Page 20 of A Secret Consequence for the Viscount
Chapter Five
Bromworth Manor was exactly as he remembered, the dark trees that ran along the drive towards it as forbidding as they always had been with their twisted limbs and branches.
The family seat stood proud before a wooded hill overlooking an ornamental lake. Built for defence in the early fourteenth century, the remains of a moat and drawbridge could still be seen to one side, the stonework on this part of the building cruder and darker than its paler, more modern counterpart.
After the onset of the Palladian style a different profile had arisen around the fortress that was more beautiful and substantial. With its pale stone, large rounded windows and double-storeyed wings, Bromworth held the semblance of grandeur, history and wealth.
His direct ancestors had lived here for hundreds of years. It was an estate that spoke of family and celebrations as well as defeats and tragedy. He remembered some of the portraits that lined the walls in the lower hall with a smile. Lovers, soldiers, keepers of the law were displayed there, each Viscount and his family afforded a position in the marching changes of history.
His own visage had not been recorded. He had been very young when his parents had died and later, when a portrait might have been commissioned, he’d wanted little to do with the place at all.
He remembered the local chaplain coming with one of the women from the church in the nearest village, their faces strained in concern as their words tumbled out, banishing his parents to another realm. A quick and final malady that had come on late one night while they were from home and left them both dead by the next. No hope to it. He was an orphan now with a guardian in the form of an uncle he barely knew.
At eight he had had a hard time of imagining the concept of ‘for ever lost’ though it had soon started to impress itself on all the various strands of his life and he had rebelled against his new punitive reality with every fibre of his being.
The first loss was the hardest, but there had been so many more since then. He was wearing Jacob’s boots and Frederick’s clothes and the winnings left over from yesterday’s card game was the only money in his pocket. Oliver had lent him a carriage and driver for the journey to Essex.
He’d become a jigsaw of other people’s lives, the hard, distant core of him hidden from everyone. A man alone and struggling with it.
The front portal creaked open before he had knocked and old Ramsey the butler stood there, his face showing a number of emotions before settling into a smile.
‘Lord Bromley.’ The man’s mouth worked as he tried to say other things, but could not. In the end the servant stepped forward and grabbed his hand, the tight warmth in the shake reassuring. ‘I cannot believe it is you, my lord. After all this time you are finally come home.’
‘Is Mr Bartlett in, Ramsey?’
‘He calls himself Lord Bromley now, my lord.’ That was given with a worried glance. ‘He believes you dead.’
‘Where is he?’
‘In bed, I should imagine. He rarely rises before the noon hour and it is not yet that.’
‘Can you take me to him?’
‘With pleasure, my lord.’
The man waved away a younger servant who stood behind him, stuck out his chest and walked to the large and winding staircase. ‘He has your old suite of rooms, Lord Bromley.’
As they went Nicholas saw many of the paintings that lined the stairway had been changed. Dark, sombre strangers now peered down at him. After he tossed his uncle out of Bromworth Manor these would be the next things to go.
The bedchamber was dull and muted, the curtains not yet drawn. Without glancing at the bed, Nick crossed to the windows and threw the shades back. The light fell on the man resting against his pillows, older now, but still as mean spirited and bad tempered as he always had been, his face suffused by a number of changing emotions.
‘You. But you are dead.’
‘Not quite, Uncle, though I imagine you to have had some say in the fact that I nearly was.’
‘Some say? Says who?’ Aaron Bartlett threw his head back and frowned as he pushed back the covers. Both cheeks were aflame with rosacea and his jowls had markedly thickened. He looked nothing at all like his brother.
‘Those who hit me in the back alley of Vitium et Virtus mentioned your name. They said it was you who had sent them.’ It was a lie, of course, as Nick had no memory of any of it, but his friends had told him the story of the pool of blood and the retrieval of his signet ring so he took the gamble. ‘You wanted the Bromley inheritances enough to kill for them.’
The man opposite him had his feet to the floor now and sat. The shake in his hands could be seen easily even at this distance across the room. In his white nightgown he looked both a pathetic figure and a powerless one. For the first time he also looked frightened.
‘The men I sent to the alley were paid to merely scare you off. You cannot prove I meant to kill you. No court in the land would try me on that. You were out of control with your gambling and I was trying to stop you from ruining everything.’
‘After encouraging me in it for all the years before?’
‘The Bromley fortune, whilst rich, was not limitless and you rarely won after the first few flushes.’
‘So you sent assassins after me to the Americas in order to keep what was left?’
