Sophia James - A Secret Consequence For The Viscount

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.

She nodded her head in order to underline such a truth.

Her own heart was beating so fast and strong she could see the motion of it beneath the thick woollen bodice of her blue-wool gown. Eleanor wondered if she might simply perish with the shock of it before she ever saw him.

Sitting down, she took a deep breath, placing her head in her hands and closing her eyes.

She needed to calm herself. This was the moment she had dreamed about for years and years and it was not supposed to be anything like this. She should be running down the stairs calling his name, joy in her voice and delight in her eyes.

Instead she stood and found her white wrap to wind it tightly about her shoulders because, whether she wanted to admit it or not, there had been a hesitancy and a withdrawal between them on the last night they had been together.

He’d seen her off, of course, in his carriage, but he had not acted then like a man who was desperate for her company.

‘Thank you, Eleanor.’ He had said that as he’d moved back and away from the kiss she had tried to give him, as if relieved for the space, his glance sliding to the ground.

He had not even stayed to watch her as the conveyance had departed, the emptiness reflected in her own feelings of dread.

So now, here, six years later she could not quite fathom where such an absence left her. What if she went downstairs now and saw this thought exactly on his face? Would her heart break again? Could she even withstand it?

She had to see him. She had to find in his velvet-brown eyes the truth between them. There was a mistake, a misunderstanding, a wrongness she could not quite identify.

Her feet were on the stairs before she knew it, hurrying down. A short corridor and then the library, the door closed against her. Without hesitation she pushed the portal open and strode through.

Nicholas Bartlett, Viscount Bromley, was sitting on the wing chair by the fire and he looked nothing like how she remembered him.

His clothes were dirty, his hair unshaped, but it was the long curling scar that ran from one corner of his eye almost to his mouth that she saw first.

Ruined.

His beautiful handsome face had been sliced in half.

‘Eleanor.’ Her brother had risen and there was delight in his expression. ‘Nicholas has been returned to us safely from all his years abroad in the Americas. He will be staying here at our town house for a time.’

‘The Americas...?’ She could only stand and stare, for although Nicholas Bartlett had also risen he made no effort at all to cross the floor to greet her. Rather he stood there with his brandy held by a hand that was dressed with a dirty bandage and merely tipped his head.

In formal acknowledgement. Like a stranger might do or an acquaintance. His cheeks were flushed, the eyes so much harder than she remembered them being and his countenance brittle somehow, all sureness gone.

For a second she could not quite think what to say.

‘It has been a long time.’ Foolish words. Words that might be construed as hanging her heart on her sleeve?

He nodded and the thought of his extreme weariness hit her next. Lifting her hand to her heart, she stayed quiet.

‘Six years,’ he returned as if she had not been counting, as though he needed to give her the time precisely because the duration had been lost in the interim.

Six years, seventeen weeks and six days. She knew the time almost to the very second.

‘Indeed, my lord.’ She swallowed then and saw her brother looking at her, puzzlement across his face, for the hard anger in her voice had been distinct.

‘You welcome my best friend back only with distant words, Eleanor, when you seemed most distraught at his disappearance?’

God, she would have to touch him. She would have to put her arms around his body and pretend he was nothing and nobody. Just her brother’s friend. The very thought of that made her swallow.