‘The black, I think. And don’t wait up for me tonight, for I shall be late.’
‘You said the same yesterday, my lord. And the night before that.’
Cristo smiled. Milne’s frailty worried him, but the old man had too much pride to just take the substantial amount of money that Cristo had tried to give him and retire. Paris had aged him, too. Just one more blame resting upon his shoulders with the shady dealings in the Château Giraudon, sordid repayment for Milne’s devotion and loyalty and belief. In him. It was a relief to leave it all behind.
‘My brothers should be here within the hour. If you could show them up.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
‘And if you could ask the housekeeper to prepare tea.’
‘Yes, my lord.’
He placed the bottle of brandy on his desk inside a cabinet and closed the doors. Alcohol was one of the factors in his lengthy estrangement and he did not wish for the evidence to be anywhere on show. Tea seemed an acceptable substitute.
The cravat at his throat felt as restrictive as the dark blue waistcoat lying over his crisp white shirt and the new tight boots hurt his heels.
‘Asher Wellingham, the Duke of Carisbrook, my lord,’ Milne announced, ‘and his brother, Lord Taris Wellingham.’
Cristo stood as the two men walked into the room, a scar that ran under Taris’s left eye giving the first cause for concern, though Cristo showed no evidence of it as he waited for speech. Asher and Taris looked older and harder. Neither smiled.
‘So you are back.’ Ashe had never been a man to beat around the bush.
‘It seems that I am.’ Cristo didn’t care for the cautiousness he heard so plainly in his words, but the distance between them was measured in a lot more than the few feet of his library floor.
‘You have blatantly ignored our many efforts to stay in touch with you,’ Ashe reminded him. ‘Over the years the notes you sent back indicated you held no fondness at all for the name of Wellingham or indeed for us. Yet here you are.’ Each word held a sharp undercurrent of blame.
‘Are you well?’ Taris spoke now, a note in the question that unexpectedly tipped Cristo off balance.
‘Very.’ Even in the many skirmishes of Paris his heart had not beaten so fast.
Asher looked around the room, taking in the lack of ornamentation, he supposed. Or of belongings! Taris’s glance, on the other hand, never wavered once.
‘Alice always hoped you would return.’ Ashe again. The barb tore at Cristo’s composure and he looked away.
Alice! The only mother he had ever known. Damn them. He felt the hand in his pocket grip the skin on his thigh. Damn England and damn family. Damn the hope that had never been extinguished, even in the most terrible of times.
‘As it seems you are here to stay, I have arranged your introduction back into society and the family fold in the guise of a theatre visit. With a lot of darkness and distraction we should at least look as if we enjoy being a family and if this is going to work at all, appearances matter.’
Ashe’s irony was so very easily heard.
Cristo nodded, not trusting himself with more. He had left England vowing never to return, his wild ways at Cambridge inflaming loyalties and stretching the already-frayed love of his family. He had never fitted in, never dovetailed into the strict and rigid codes his father had laid down and when everything had finally unravelled after Nigel Bracewell-Lowen had died in the cemetery in the village near his home, Cristo’s father had been the first to tell him that he was not a true Wellingham, or a legitimate son of Falder.
Cristo swallowed back the bile of remembrance as he remembered his father’s final tirade. Ashborne had dallied with a French woman on his travels, a small meaningless tryst he had said that was ‘ill-advised, wrong-headed, inappropriate and more than foolish’. The words still had the power to hurt even all these years later, for what did one say to a parent so condemning of his very conception and of the woman who had birthed him?
The other side of the coin had also held damage. Alice, his stepmother, had taken him in at Falder and loved him like her own and if a whisper of his true parentage was ever mentioned he had not heard of it. The three-month-old Cristo de Caviglione had become a Wellingham, his name written into the family Bible by Alice’s very hand. She had told him that much later when the tensions between him and his father had resulted in the truth being thrown in his face and she had hurried to London to plead with Cristo to stay.
Love and anger entwined in deceit, and now a different duplicity. Cristo hated the beaded sweat on his upper lip as his oldest brother outlined his plans for the evening.
‘Our wives shall also be accompanying us to the theatre.’ The tone Asher used was so very English.
Emerald Seaton and Beatrice-Maude Bassing-stoke! Cristo had kept up with the family gossip while in Paris and the two women were by all accounts as formidable as his brothers. He wished suddenly that he might have had a formidable woman at his side, too, dismissing the thought with a shake of his head.
‘There are bridges to cross if you are to gain acceptance here, given the wild ways of your youth and of your questionable exploits in Paris.’ Taris tilted his eyebrows in a way that gave the impression of searching.
‘I quite understand,’ Cristo answered quickly. A public place would ensure distance and formality, the baser emotions of blame and redress submerged beneath the need for ‘face’. Years and years of an upbringing that revered the word ‘proper’ would at least see to that. It was a relief.
The tea that his housekeeper bustled in with seemed a long way from the good idea that he had initially thought it, and her rosy smiling face was the antithesis of all expressions in the library.
When she left he was glad, the plumes of steam from the teapot and the three china cups and saucers beside it little harbingers of a life that he had left and lost, a very long time ago.
Ashe was already showing signs of retreat. ‘Then we will see you tonight.’
‘You will.’
‘At half-past seven.’
‘On the dot.’
Taris raised the black ebony cane he held towards the teapot. The dimpled silver ball on the end of it glimmered in the light. ‘I’d like a cup.’
‘It’s tea, Taris.’ Ashe’s explanation was given quietly.
‘I know.’
‘You don’t damn well drink the stuff.’
Cristo watched as Taris brought out a hip flask from his jacket pocket and unscrewed the top. ‘I just asked for a cup.’
Merde. Cristo remembered his brothers’ banter with an ache. Many years younger, he had never really been a part of such repartee, no matter how much he had wanted it.
Reopening the cupboard door, he raised two crystal glasses from the green baize beside a new bottle and placed the lot down before them. ‘Help yourselves.’
‘You won’t join us?’ Ashe again.
‘I try to ration myself these days.’
‘Ashborne would be pleased to know of it.’
The mention of their father fell bitter between them, the past knitting uneasily into a growing silence.
‘I doubt he would care much either way, actually.’
His meaning settled on his brothers’ faces as a question and he wished he might have taken such bitterness back, the sheer anger in his words giving away much more than he had wanted.
‘Perhaps you did not know that