her room and opened her book. She had already poured herself a glass of wine and had a slice of the apple pie the cook had made that night for dinner beside it. Everything she needed right there. Outside it was cold, the first snows of winter on the ground. Inside a fire roared in the hearth, the sound of it comforting.
She seldom came to the city, but she had journeyed down to be with her family in the autumn and had decided to stay for the Christmas celebrations, the food and the decorations—things that Lucy needed in her life. She would leave tomorrow with her daughter for Millbrook House, the ancestral estate of the Westmoor dukedom in Middlesex. Her home now. The place she loved the most in all the world.
Opening her book, she began to read about the new varieties of roses, a plant she enjoyed and grew there in the sheltered courtyard gardens. She could hear her brother’s voice from the downstairs library more distinctly now. He must have opened the door that led into the passageway and his quiet burr filled the distance.
She stopped reading and looked up, tilting her head against the silence. The other voice sounded vaguely familiar, but she could not quite place its tone. It was not Frederick Challenger or Oliver Gregory, she knew that, but there was a familiarity there that was surprising. The click of a door shutting banished any sound back into the faraway distance, but still she felt anxious.
She was missing something. Something important. Placing the book on her small table, she stood and picked up the glass of wine, walking to the window and pulling back the curtains to look out over the roadway.
No stranger’s carriage stood before the house so perhaps the newcomer had come home in her brother’s conveyance from Mayfair, for she knew Jacob had been to his club.
Her eyes strayed to the clock. It was well after ten. Still early enough in London terms for an outing, but late for a private visitor on a cold and rainy evening. She stopped herself from instructing her maid to go down and enquire as to the name of the caller. This hesitancy also worried her for usually she would have no such qualms in doing such a thing.
A tremor of concern passed through her body, making her hands shake. She was twenty-four years old and the last six difficult years had fashioned such strength and independence that she now had no time for the timidity she was consumed with. If she was worried she needed to go downstairs herself and understand just where her anxieties lay.
But still she did not move as she finished her wine in a long and single swallow and poured herself another.
There was danger afoot for both herself and Lucy.
That horrible thought made her swear out loud, something she most rarely did. Cursing again under her breath, she took a decent swallow of the next glass of wine and then placed it on the mantel. The fire beneath burnt hot. She could see the red sparks of flame against the back of the chimney flaring into life and then dying out.
Soldiers.
Ralph, Jacob and herself had played games in winter with them for all the young years of their life. Her hand went to her mouth to try to contain the grief her oldest brother’s death had left her with. With reverence she recited the same prayer she always did when she thought of him.
‘And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds...’
It was a snippet from one of the verses of Thessalonians, but the image of her and her brothers rising whole into the sky was a lovely one. Lucy would be there, of course, and Rose and Grandmama, as well, and all the other people that she loved.
She was not particularly religious, but she did believe in something—in God, she supposed, and Jesus and the Holy Family with their goodness. How else could she have got through her trials otherwise?
She was sick of her thoughts tonight, fed up with their constant return to him.
That damn voice was still there in her mind, too, changing itself into the tones of the man she had loved above all else and then lost.
The hidden name. The unuttered father. Although she knew Jacob suspected she had told their father, she had never told anyone at all exactly what had happened to her, because sometimes she could barely understand it herself.
For a moment she breathed in deeply to try to stop the tears that were pooling in her eyes. She would not cry, not tonight with a fire, a good book, some apple pie and French wine.
Her life had taken on some sort of pattern that felt right and she loved her daughter with all her heart.
The door downstairs was ajar again and the voices came more clearly than they had before. Her brother sounded perturbed, angry even, and she stood still to listen, opening her own door so that the words would be formed with more precision.
‘You cannot possibly think that we will not help you. All of us. There is no damn way in the world that I will let you go and fight this by yourself.’
‘But it is dangerous, Jake. If anything were to happen to you and your family...’
The room began to spin around Eleanor, in a terrifying and dizzying spiral. There was no up and down, only the vortex of a weightless imbalance pulling at her throat and her heart and her soul.
Nicholas Bartlett. It was his voice, lost for all these years. To her and to Lucy. To Jacob and Frederick and Oliver. Why was he down there?
He had not come to see her? He had not beaten down her door in the rush of reunion? He had not called her name from the bottom of the stairs again and again as he had stormed up to find her before taking her into his arms and kissing her as he had done once? Relentlessly. Passionately. Without thought for anyone or anything.
He had sat with her brother discussing his own needs for all the evening. Quietly. Civilly.
Perhaps he did not know she was here, but even that implied a lack of enquiring on his behalf. The man she remembered would have asked her brother immediately as to her whereabouts and moved heaven and earth to find her.
She nodded her head in order to underline such a truth.
Her own heart was beating so fast and strong she could see the motion of it beneath the thick woollen bodice of her blue-wool gown. Eleanor wondered if she might simply perish with the shock of it before she ever saw him.
Sitting down, she took a deep breath, placing her head in her hands and closing her eyes.
She needed to calm herself. This was the moment she had dreamed about for years and years and it was not supposed to be anything like this. She should be running down the stairs calling his name, joy in her voice and delight in her eyes.
Instead she stood and found her white wrap to wind it tightly about her shoulders because, whether she wanted to admit it or not, there had been a hesitancy and a withdrawal between them on the last night they had been together.
He’d seen her off, of course, in his carriage, but he had not acted then like a man who was desperate for her company.
‘Thank you, Eleanor.’ He had said that as he’d moved back and away from the kiss she had tried to give him, as if relieved for the space, his glance sliding to the ground.
He had not even stayed to watch her as the conveyance had departed, the emptiness reflected in her own feelings of dread.
So now, here,
