Fred’s voice cracked as his glance took in Nick’s cheek and the bandage on his left hand holding the deep wound safe from further damage.
Twenty-five days at sea had not helped the healing. It ached so much he had taken to cradling it across his body, easing the pain and heat. He released it now and let it hang at his side, taking hope from the bare emotion of his friends even as his fingers throbbed in protest.
‘Thank the Lord you are returned.’ Oliver stepped towards him and wrapped his arms around all the damaged parts of his body. It had been such a very long time since someone had touched him like this that he stiffened. Then Fred was there and Jake, enveloping him so tight in an embrace he hardly knew where one of them stopped and another one started.
Safety. For the first time in years Nicholas took a breath that was not forced. Yet despite this, he himself reached out to none of them. Not yet. Not till it was over. Protecting each of them from harm was the only thing he now had left to offer.
He should not have come. He should not have been so selfish. He should have listened to his inner voice and stayed away until he knew where the danger had come from. But friendship held its own beacons and the hope of it had led him here, hurrying across the seas.
‘This unexpected reunion calls for a celebration.’ Fred spoke as he hauled Nicholas back into the private drawing room at the end of the corridor, the others following. A table set up for poker had been dismantled in the rush of their exit, the cards fallen and the chips scattered. Just that fact warmed him and when Oliver chose an unopened bottle from a cabinet in the corner and poured them each a drink, Nick took it gratefully.
He waited till the others filled their glasses and raised his own.
‘To friendship,’ he said simply.
‘To the future,’ Jake added.
‘May the truth of what has happened to you, Nicholas, hold us together,’ Fred’s words were serious and when Oliver smiled the warmth in his green eyes was overlaid by question.
The cognac was smooth, creamy and strong and unlike any home-brewed liquor Nick had become so adept at dispensing in the cheap bars of the east coast of the Americas. The kick in it took his breath away. The flavour of his youth, he thought, unappreciated and imbibed in copious amounts. Today he savoured it and let it slide off the back of his tongue.
When Jacob motioned to the others to sit Nick took his place at the head of the table. This was where he had always sat, his initials carved into the dark mahogany of the chair. The first finger of his right hand ran across the marking, the ridges beneath tracing his past.
‘We never erased anything of you, Nicholas. We always believed that you would be back. But why so long? Why leave it for so many years before returning?’ Jacob voiced just what he imagined the others were thinking.
‘I had amnesia. I could not remember who I was or where I had been. My memory only began to function again in the Americas five weeks ago after encountering a man who wanted me dead.’
‘He nearly succeeded by the looks of it.’
‘Nearly, but not quite. He came off worse.’
‘You killed him.’ The soldier in Fred asked this question and there was no room in his answer for lies.
‘I did.’
‘We found blood in the alley behind Vitium et Virtus the morning after you disappeared.’ Jacob stood at that and walked over to the mantel to dig into a gilded box. ‘This was found, too.’
His signet ring surprised him. He had always worn it, but had forgotten that he had. The burnished gold crest caught at the light above. Servire Populo. To serve the people. The irony in such a motto had been humorous to him once given his youthful overarching ability to only serve himself. Reaching out, he took the piece between his fingers, wincing at the dirt under his nails and the scars across his knuckles. He swallowed back the lump that was growing in his throat.
His old life offered back with such an easy grace.
‘I can’t remember what happened in the alley.’
‘What was the last thing you remember then? Before you disappeared?’
‘Arguing at Bromworth Manor with my uncle. It was hot and I was damnably drunk. It was my birthday, the fifteenth of August.’
‘You disappeared the next Saturday night then, a week later. That much at least we have established.’ Fred gave this information.
‘Did you know that your uncle has taken over the use of the Bromley title?’ Oliver leant back against the leather in his chair and raised his feet up on an engraved ottoman, his stance belying the tension in his voice. ‘He wants you declared dead legally, given the number of years you have been missing. He has begun the procedure.’
‘The bastard has the temerity to call himself your protector,’ Jacob snarled, ‘when all he wants is your inheritance and your estates.’
Nicholas took in the information with numbed indifference. Aaron Bartlett had never been easy but, as his late father’s only brother, he’d had the credentials to take over the guardianship of an eight-year-old orphan. Nicholas remembered the day his uncle had walked into Bromworth Manor a week after his parents’ death, both avarice and greed in his eyes.
‘He’s a charlatan and everyone knows it and I for one would love to be there when you throw him lock, stock and barrel out of your ancestral home.’ As Oliver said this the others nodded. ‘Do you think he had any part in your disappearance?’
Nicholas had wondered this himself, but without memory or proof he had no basis on which to found an opinion. Shrugging his shoulders, he finished the last of his cognac and was pleased when Jacob refilled the glass again.
He held the signet ring tight in his right hand, a small token of who he was and of what he had been. He did not want to place it on his finger again just yet because the wearing of it implied a different role and one he didn’t feel up to trying to fill. He had walked under many names in the Americas, but the shadow of his persona here was as foreign to him now as those other identities he had adopted.
Jacob and Fred each wore a wedding ring. That thought shocked him out of complacency and for the first time he asked his own question.
‘You are married?’
The smiles were broad and genuine, but it was Jacob who answered first.
‘You have been gone a long time, Nicholas, and dissoluteness takes some effort in maintaining. There comes a day when you look elsewhere for real happiness and each of us has found that. Oliver may well be wed soon, too.’
‘Then I am glad for it.’
And he was, he thought with relief. He was pleased for their newfound families, pleased that they had managed to move forward even if he had not. ‘Can I meet them? Your women?’
‘Tomorrow night.’ Fred said. ‘We have a function at my town house with all the trimmings and a guest list of about eighty. You look as though you could do with a careful introduction, Nick, and such a number would not be too daunting for a first foray back into English society.’
‘You will need the services of a barber and a physician before others
