Page 58 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
Chapter Twelve
Eleanor had watched Nicholas Bartlett leave the Westmoor town house, his hat in hand and a heavy coat shrugged on in the winter chill of the night. She had been waiting for him to go ever since she had said goodnight to Lucy, not to hail or shout to, but just to observe.
He’d looked tired, his fingers threading through the hair at his temple, and she thought of the headaches he had told her of.
His hand was again cradled over his chest in the way he always held it if he thought no one was looking. Jacob had said the wound was substantial. A blade, he had intimated, that had cut the flesh to the bone.
The same blade that had glanced his cheek, perhaps? She wondered whether he would go home tonight as it was still early or whether he would head out again to enjoy the frivolity of the London night life.
If she knew exactly what it was she wanted from him, she would have run after him or waited downstairs to catch him as he left. But she did not even know that.
She had badly miscalculated the effects of being so secretive. Lucy did deserve to know him and Nicholas also needed to understand what had happened between them all those years ago so that he might make a decision based on facts.
The wine from dinner now sat in her stomach, souring her mood. The start of another year and here she was, in the place she had been for the past six of them, worrying again about her future and caught in a limbo.
Well, it would not do at all. She would go and see Nicholas Bartlett and explain her reasoning for such a subterfuge. Fear. Uncertainty. Years of making decisions about her and Lucy’s life that had been entirely her domain.
Eleanor wondered whether the shock of understanding that he was indeed Lucy’s father might have jogged other memories.
The heat of summer. The gauzy thin layers of cotton sheeting on his bed. The sound of her heartbeat as he had leaned down to take one nipple in his mouth.
Her breast rose even now at the memory and she castigated herself for being so shallow, so very bent on the sensual. Last time she had let her heart rule and not her head and look what had happened.
She would go and see Viscount Bromley in the morning before anyone here realised she was gone and she would lay her cards on the table with as much honesty as she might muster. She hoped that it would be enough.
* * *
On arriving home Nick went straight to his library to pour himself a straight whisky. The shock of Lucy’s parentage added to the attack in the carriage had left him shaken and exhausted and he needed to understand just how much of a threat these assailants could be to Eleanor and his daughter, let alone to him. This uncertainty needed to end. He needed now to reclaim his own life, all of it, so that the past and the present could lead to a future that was decent and sustainable.
So he spent the rest of the evening sifting through names on the list that he and the others had drawn up in Vitium et Virtus. He wrote down every single thing he remembered about the two attackers he had met tonight.
Both had carried weapons and had been dark haired. He’d scratched the first assailant on his cheek and the mark would undoubtedly last a while before it disappeared. If he could find this man before that happened...
But how?
Looking through the names, he kept returning to Bowles and Wilshire. Taking another page of paper, he drew a line down the centre and scrawled a list of any interaction he had ever had with either man. Bowles was the one who seemed to have more of a motive to hate him and yet Nick could not imagine why he would want to pay assailants over so many years to try to see him dead.
Unless...
What was it Eleanor had said of him?There is something frightening about him.
The incident at Vitium et Virtus had shown him that, the maid Bowles had hurt with his small sharp knife shaking in fear and pain. What might have happened if he had not chanced upon the pair when he did? Could Nash Bowles have taken things even further? If he had been hanging around the club, perhaps the others might have noticed other situations that were similar?
Nick’s head was starting to ache with all the possibilities and he leaned back against the soft leather and watched the fire.
Flame had always calmed him. He’d spent a month in a cold, hard-floored jail outside New York after being accused of cheating in a card game by a man who was later found dead. It was winter and he had nearly frozen to death by the time they let him out, the charges dropped altogether when witnesses to the murder and the actual culprit had come forward.
After that he had gone into the wilderness and built a fire at his campsite every night right through to the springtime.
Taking a sip of his whisky, he felt the warmth of it slide downwards as the clock on the mantel chimed the hour of three.
Another thought struck him. At Bullock’s Museum the other day when he had met David Wilshire, the man had informed him that Nash Bowles had not forgiven him, a fact alluding to strong feelings especially after six years of absence.
Why would that be? Surely Bowles would have realised his actions at Vitium et Virtus were despicable at the least and moved on?
Outside the moon passed behind a cloud and the room darkened. Nicholas seldom sat up at night with a light on, save for that of the fire. Years of hiding had taught him the shadows were safer places in which to dwell and to be hidden.
He wished Eleanor were here to talk to for only with her did his sadness lift and disperse and he yearned to know more of the little daughter that they had made together.
