The family had not been pleased by his absence though and he knew now he should have handled things with more aplomb than he had.
His right cheek ached from where Sephora Connaught had scratched him, three dark lines running from eye to chin caught in the reflection of the glass that he held. He hoped they would not fester like the wound had on the other cheek as he closed his eyes.
When he had thrown himself off the bridge today part of him had hoped he might not again surface and that he would be celebrated as a hero when he failed to reappear. Such a legacy of valour might sweeten the nightly howls of the Douglas ancestors whose portraits lined the steep stairwell as he walked to his bedroom late at night and there was some comfort in imagining it such before the truth of his life was torn apart again by gossip and conjecture.
He was alone and running from a past that kept reaching out, even here in a quiet, warm room and in the company of friends. Lifting the glass of brandy to his lips, he finished the lot.
‘You look like a man who needs to unload his demons, Francis.’ Gabriel said this, his voice close and worried. ‘Adelaide thinks you have the same appearance as I did when I first met her, swathed in secrets and regrets.’
‘How did she cure you, then?’
‘Oh, a good wife has her ways, believe me, and mine was never a woman to give up.’
Lucien joined in the conversation now. ‘It’s what you need, a woman with gumption, spirit and humour.’
‘And where do you think I shall find this paragon that you describe?’ The brandy was loosening his tongue and stilling the shakes and with the blanket about his shoulders he was finally feeling warmer and safe.
‘Perhaps you have just done so, but do not know it yet.’
Francis frowned in sheer disbelief. ‘Lady Sephora Connaught is engaged to be married to the only son of a duke. A slight impediment, would you not say, even given the fact I have not yet shared one word with her.’
‘But you will. She will have to thank you for risking your life and I am certain jumping into a dangerous freezing river must have its compensations.’
‘Is it the brandy that is making you both talk nonsense for I am damned sure that the so-called “angel of the ton” would have enough sense to keep well away from me?’
‘You paint yourself too poorly, Francis. Seth Greenwood’s cousin, Adam Stevenage, said that you had tried to save Seth. He said that you held him up out of the mud for all the hours of the day and it was the cold that killed him come the dusk.’ Lucien said this softly, but with conviction.
‘Stop.’ The word came with an anger Francis could not hide and he turned away from the glances of both his friends. ‘You know nothing of what happened at Hutton’s Landing.’
‘Then tell us. Let us help you understand it instead of beating yourself up with the consequences.’
Francis shook his head, but he could not halt the words that came. ‘Stevenage is wrong. I killed Seth with my own stupidity.’
‘How?’
‘It was greed. He wanted to leave after the first lucky strike, but I persuaded him to stay.’
‘For how long?’
‘A month or more.’
‘Thirty days?’ Lucien stood now and walked to the window. ‘Enough time for him to have changed his mind if he had wanted to. How long did you have to think about jumping into that river today?’
Francis frowned, not quite catching his drift, and Lucien went on.
‘Two seconds, five seconds, ten?’
‘Two, probably.’ He gave the answer quietly.
‘Did you think about changing your mind in those seconds?’
‘No.’
‘Well, Seth Greenwood had millions and millions of those same seconds, Francis, and neither did he. Would it have been our fault if you had jumped today and never resurfaced? Should we have languished in guilt forever because of your decision to try and rescue Lady Sephora Connaught? Are one man’s actions another man’s cross to bear for eternity if things don’t quite turn out as they should?’
Gabriel began to laugh and brought the bottle of brandy over to refill their glasses.
‘You should have taken to the law, Luce, and you to the ministry, Francis. Arguments and guilt have their own ways of tangling a man’s mind and no doubt about it. But here’s to friendship. And to all the life that’s left,’ he added as their glasses clicked together in the fading dimness of the library.
‘Thank you.’ Francis felt immeasurably better, lightened by a logic he had long since lost a hold of. He’d been mired in his guilt, it was true, stuck in the darkness like a man who had run out of hope and could not go on.
He had to move forward. He had to live again and believe that all he had lost could be found. Happiness. Joy. The energy to be true to himself.
He’d heard a voice, too, before he had jumped, from above or in his head he knew not which. A voice he knew and loved; a voice instructing him to save the girl in order to save himself and to be whole again.
God, was he going mad? Was this insanity the result of excessive introspection and guilt? Raising his glass, he drank of it deeply and thought that he had only told his friends the good half of a long and damn sordid story because the other part was too painful for anyone to ever have to listen to.
Five days later his butler came into his library with a heavy frown upon his face.
‘There is a gentleman to see you, Lord Douglas. From Hastings, my lord. He has given me this.’
Walsh passed over a card and Francis looked down. Mr Ignatius Wiggins, Lawyer. ‘Show him in, Walsh.’
The man was small and dressed in unfashionable clothes of brown. He looked nervous as he fidgeted with a catch on the leather case that he held before him like a shield.
‘I am the appointed counsel of Mr Clive Sherborne, my lord, and I have come to tell you that he has been murdered, sir, in Hastings a week ago. It was quick by all accounts, a severed throat and a knife to the kidney.
Good Lord, Francis thought. He stood to digest the brutality of such an ending and thought of the deceased. He had met him only once for he’d come to the Douglas town house with his wife, a garish but handsome-looking woman of low character and poor speech. They had come with the express purpose of informing his uncle about the birth of a baby whom they insisted was his by-blow. Wiggins had accompanied them.
Lynton St Cartmail had been furious and wanted nothing to do with such a hoax. Blackmail, he’d called it, Francis remembered, as he had ordered them summarily gone.
Clive Sherborne, however, had taken the child they had brought with them in his arms, a crying-reddened baby with dark lank hair and pale skin, even as he promised that he would instruct a lawyer to call on the fourth Earl of Douglas. His voice had been gentle and sad, a man who had not looked like the type to be murdered so heinously years later and Francis wondered what had happened in the interim to make it thus.
‘Mr Sherborne had asked me to inform you of any significant events in his household, my lord, and so I am—informing you, I mean, about his death. A significant event by anyone’s standards.’
‘Indeed it is, Mr Wiggins.’ Francis wondered briefly whether the mother, Sherborne’s wife, was still alive and what had become of the girl child. He wondered why Wiggins had come back, too, given the amount of years that had passed since last being here.
‘The deceased