‘So does silence.’
At that she laughed, because thus far since meeting him again she had voiced her opinion without reserve. He made her talk again. He made her take risks.
He was quickly catching on to the rhythm of the dance and manoeuvred her easily about the room despite the number of others on the floor. She could feel hardness in his body where before there had been softness. He smelt of lemon soap and cleanliness, the lack of any other perfume refreshing.
At five foot six she was quite tall for a woman. With him she felt almost tiny, her head fitting easily into the space beneath his chin. Breathing him in, she allowed him to lead her, closing her eyes for a second just to feel what she once had at the Bromley town house the night before his disappearance. The night Lucy was conceived.
She had sent Lucy away today, back to Millbrook, just so that as a mother she might understand the road she must now travel.
Towards him or away? The quick squeeze of his fingers against hers brought her eyes up to his own, an emotion there she could not interpret.
‘A lack of memory is a hard taskmaster,’ he whispered, ‘because sometimes I imagine...’ He stopped.
‘What? What do you imagine?’
‘That I have danced with you before.’
She looked away and hated the lump that had formed in the back of her throat.
The night lights of the city had glowed through the large sashed windows of his town house as he had taken her into his arms and danced her to his bed.
Please remember, she thought. Please remember and love me. Then Mr Dromorne’s face at the side of the floor came into view, watching with eyes that held no warmth whatsoever and as the music ran down into the final notes Nicholas escorted her back to her brother.
She did not see him again that evening, but knew he had gone into the card room because the whispers of his luck there began to float into the salon.
An hour later when Rose pleaded tiredness, Eleanor was more than grateful to accompany her home.
* * *
Nicholas sat with a whisky in his room and listened to the clock strike the hour of five. The fire in the grate was still ablaze for he had fed it for all the small hours of the early morning with the coal piled near the hearth in a shining copper holder.
Eleanor Huntingdon was asleep somewhere in the house and close. He wished they could talk again. He wished he could see her smile and hear her clever honest words.
He had paid off Dromorne with a good percentage of his takings so that was one creditor he no longer had to worry about. His skill at cards had risen directly with the practice he’d had in the Americas.
The basic strategy of the games had become like second nature to him, the running number of points holding little difficulty. He could count down a single deck to zero within ten seconds in order to know exactly where his edge lay.
A dubious talent and one that told others much about the life he had lived in the interim. He had seen Jacob and Frederick watching him with questions in their eyes. He was only glad that Jacob’s sister had retired early because this acquired skill was not attractive.
He would need to leave for Bromworth Manor soon. That thought had him swallowing more of his whisky and standing to look out of the window.
The orderliness of London was what had struck him first on his return. The neat lines of houses and the straight roads. The lights added to the illusion that the city went on for ever, stretching from east to west in a long and unbroken tableau. Virginia and Georgia and the Carolinas had been wild and lonely places. Sometimes he had walked between settlements for a week or more and seen no one.
Tonight he had panicked badly in that room of Frederick’s with almost a hundred people in it and Eleanor had noticed and helped him. If she had not been there he wondered what might have happened. If she had not led him to that secluded room, he had no faith in thinking he would have coped.
He did not trust himself any more to act accordingly, to function here, to blend in with thetonwhilst he tried to understand just who it was here who meant him harm.
If it was his uncle then it would be easy to negate any danger, but Eleanor’s question had set his mind running in other directions.
‘You think it is another?’
His father’s brother might have the motivation to see him dead in England, but he doubted the man had the drive or the contacts to send someone after him to the Americas. If it was not him, then it would need to be an enemy with a good deal of money to spare and a large axe to grind. He could think of any number of past acquaintances who might have fitted that bill given his debauched behaviour as a young viscount of means.
His sins were returning to roost. If he could only remember his missing week, he thought, he might know the perpetrator, but not one drip of recall had come through the solid curtain of mist.
He needed to sleep to be focused on his journey later that day and yet he did not seek his bed. Rather he stood and watched the moon and the sky and the cold gleam of freshly falling snow on the roadway in front of the Westmoor town house, his isolation making him shiver.
