ralph had had. She shook that thought away.

  Jacob had told her this morning that Nicholas was almost certain his guardian had been the one to waylay him in the alley. After today there would be no more looking over one’s shoulder and expecting trouble, for if he knew the perpetrator of all his problems he could deal with the man summarily. She breathed out with decided relief and was pleased for the decisions she had made last night to help Nicholas Bartlett with his lost week.

  Noises came through the quiet and then there was the sound of horses and bustle, a called-out goodbye and footsteps leading up the steps. After that the front door closed behind the newcomer and his voice reached her with its deep and steady tones, hints of another land in the cadence.

  Eleanor hastily tidied herself and put her needle through the next stitch needing execution. She also quietened her nerves as best she could.

  ‘You are up still?’

  He looked more relaxed then he had yesterday. The boots he wore now were Jacob’s. She recognised the engraved silver buckles.

  ‘I seldom retire before ten.’ She gave this back to him and was glad when he came into the room and sat in the chair opposite.