repartee, no matter how much he had wanted it.
Reopening the cupboard door, he raised two crystal glasses from the green baize beside a new bottle and placed the lot down before them. ‘Help yourselves.’
‘You won’t join us?’ Ashe again.
‘I try to ration myself these days.’
‘Ashborne would be pleased to know of it.’
The mention of their father fell bitter between them, the past knitting uneasily into a growing silence.
‘I doubt he would care much either way, actually.’
His meaning settled on his brothers’ faces as a question and he wished he might have taken such bitterness back, the sheer anger in his words giving away much more than he had wanted.
‘Perhaps you did not know that he left this world calling your name?’ Ashe’s expression held all the indignation that his ducal title afforded him.
‘A death-bed wish for clemency is such an easy request given he could barely stand my company in life.’ Cristo had recovered his equilibrium, though Taris began to speak with a great deal of emotion.
‘With the reputation you have garnered in Paris, perhaps he was right to send you away. The Carisbrook title is an old and venerable one after all, and it needs each and every one of us who bear it to bring it proudly through the next decades.’
An argument that might hold more weight were I a true Wellingham.
Cristo almost said it, almost blurted the sentence out with little thought for consequence, raw anger still holding the power to hurt. But the memory of Alice stopped him.
Better to smile, the illusion of a family tied in blood and ancestry and one unbroken line of history more palatable than the other face. His brothers’ dark hair shone in the lamplight, like a stamp of belonging, or a badge of title. So very simple if you only knew where to look! His own reflection in the polished mirror made him turn away, the silvered fairness belonging to a different lineage altogether.
Gulping back the last of his brandy Taris poured himself another, the clock on the mantel chiming the hour of three. ‘So you are home for good, then?’
‘It’s my plan.’
‘How did you lose your finger?’ Ashe’s interest was almost dispassionate—a conversation topic as mundane as the weather or the happenings at the last ball.
‘On a ship after leaving England. My opponent came off worse.’
‘Rumour has it that a good many of your opponents have “come off worse,” as you put it.’
‘Rumour is inclined to favour exaggeration.’
‘One false step back here and society will crucify you.’ Asher’s voice held a hard edge of warning. ‘In Paris the extremes of human behaviour might well be tolerated. Here you won’t have that luxury, and I won’t stand idly by and watch you squander the Wellingham name. Neither will Taris.’
Now they were coming to it. No more vague innuendo or ill-defined familial congeniality. His careless past had caught up with him and the gloves were off.
‘I did not come home for that.’
‘Then why did you come?’
For a moment Cristo thought to lie. To merely smile through it all, and just lie, but here in the heart of England he found that he could not.
‘I came back in order to live.’
Neither of his brothers answered him and he felt the muscle along the side of his jaw ripple as he held his silence.
‘God.’ Ashe swore and then swore again as the sun broke through the clouds outside, flooding the room with light. Taris looked up into it, holding his left hand to his face in a peculiar movement, the line of his fingers open to the warmth.
‘Lucinda sends you her love,’ he said as he lowered his arm.
His sister.
‘Did she marry?’
‘No. She is adamant about remaining a spinster.’
‘Quite a choice.’
‘The same could be said of your preferences.’
Ashe collected his gloves and hat from the chair beside him and Cristo stood when they did, pleased that in the years between then and now that he had grown a good two inches taller than either of them. He shook their hands as a stranger might, vaguely aware of the crest of the Carisbrooks engraved into the heavy gold of his oldest brother’s ducal ring.
‘We will see you this evening, then.’
‘Indeed.’
He watched as they followed Milne out of the room and when the door shut sat on the arm of the sofa and balanced there, neither standing nor sitting. The day darkened as he continued to look out of the window, listening to the bells of some church mark off the hours and the occasional shout of English voices from the streets outside.
Home.
The smell of it all was different. Softer. Greener. Known.
I came back in order to live! The idea of it spun untrammelled in the corners of his memory and the secrets that he held marked his heart with blackness.
Eleanor did not wish to go out that night; the wind had heightened, tossing the clouds around the sky, and a homely fire in the front parlour beckoned.
Still, with the arrangements made and Sophie and Margaret speaking of nothing else all afternoon, she felt trapped into it.
The gown she wore was of sapphire-blue silk, the pelisse having a chenille fringe skirt and a ruffled underskirt in cream. She had had the dress made the previous summer, but the style had not yet slipped from fashion and she enjoyed wearing the garment. On her wrist she wore a pearl bracelet and at her neck a matching strand that had been her mother’s. Her hair had been fashioned with corkscrewed curls around her face, the length braided and pinned at the back.
All in all she thought she looked passable, the colour of her eyes deepened by the shade in the dress, though the same disquiet that had visited her earlier had returned again.
She breathed out hard, chastising herself for worrying. She was twenty-three years old and the catastrophe that might have been her life had settled into a pattern that was … comfortable. Her family was safe and happy, she kept good health and lived in a discreet neighbourhood.
She needed nothing more, so when the tiny worm of denial flared she stomped on it hard. ‘Nothing,’ she said and made certain that she had change in her reticule and a handkerchief should she need it before leaving the quiet of her chamber to join the others downstairs.
