by Sophia James
Oliver raised his glass towards him as he took a seat on the leather sofa by the windows.
‘Here’s to your return and to the future.’ His smile was wide and honest. ‘You were my first true friend here in England and it’s good to have you back.’
‘It’s good to be here, Oliver.’
‘God, Nick, I was such a green boy back then, wasn’t I? One day at a new school and they were already teasing me about my Indian background and the colour of my skin and of the different way I spoke, until you showed up.’
‘With my ire up and fists flying. I’d been practising my boxing skills at Bromworth Manor that summer holiday if I remember correctly and wanted to put them into practice.’
Oliver shook his head. ‘It was much more than that, I would say. There were two of us and ten of them and you had a split lip and a black eye for weeks after and a broken wrist to boot. But they never bothered me again.’ He twirled the crystal stem of his wineglass in hand before glancing up. ‘I used to think of that after you had gone and for years I combed the city for you and paid agents to try and understand what had happened in the back alley of Vitium et Virtus. Even when people said that there was no hope left I always held out for some...’ He stopped and took a drink. ‘So here is to our friendship, Nick, and to brotherhood and to finding the bastard who did this to you. We are all in this you know. We all have your back.’
‘I do know and I thank you for it and when I have need of help I will let you know. Coming back again has been a revelation, all the differences and the changes. I have never seen you look quite so happy. Where did you meet Cecilia?’
Oliver stretched his long legs out before him as he took his time to answer. ‘In Paris. She was at the time employed in a gentlemen’s club and went under the name of Madame Coquette. She was quite famous.’ The laughter in his eyes made it known the story was not exactly as he said it.
Nick drank deeply before answering, ‘Here’s to women who are not boring, then, and who know how to please a man.’
‘Oh, a good woman is much more than that, Nicholas. To be with someone you love is about the warmth of friendship and the certainty of a future. There’s a comfort, too, in the complete absence of lies and after living a life like mine that is more than a relief.’
‘By the sound of things you have all found women with as many secrets as your own. Perhaps that is the trick of happiness?’
‘I think fate plays a hand, too, and timing.’
‘I’ll drink to that.’ But all Nick could think of as he smiled was the lost week that Eleanor Huntingdon was doing her best to try to make him remember.
* * *
‘Eleanor Huntingdon is helping Nicholas retrieve his memory.’ Oliver said this to Cecilia when he returned home for she was waiting up for him in the morning room.
‘Is he recalling anything else leading up to his disappearance?’
‘Seems he is not, but Jake’s sister is squiring him around town, trying her hardest to facilitate his memory.’
‘Were they close? Before this happened, I mean?’
‘I can’t remember. I didn’t think so, but...’
‘I hear all sorts of accounts of Lord Bromley wherever I go. He was somewhat wild, I gather, and seldom seen out of the company of women.’
‘He was lonely. Like me.’ Pulling her from the wing chair, he sat down himself and settled her on his lap. ‘You are warm and comfortable, my love.’
She laughed at that. ‘Like an old slipper?’
‘Warm and comfortable and sensual as hell,’ he amended and kissed her.
‘That’s better.’ She leaned back against him, her rich brown hair released from its pins and clips burnished in the firelight. ‘Eleanor Huntingdon is strong and sensible and I have liked her a lot each time I have met her. She is not a lightweight woman, yet she holds secrets and they worry her.’
‘Such intuition is not to be trifled with. I concur with your conclusions.’
‘Perhaps Nick is the man to help her, then? The way you speak of him, Oliver, gives me the impression that he was never afraid of anything.’
‘The attraction of opposites, you mean?’
‘Well, if he was reckless and dissolute you also said that he wasn’t a man who was unfair. And if he is lonely...?’
‘Perhaps they might find solace in one another?’
He was now laughing so much he could barely kiss her although he tried. ‘Are you by any chance lending your hand to that dubious art of matchmaking, sweetheart?’
‘If I invited them for afternoon tea, would you promise to be circumspect, Oliver? We could then test the waters, so to speak.’
‘Let’s go to bed right now and I will show you just how circumspect I can be.’
Oliver lifted her up then and their reflection caught in the window, light against dark, and he wondered anew as to how he had been lucky enough to find such contentment.
Happy chance and good fortune. The two blessings had been largely missing in his life before he had met Cecilia. He hoped with all his heart that Nick might finally find the same.
* * *
After Oliver left Nick retired to his bedchamber, the blues on the walls restful and mellow. He’d loved this room and coming in here as a young boy to curl up on the enormous bed with his parents and talk.
The same slice of regret ran over him, far more remote than it had once been, but still there none the less. Their deaths were the point where his life had begun to spin out of control, a wildness growing that became unchecked and complete.
The clock on the mantel chimed one. It was late and yet the night felt alive. With ideas and thoughts and hopes.
Cecilia was pregnant. Oliver had told Nicholas that under the threat of confidentiality. A new life. Another generation and the responsibility of guiding and teaching a child about what it was to live well.
As Eleanor had taught her daughter?
‘Lucy.’ He said the name out loud, liking the sound of it. A little girl. He wondered if she looked like her mother. He hoped she had Eleanor Huntingdon’s vivid blue eyes and brave spirit.
His glance fell on the piano in the far corner of the room and he walked over to pull out the seat. He had not played in years and he wondered why the instrument had been left here in this room when piano playing was so much outside his uncle’s endeavour or intention.
Setting his fingers above the keys, he began to beat out the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. He recalled so much more of his early years when he played. That’s why he had stopped in the first place, he supposed, out of pure sorrow. It was also why he could never quite abandon it.
He did not know when he’d started thinking about the music instead of hearing the notes. It was after his parents had died and he’d returned in the holidays to the cold unwelcoming Bromworth Manor. It was in loneliness that he’d gained the nuances of the pedal and had started to notice that silences, too, could be shaped by emotion.
He did this now even after all these years of awayness. He rode the edge of the beauty between easy and hard, and was absorbed in the sweet and powerful truth of the notes.
He’d never played for anyone, not even Jacob or Frederick or Oliver. He doubted they even knew he could hold down a tune. No, the music was his alone, his and his parents. A connection. Him on one side and them on the other. After his conversation with Eleanor today such a realisation was enlightening.
* * *
Lack of sleep made Nick feel wary though in those brief moments it had found him, his dreams had been strange amorphous ones full of ghosts and dead people.
It was the piano, he supposed, and the music that had wrapped around his regret and brought his parents closer. Jacob’s older brother Ralph had been there, too, with surprise on his visage at his newfound demise, blood still at his temple. Th
e world they inhabited had been full of clouds and mist and fireworks.
That thought brought a frown because his mother had always hated the noise of them.
Eleanor was waiting for him outside Lackington, Allen & Co., a blue bonnet tied firmly under her chin and in a coat the colour of a churning winter ocean. He thought for a moment she had never looked more beautiful or more vulnerable.
‘You are early?’ He said the words as a question, stopping himself from reaching out and taking her hand again. It was a good ten minutes before the hour she had allotted as their meeting point yesterday.
‘Last time I was early, too.’
She did not look at him directly as she said this, her glance sliding away and a hitch in her voice. The façade of the Temple of the Muses was shining, whether from the recent rains or from the lightness of the clouds he could not tell.
‘You once told me that you had bought the book Robinson Crusoe from here and read it in a day.’ She said this as they walked up the stairs into the main room with its imposing galleried dome.
‘One of the few I ever purchased, then, according to the state of my library.’ He liked her soft laughter. ‘Actually Oliver Gregory returned the Defoe copy to me last night when he dropped in for a drink. He also said he’d seen us outside Fortnum and Mason a few days before I disappeared. What was it we were doing there?’
‘Buying wine as a celebration.’
‘What were we celebrating?’
‘I can’t really remember.’ Her cheeks flamed and the memory of something was so firmly written on her face that Nick knew she lied.
* * *
The wine was a celebration of our first kiss here at Lackington, Allen & Co. at Finsbury Square.
It had been summer and the day had been hot and so they had gone to find chilled wine and a small hamper of food for a picnic by the Serpentine.
Then, he had looked at her as if she was the most beautiful woman he could imagine. Now he only appeared perplexed. At her poorly formed falsity probably and her reddened cheeks. She had not blushed in six years and now she was doing so on an hourly basis.
Well, it had to stop. She was no longer eighteen and foolish and Nicholas Bartlett was hardly going to take her hand and run laughing through the streets in search of sweet treats and then kiss the dusted sugar off each finger as she ate them.
The sheer absurdity of it made her smile.
She noticed that everyone watched him, covertly, his sheer presence now impossible to miss. At six foot two he had to bend at the portal, yet he filled the room with such a masculine grace and power that it took her breath away.
‘I visit the library every time I come down from Millbrook House to London.’
‘And is that often?’
‘As little as I can possibly manage it, truth be told. Usually only at Christmas.’
‘The life of a widow is a quiet one, then? Tell me, where did your husband hail from?’
‘Scotland.’
‘Fred Challenger says he was from Edinburgh and Oliver Gregory swears it was the Highlands. There is a difference?’
She felt suddenly sick and a sheen of sweat built on her top lip. ‘You have been asking about me?’ He was a man who could discover facts about her past that few others could. If he put the timings of her return together and the birth of Lucy...
‘Only in passing, but I am sorry for your tragedy, Eleanor. It must have been hard to be so alone.’
‘I have my daughter.’
‘And I am glad of it.’
He did not patronise her or give unwanted advice. He spoke only in words that were simple and true.
It must have been hard to be so alone.
Because he had been lonely, too, she thought. In childhood on the death of his parents and in the wild dangerous antics of his youth. In the card rooms of London when the numbers never added up and he was left with a handful of debtors shouting for payment and an uncle who was withholding his inheritance. Certainly in his restless years abroad when he had shifted from place to place with an unknown killer on his tail and a memory that gave him no recall of peril.
Even here now, in the over-stacked salons of Lackington’s, he looked unapproachable and out of place.
For a second she wondered if she had the heart to climb the steps to the small scientific reading room they had visited last time and find the quiet spot at the end of a row of shelves. Could it ever be again like it was, that young unbridled love, breathless with passion? Giddy with the thrall?
Now she was shy of him in a way she had not once been for she’d seen the glances every woman had thrown his way no matter where they went. Desire had that certain raw and hungry look she hoped could not be discerned on her own face.
‘Penny for your thoughts, Eleanor?’
She smiled at his question and gestured to him to follow her.
Every leather-bound tome looked as if it had not been touched for years, the dust settled in the interim. The view was a fine one, however, and he went to the window to peer over London.
‘When I arrived here I thought everything looked so neat. The houses, the streets, the people.’
‘America is more wild, I suppose. Less ordered.’
‘It is in parts, but there is a sort of beauty in that. Perhaps it was the same for you in Scotland?’
‘Scotland?’
‘Where you lived with your husband?’
‘Oh, yes, it was.’
Digging into his pocket, he felt the small plaited bracelet and brought it out on his palm to show her.
‘Is this yours, Eleanor? I found it in a wooden box on the mantelpiece in my library.’
She began crying just like that, one moment shocked and the next inconsolable, large tears running down her cheeks even as her hands came to wipe them away.
Crossing the room, he took her in his arms and liked how her head fitted exactly beneath his chin, the warmth and softness of her astonishingly right. She smelt of violets and freshness. He knew the moment she gained control because she stiffened and pulled away.
‘I am sorry.’
He noticed that she held the colourful circle of thread tightly in her fist as though she might never let it go.
‘It is valuable?’
‘To me? Yes.’
* * *
Eleanor could feel her bottom lip still quivering and knew her eyes were red. When he gave her his kerchief she blew into it and then began to worry because she did not quite know whether to hand it back to him or tuck it into her sleeve to wash later.
These huge swings of emotion were something she had not felt with Nicholas six years ago in the happy haze of their new love. Then it had been easy and light.
Now everything weighed heavily upon them. Their past and their future and the present, too, because there was a danger close that she could not quite decipher.
She had given him her bracelet after he had made love to her. A circle of threads plaited for her by her mother from her tapestry basket and beaded at the end in the colours of primrose, green, cerulean-blue and coquelicot-red. When she’d explained how important it was he had held the gift and looked as though she had given him the world.
Today the limp gaudy bracelet had appeared tired and out of place between his thumb and forefinger, fingers that gave no impression at all of being that of a cosseted lord. There were small thin white scars across his knuckles now.
The hand of a fighter, the hand of one who had endured much hardship. A tougher hand altogether.
And yet when he had held her in his arms a few minutes ago all those elements of danger, menace, toughness and peril had only made her feel safe.
‘I did not sleep well last night, my lord, and I am sorry for such an outburst.’ She felt she needed to explain.
‘Did I give you anything back in return?’
‘Pardon?’
‘When you gave me the bracelet, did I find something of mine for you?’
Another kiss. She nearly said it.
Instead she shook her head and simply looked at him, at the small gold chips at the outer edges of his brown eyes, at the wound on his cheek which today seemed lessened and a part of him, another way of how his time in the Americas had been imprinted into now.
He was even more handsome than he had been, the hard and thinner planes of his face melding into high cheekbones and a strong chin. Not in the manner of the Greek gods, unmarred and perfect, but following in the fashion of a Norse one, scarred by battle and war and the fighting arts held dear by the Viking marauders.
He could protect Lucy and her. From everything.
He had kissed her right here last time in the slant of sunbeams coming in from the window. He had taken her hand and pulled her into him, slowly, never looking away, and with his fingers in the nape of her hair his mouth had come down upon her own, allowing no escape as he had deepened the connection and taken her heart.
Unforgettable.
Eleanor stood there in the dim winter light and wished with everything she had that he might remember.
* * *
Something had happened here in this room last time. He could see the shadow of it in eyes remote with memory. He touched her lightly.
‘The scent in the bracelet is violets. Your scent. Why did you give it to me?’
‘You had told me of how you had lost your parents and I wished to make you happy again.’
‘My parents?’
‘You said you played the piano sometimes to remember them. You said you felt them close just there on the other side of the music.’
Shock tore through his equilibrium.
‘You said sometimes when you could not sleep you played the Moonlight Sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven to try and reach them and you felt you did.’