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.
He had not moved at all from his place by the fire and he had not put his glass down either. Stay away, such actions said. Stay on your side of the room and I shall stay on mine.
‘I am glad to see you, Lord Bromley. I am glad that you are safe and well.’
His smile floored her, the deep dimple in his un-ruined cheek so very known.
‘Thank you, Lady Eleanor.’ He held up his injured hand. ‘Altered somewhat, but still alive.’
The manner of his address made her sway and she might have fallen had she not steadied herself on the back rest of the nearby sofa. His dark brown hair was lank and loose, the sheen she remembered there gone.
‘I heard you had been married to a lord in Scotland and now have a child. Your brother spoke of it. How old is your daughter?’
Terror reached out and gripped her, winding its claws into the danger of an answer.
Without hesitation she moved slightly and knocked her brother’s full glass of red wine from the table upon which it sat. The liquid spilled on to the cream carpet beneath, staining the wool like blood. The glass shattered into a thousand splinters as it bounced further against the parquet flooring.
Such an action broke all thought of answering Nicholas Bartlett’s question as her brother leapt forward.
‘Ellie, stay back or you will cut yourself.’
* * *
Ellie? The name seared into some part of Nicholas’s mind like a living flame. He knew this name well, but how could that be?
He shook his head and looked away. He knew Jacob’s sister only slightly. She had been so much younger than her brother when he was here last, a green girl recently introduced into society. But she had always been attractive.
Now she was a beauty, her dark hair pulled back in a style so severe it only enhanced the shape of her face and the vivid blueness of her eyes. Eyes that cut through him in a bruised anger. He knew she had spilt the wine on purpose for he had spent enough years with duplicity to know the difference between intention and accident.
He’d asked of the age of her daughter? Was there something wrong with the child, some problem that made the answer untenable to her?
Jacob