Page 22 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
The very feeling calmed him and made him lighter. For the first time ever he felt he was following in the footsteps of his beloved father.
The land held an ancient history, carried down by the centuries, of planting and nurturing. Perhaps it was the same with people? The rain, the soil, the forests, the hills. They were imprinted within him, known and familiar, a part of his understanding in the translation of life.
In the Americas it had all been so foreign. Different seas and rivers and plants. Foreign languages and foods that he had no understanding of or liking for.
The codes for being a Bromley had been ripped out of him, forgotten, lost in violence and circumstance. Here, the pattern reformed and carried on, the smells of the place, the sounds, the shadows and the light.
A comradeship. A rightness.
He picked up the cheese knife and looked at the crested end of it.Servire Populo. For the first time ever he understood exactly what it meant.
* * *
Much later he walked down to the small graveyard behind the ruined chapel, the stones of commemoration ill kept and unweeded.
He found his parents’ graves side by side in one corner, the late winter sun still upon them, and he was glad for it.
His fingers traced the words that he knew by heart. Their names. The dates of their births and deaths. The epitaph was short. Chosen by his uncle, he guessed, and conveying little.
Until we meet again.
The words made him smile as he imagined his father with his hands around the throat of his brother in an eternal celestial retribution when he arrived at the heavenly gates for judgement.
Placing the wildflowers he had gathered on his mother’s stone, he bowed his head.
Today he felt closer to them than he had felt in years.
‘I will become a better man.’ The words were out before he knew them said, slipping into the breeze, though when his good hand dug into his pocket to try to banish the cold he felt the hard outline of a set of dice. His injured hand ached with the effort of lifting Bartlett, but it was worth it.
People arrived at the place they were meant to be even if they came with a past. It was how life worked. But the past did not have to define one just as the present did not. The future was his, here in Essex, in the ancient seat of the Bromleys. It was his to nurture, grow and tend to.
Hope filled him. For Bromworth, for a new direction, for his friends and their support.
For Eleanor Huntingdon.
That name had him tensing. They barely knew one another, but she was there none the less in his mind, her smile, the way she spoke, the vivid blue of her eyes and the dark of her hair.
He would like to show her this estate. He would like to walk with her and tell her all that had happened to him, as a child, as a youth, as a man, so that she might know of the darkness inside him.
Of all the people in the world he thought she would be the one to understand.
* * *
Eleanor sat in the library at the Westmoor town house, stitching a complex tapestry of colourful nasturtiums, although her heart was not in it.
At every noise outside she stopped to listen, every sound of horses and carriage, every call of a night bird or the far-off ringing of bells.
Her brother and Rose had gone to a play at the Royal Coburg Theatre, but she knew Nicholas Bartlett was expected back from Essex tonight. She hoped it might be when the others were absent for she wanted to speak with him privately and make him an offer.
An offer.Even the words sounded impossibly difficult.
Placing down her stitching, she pulled back the fabric of her bodice and lifted up the gold chain that she always wore around her neck. The small ring brought a smile to her lips as her fingers closed about it.
Blue zircon had a charm more captivating than the sophisticated diamonds which it sometimes imitated.
They had found it in a jewellery shop in Piccadilly on the day they had visited Lackington, Allen & Co. and Nicholas had purchased the trinket because the colour matched her eyes exactly.
‘Like blue starlight,’ he had said and she’d laughed, because of the fancy and daydream.
