One Ilicit Night

by Sophia James

  ‘Cristo Wellingham is the most handsome man to ever grace London, I swear it, and he dresses in clothes that have come straight from Paris. Did you ever meet him when you were there all those years ago, Lainie? I doubt that you could have missed him.’

  Eleanor froze, the lost night in the winter of 1825 leaving her momentarily speechless.

  ‘Oh, she was far too busy with me, Sophie.’ Martin easily deflected the conversation and pretended to look more than hurt when the girls laughed.

  ‘We know that you are her heart’s desire, Uncle Martin,’ Margaret teased, ‘but can’t a girl at least look?’

  Leaning over, Eleanor took her husband’s hand in her own, liking the warmth and familiarity. ‘Your nieces are young and frivolous and their shallow measure of a man’s worth is a testimony to that fact.’

  ‘How cruel you are, Lainie.’ Sophie’s tone was soft. ‘But your insult must also apply to the other young ladies who were at the Brownes’ last night.’

  ‘When is this demigod next in circulation?’ Martin’s question was threaded with humour.

  ‘Tonight. There is a large gathering at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. A comedy by James Planche is showing and it is supposed to be very good.’

  ‘Perhaps we should go?’ Martin’s voice sounded stronger than it had in a while, but Eleanor began to shake her head, a vague disquiet building behind her smile. Something was wrong, she was sure of it, and yet she could not put her finger on just exactly what it was.

  ‘Please, Eleanor. It has been ages since we all went out and if Martin feels up to it?’

  ‘Of course! Our box has been severely neglected of late, and I am sure your mother would also enjoy the outing, Sophie.’

  Cristo watched the rain from the window of his house overlooking Hyde Park. Summer rain slanting across the green grass blurred the paths that crossed the common.

  He lifted the brandy he had brought with him from Paris and took a liberal swig straight from the bottle. His brothers would be here soon and he would need all the succour he could muster. He wished he could have cared less than he did about what it was they might say to him, but the wildness of his youth had alienated him entirely and they had probably been as happy as his father to know he was leaving England. His father’s first letter to find him when he eventually reached Paris had made certain he understood that returning to the family fold was not an option. The memory still hurt, but he shoved it aside. He could help none of it and what was done, was done.

  Only masquerade. Only deception. England and its airs and expectations made him take another good mouthful of brandy and then another. He should not have come back, but ten years on foreign soil felt like a lifetime and the soft green heart of England had called to him even in his dreams.

  ‘Would you be wanting your black cloak, or your dark blue one this evening, my lord?’

  Milne, his butler, held a cape on either arm.

  ‘The black, I think. And don’t wait up for me tonight, for I shall be late.’

  ‘You said the same yesterday, my lord. And the night before that.’

  Cristo smiled. Milne’s frailty worried him, but the old man had too much pride to just take the substantial amount of money that Cristo had tried to give him and retire. Paris had aged him, too. Just one more blame resting upon his shoulders with the shady dealings in the Chateau Giraudon, sordid repayment for Milne’s devotion and loyalty and belief. In him.

  It was a relief to leave it all behind.

  ‘My brothers should be here within the hour. If you could show them up.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  ‘And if you could ask the housekeeper to prepare tea.’

  ‘Yes, my lord.’

  He placed the bottle of brandy on his desk inside a cabinet and closed the doors. Alcohol was one of the factors in his lengthy estrangement and he did not wish for the evidence to be anywhere on show. Tea seemed an acceptable substitute.

  The cravat at his throat felt as restrictive as the dark blue waistcoat lying over his crisp white shirt and the new tight boots hurt his heels.

  ‘Asher Wellingham, the Duke of Carisbrook, my lord,’ Milne announced, ‘and his brother, Lord Taris Wellingham.’

  Cristo stood as the two men walked into the room, a scar that ran under Taris’s left eye giving the first cause for concern, though Cristo showed no evidence of it as he waited for speech. Asher and Taris looked older and harder. Neither smiled.

  ‘So you are back.’ Ashe had never been a man to beat around the bush.

  ‘It seems that I am.’ Cristo didn’t care for the cautiousness he heard so plainly in his words, but the distance between them was measured in a lot more than the few feet of his library floor.

  ‘You have blatantly ignored our many efforts to stay in touch with you,’ Ashe reminded him. ‘Over the years the notes you sent back indicated you held no fondness at all for the name of Wellingham or indeed for us. Yet here you are.’ Each word held a sharp undercurrent of blame.

  ‘Are you well?’ Taris spoke now, a note in the question that unexpectedly tipped Cristo off balance.

  ‘Very.’ Even in the many skirmishes of Paris his heart had not beaten so fast.

  Asher looked around the room, taking in the lack of ornamentation, he supposed. Or of belongings! Taris’s glance, on the other hand, never wavered once.

  ‘Alice always hoped you would return.’ Ashe again. The barb tore at Cristo’s composure and he looked away.

  Alice! The only mother he had ever known. Damn them. He felt the hand in his pocket grip the skin on his thigh. Damn England and damn family. Damn the hope that had never been extinguished, even in the most terrible of times.

  ‘As it seems you are here to stay, I have arranged your introduction back into society and the family fold in the guise of a theatre visit. With a lot of darkness and distraction we should at least look as if we enjoy being a family and if this is going to work at all, appearances matter.’

  Ashe’s irony was so very easily heard.

  Cristo nodded, not trusting himself with more. He had left England vowing never to return, his wild ways at Cambridge inflaming loyalties and stretching the already-frayed love of his family. He had never fitted in, never dovetailed into the strict and rigid codes his father had laid down and when everything had finally unravelled after Nigel Bracewell-Lowen had died in the cemetery in the village near his home, Cristo’s father had been the first to tell him that he was not a true Wellingham, or a legitimate son of Falder.

  Cristo swallowed back the bile of remembrance as he remembered his father’s final tirade. Ashborne had dallied with a French woman on his travels, a small meaningless tryst he had said that was ‘ill-advised, wrong-headed, inappropriate and more than foolish’. The words still had the power to hurt even all these years later, for what did one say to a parent so condemning of his very conception and of the woman who had birthed him?

  The other side of the coin had also held damage. Alice, his stepmother, had taken him in at Falder and loved him like her own and if a whisper of his true parentage was ever mentioned he had not heard of it. The three-month-old Cristo de Caviglione had become a Wellingham, his name written into the family Bible by Alice’s very hand. She had told him that much later when the tensions between him and his father had resulted in the truth being thrown in his face and she had hurried to London to plead with Cristo to stay.

  Love and anger entwined in deceit, and now a different duplicity. Cristo hated the beaded sweat on his upper lip as his oldest brother outlined his plans for the evening.

  ‘Our wives shall also be accompanying us to the theatre.’ The tone Asher used was so very English.

  Emerald Seaton and Beatrice-Maude Bassing-stoke! Cristo had kept up with the family gossip while in Paris and the two women were by all accounts as formidable as his brothers. He wished suddenly that he might have had a formidable woman at his side, too, dismissing the thought with a shake of his head.

  ‘There are bridges
to cross if you are to gain acceptance here, given the wild ways of your youth and of your questionable exploits in Paris.’ Taris tilted his eyebrows in a way that gave the impression of searching.

  ‘I quite understand,’ Cristo answered quickly. A public place would ensure distance and formality, the baser emotions of blame and redress submerged beneath the need for ‘face’. Years and years of an upbringing that revered the word ‘proper’ would at least see to that. It was a relief.

  The tea that his housekeeper bustled in with seemed a long way from the good idea that he had initially thought it, and her rosy smiling face was the antithesis of all expressions in the library.

  When she left he was glad, the plumes of steam from the teapot and the three china cups and saucers beside it little harbingers of a life that he had left and lost, a very long time ago.

  Ashe was already showing signs of retreat. ‘Then we will see you tonight.’

  ‘You will.’

  ‘At half-past seven.’

  ‘On the dot.’

  Taris raised the black ebony cane he held towards the teapot. The dimpled silver ball on the end of it glimmered in the light. ‘I’d like a cup.’

  ‘It’s tea, Taris.’ Ashe’s explanation was given quietly.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You don’t damn well drink the stuff.’

  Cristo watched as Taris brought out a hip flask from his jacket pocket and unscrewed the top. ‘I just asked for a cup.’

  Merde. Cristo remembered his brothers’ banter with an ache. Many years younger, he had never really been a part of such 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 al most 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.

  Chapter Five

  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.

  Cristo walked into the Theatre Royal Haymarket, late. He had
missed the first gathering, he knew, but Milne had caught his foot on a corner of the carpet and the physician had been called to make certain that nothing was broken.

  One night, he thought, to scotch the rumours of a Wellingham family feud and then that would be the end to it. One night to mingle and smile and then he would be left alone to pursue what it was he needed from England.

  Peace.

  Solitude.

  A place to breathe without the fear of a knife in his back or a secret around the next corner!

  As he pushed aside the curtains of the family box, the darkness kept him still whilst his eyes became accustomed to the lack of light. After a moment he could see his brothers and the seat they had left between them.

  For him.

  He slipped in without apology and acknowledged Asher to his left. Three women sat in a tight row in front, one dark-haired, one blonde and one… Lucinda. She turned to gaze at him with eyes that had not changed one bit in ten years and blew him a kiss.

  He could not help but smile at her joie de vivre.

  Across the theatre in the boxes at the same level he saw others watching, their eyes barely glancing at the comedy on the stage. Below, too, a good deal of the patrons looked up.

  The prodigal son or the black sheep? Cristo was pleased Milne had made such a fuss with his clothes, the frock and waistcoat he wore of the highest quality. Criticise me at your peril, they seemed to say, and as he adjusted his cravat he caught the eye of the dark-haired woman sitting directly in front of Taris. She did not smile or move, yet he felt a rapport that was unmistakable. Beatrice-Maude Wellingham, his middle brother’s wife. A woman of substance and intelligence and pure, clear wit! He had read her writings in the London Home and admired her views. She looked away as he failed to and he felt himself tense. When the lights came up again for the interval, he was pleased to stand and stretch.

  Lucinda, his sister, was the first at his side.

  ‘You are long overdue, Cristo, and it is said that you are looking for a place to stand your bevy of bloodstock. I have heard that the Graveson property is on the market for the first time in a century. Perhaps that would do.’