by Jane Lark
He poured another glass of brandy as Harry laughed when the woman he’d held stood up. Henry slapped her backside in a careless gesture, then held his hand out for her to pull him up and lead him to a room upstairs.
He threw Henry a smile. Henry tossed him a smirk. He was not jealous. He was merely… in pain.
Lord, he longed for that sense of carelessness that Harry still lived within. Nothing had worried him. Nothing had disturbed his thoughts. That was why he’d slept with these women, because there had been no need to consider past or future. That was why he had loved to pierce his silent thoughts with shocks of dramatic recklessness.
Now his thoughts would not bloody-well shut up, and the emotions… To care came at a cost. A burden of bitter tasting feelings that were ripping him apart.
“I am seeking Lord Henry Marlow. I was told he is here. Have you seen him?”
Bloody hell! Henry immediately stood and swayed. He looked across the room towards the door leading into the front hall. The room swayed too.
His father!
“And Harry Marlow, is he here?” Uncle Edward was with his father.
“And Peter Sparks…” And Lord Sparks was keeping them company!
What was wrong with them?
What was wrong? His mother… One of the family…
Henry strode across the room, some of the liquor clearing from his head with a sudden rush of adrenaline although it did not stop him walking a little askew. “What is it? What has happened?”
“As if you care…” His father stated. “I have come to take you back to London, there are people waiting for you there. A respectable woman, the daughter of my friend.”
Henry’s brow scrunched in confusion. His father had come to drag him out of brothels before, but not since he’d left Oxford.
“Harry!” Edward yelled across the room his eyes looking beyond Henry.
Henry looked back at Harry, the liquor stealing his balance a little as the room swayed again. Harry had heard. He’d been half way up the stairs. He said something to the woman then let go of her, and turned to come back downstairs, leaving her there. He jogged down the stairs in a very Harry like way. Harry was the epitome of uncaring.
Henry looked back around and smiled at his father’s small group.
Harry walked past Henry, more steady than Henry was and growled in a low voice at Edward, “Go away.”
They were Henry’s sentiments exactly. He smiled at his father particularly, probably in a drunken manner.
“I am not a boy to be dragged out of brothels anymore,” Harry continued.
“You ought to be in the barracks.”
“I shall be, by six, and no one gives a damn where I am until then. Oddly enough I am a man and able to manage my time and my life without your oversight, Papa. Go away.”
“Henry.”
Henry faced the diatribe awaiting him in his father’s expression.
“My sentiments are Harry’s, go away.” Henry swayed again when he spoke, as the liquor he’d only recently drunk poured into his veins to join the effects of the rest of the liquor he’d drunk tonight.
His father grasped his arm. “You were supposed to spend this time with your family, for Sarah’s debut and with Alethea—clearly you have forgotten the promises you made.”
“I attended their balls and I have not forgotten, believe me.” Of course he had not forgotten. How could he damned-well forget? He’d attended Alethea’s and Susan’s ball and found his eyes, his awareness and his soul constantly drawn to the wrong sister. Then at his sister’s ball he’d ceased arguing with his urges and acted upon them and kissed the wrong sister, who had then expressed her judgement of his error by leaving him standing in a bloody street quite obviously alone in his obsession. And his obsession had not abated! Of course he remembered. He remembered and cared!
His father’s glare intensified.
“Please go away, Papa, I have no idea why you thought coming here would benefit anyone.” Henry would have turned away but Lord Sparks gripped his arm before he could.
“Where is Peter?”
“In bed, enjoying the sport I should imagine.”
“As I will be any moment if you go away, Papa,” Harry added looking at Edward.
“Damn you, Harry.”
Lord Sparks let Henry go.
“Goodnight, Father. Enjoy your journey home.” Harry turned away and walked back across the room, to return to his bird of paradise. Henry turned, his gaze following Harry’s retreat. “Good evening to you too Uncle; Lord Sparks!” Harry called without looking back. But then Harry stopped and turned around, holding the attention of every man and woman in the room. “Oh. Shall I tell Peter you were looking for him? I am happy to, if you like, Lord Sparks?”
The judgement of the liquor lifted Henry’s lips into a smile. He looked back at his father’s group.
Lord Sparks’s face had twisted in a bitter expression, and he’d turned a deep pink. He did not look amused by Harry’s comment. In fact, he looked as though he was considering going upstairs, thrusting open every door and when he found Peter, dragging him out of whichever bed he was in.
Henry’s smile widened, because the thought of Peter’s father dragging him from a whore’s bed was amusing. Peter was a grown man. They were all men. Yet their fathers seemed to constantly struggle with that fact.
“And you, Henry…” his father said. “You began this from what I have heard, even though you had obligations in town. Is there a woman upstairs?”
His father’s image blurred. Obligations… He hated that bloody word. And of course the implication his father made was that he was breaking his obligation to Alethea by bedding another woman.
“My obligations…” Henry slurred. Obligations that had been created for him from the day he was born. Obligations that had not been his choice, and were no longer his preference. Obligations that he had been tricked into through his entire bloody childhood. How could he have known as a child—when he had not refused his father’s or Uncle Casper’s desire for him to wed Alethea—that there were emotions to be discovered that would defy obligations, sense and morality. He had been a child—how had he been supposed to know that he should say no?
He stepped back, to lean on to a table, only when he leant back he caught the round table at the wrong angle, lost his balance, and fell, like a heavy sack of wheat. He’d become a drunkard, but he did not care. He would rather that liquor claimed him, flowing through his blood, it silenced the fighting going on his head. A fight between obligation and desire.
“Harry!” Henry heard Edward shout. “Tell us which hotel Henry is staying in?”
“The King’s! They are all there!” Harry called.
~
Henry woke with a hammer thumping against the inside of his skull. The devil. He rolled on to his side. His stomach spun with nausea. The room charmingly smelt of vomit.
He opened his eyes.
His father sat in a chair facing him. Henry was no longer at the brothel but in his bedchamber in the hotel, and on the floor beside the bed was a soiled chamber pot. He had cast up his accounts since returning here, and he could not remember how he had returned.
It was only his father in the room, his uncle and Lord Sparks were not here.
“Have you any idea what a mess you appear?” his father stated.
Henry did not particularly care, except it did not feel good to think that his father had been taking care of him while he’d puked up the brandy he’d imbibed in his desire to get lost in a world of delirium.
“May we not be rid of that chamber pot, if you do not wish me to be ill again?” Henry groaned.
“I have a mind to leave it there, if only to make you ill again. It may teach you a lesson. You have never learned anything from me, neither from what I have said, nor what I have done.”
Henry rolled on to his back, and his arm lifted, so the back of his hand lay on his brow. Bloody-hell, he felt like death.
His father stood and went across to p
ull the cord. “When the maid comes, I will ask her to bring you something to eat. Eating will settle your stomach.”
Henry doubted it.
“There is water beside you.”
Henry looked across to see a clear glass jug, with an empty glass beside it. He sat up. His brain rolled forward in his skull, crying out against the movement. His stomach lurched. Damn. He should not have drunk so much, and yet the oblivion had felt good while it had lasted.
His father came back and poured water from the jug into the glass. “Here.” He handed it to Henry. His father was still angry, his movements were stiff and his voice low and bitter. There was a stern conversation to come. A conversation Henry did not care to have.
Henry sat up a little farther and took a gulp of the water. His stomach lurched again.
“Sip it.” his father ordered, before turning away.
Heat flooded Henry’s face; embarrassment and guilt slapping him. He was ashamed that his father had needed to look after him it made him feel like a damned child.
A knock struck the door. “Lord Marlow?”
“Come in!” his father called.
“Oh. I’m sorry, sir.” The maid stepped back startled. She had obviously not realised Henry had been joined by his father. Until this moment she had been giving Henry the eye his entire stay. He had probably shared his bed with her in the past, he did not remember her face, but that would not have been abnormal if a maid was willing. The thought kicked him sharply in the gut and set the nausea spinning once more. He sipped the water.
“Please take the chamber pot.” His father pointed to it. “Then bring up some bread and cheese.”
She bobbed a curtsy at his father, then picked up the chamber pot, and threw a smile at Henry, out of sight of his father, before bobbing another curtsy. Then she left with the soiled pot.
His father walked over to the window, with his back to Henry, as Henry sat up straight and turned so he sat on the edge of the bed. His head thumped.
His father leant and rested his hands on the windowsill, with his head down, in an expression of defeat. “You invited Alethea to town,” he said without lifting his head. “And then deserted her. Do you know how ill that looks? Do you realise how that impacts upon me?”
His father straightened suddenly and turned to look at Henry. “And damn it, this sounds like a conversation my father had with me when I was younger than you, and in pain because your mother had rejected me. But I do not wish to push you away, I only wish you to see sense. When will you grow out of this recklessness? When will you care what others think and feel?”
Henry cared what Susan thought. He feared what Susan thought. “I care.”
“Then you show it poorly. The way you act bears no impression of it.”
Henry grimaced. He was not in the right temper for this.
“Do not make a face at me. You are becoming an embarrassment. You must know it. Casper has made some bitter comments to me in these last days. You are destroying my friendship when I am naught to do with your foolish acts and self-centered nature. I have tried, Henry, by God, I have tried to make you see sense. I have failed. I thought this summer, when you invited Alethea to town that your accident had encouraged you to grow up and change your ways; then I hear you have challenged the others to a race again, on a whim. Why?”
Because I needed to escape. “Because I felt like it.” He’d never cared to hear his father’s opinion when he was in an oppressive mood.
“Reckless; as I said. Uncaring; as I said.” His father walked closer, with quick strides.
Henry stood, so his father could not lean over him, and wave a damning finger as he’d done when Henry had been a boy—Henry was not being regressed.
“I am tired of this Henry! Grow up!”
“I am grown. It is just that you do not recognise it, and come and drag me out of brothels as though I am a youth still.”
“Because you cannot behave like a grown man,” his father growled before Henry’s face.
Oh, no. He could. He could behave too much like a grown man; that was his issue. But the charge of recklessness was true.
Why the hell did I kiss Susan? He might have stayed in town and pretended all was right if he had not. He need not have—
“Alethea will not wait forever. I was at a ball which she attended last evening. Do you think she sat out all the dances, awaiting your return? No. Of course she did not. She danced every one.”
There was a pause as though his father assumed Henry might express a horrified reaction to the news. None was forthcoming. He knew very well that Alethea would meet other men and he did not care if Alethea found another man to propose to her, it would be simpler if she did. It meant that his guilt would at some point subside.
But whether Susan might ever be persuaded to relinquish her sense of loyalty—
“The Earl of Stourton sends her flowers, did you know that? Casper told me so very proudly last evening.”
Henry sighed. He had not known about the flowers. He did now. As Uncle Casper had intended.
“Alethea and Susan are making a grand impression in town, and you… You leave. You will lose her.”
Susan was making an impression…
What impression had she made? “Did Susan dance every dance too?”
“Yes. But do not think that it means that Alethea was not particularly popular, only that Susan is also popular.”
Henry shut his eyes as the words jabbed at his ribs. Damn!
He sipped the water to give him time to compose himself.
His father turned away and paced across the room, then turned back and stood still, his hands clasping behind his back, as he stared at Henry. “Do you care?”
Henry said nothing.
“I mean do you care for her?”
He had known the question his father was asking. “I like her… and you know I asked her to come to London to see if it might become more than like,” and I have discovered a burning hunger for her sister—a thirst that is so fierce I cannot imagine that it will ever be quenched. But he still liked Alethea, only it was no more than that.
“Casper and I have hoped for a union between you since the moment she was born.”
“I know, Papa. It has been forced down my throat since the moment she was born.” Henry had no patience for this talk; or his father’s cursed dreams.
“You have always been willing…” His father’s pitch was deep and serious. “Are you no longer willing?”
“I have not said that.” He had not said anything, he could not form the words that would tear the two families apart and destroy his father’s hopes. He was not as recklessness nor as selfish as they thought.
Damn it, what might he be saying now, though, if Susan had come to him? What might have happened next?
The words inside him were a constant running waterfall of desire, guilt—fear and hope. That was why he’d come away from town. Not to run, but to deal with this riot of emotion. It was a melee of feelings storming at each other. He had been managing it with a daily substantial dose of liquor since he’d arrived here.
“You have embarrassed me.” His father repeated in a blunt low tone, that hinted at the emotion beneath the statement. His father rarely showed his emotion, he hid it behind a habitual mocking expression. “The whole of London will learn that you are here, when you have Alethea there.” He paused for an instant and swallowed. “And damn I sound far too much like your grandfather.” He looked up at the ceiling, as though asking for Divine help. Then looked back at Henry.
“I have been you. I have drunk myself stupid, gambled and acted irresponsibly, my father sent me abroad so I would not be an embarrassment to him. I have always regretted that I cut myself off. He died before I returned.” He sighed, then in a lower softer voice, said, “Perhaps this is justice, that I have such a son in return. But I will not cut you off.”
Henry said nothing. What was there to be said?
His father sighed again. “I do not wish yo
u to feel forced to take Alethea. That would not work for either of you. I married your mother for love, you ought—”
“I know—”
“If there is no feeling there, then perhaps we should simply make it clear to her and Casper that you are unable to fulfil our hopes. I know he only wishes Alethea happy too, he would rather that than you were forced.”
“I do not feel forced, Papa.” Only confused. But if he was going to back out of their arrangement then Alethea ought to be the first to know; not his father.
“Then when the hell will you accept some responsibility, and cease this behaviour?”
Henry put down the glass, then his hand lifted so his fingers could rub his temple. “When I do not have a thumping bloody headache. Must you shout?”
His father stared at him. “Will you come back to London with me?”
To face the mess he had made of things… “Yes.” He had to face it at some point, he could not hide from it forever.
There was a knock on the door, his father walked over and opened it, then held it open. It was a footman with a table for them to eat at and the maid with the meal his father had ordered.
“What am I to do to get through to you?” His father asked as they sat down to eat.
“Nothing, Papa, I must get through to myself. I am certain no one else will achieve it…”
“Am I to give up on you then and wait for Percy to leave university?”
“Have no hope of Percy, he is as bad as me and you know it,” Henry said as he spread butter on the fresh deliciously sweet scented bread, that had suddenly made his appetite roar.
“Then perhaps I should wait for your younger brothers, perhaps Stephen will step up to the mark.”
Henry looked up. “Except that he looks up to Percy as Percy has always looked up to me.”
“Then I shall separate Gerard and William from the three of you, so they cannot be tarnished. I shall move them to a different school where they will not hear of your antics and never let them home when you three are there, and they’ll attend Cambridge not Oxford. There, so now the situation is resolved.” It was said with his father’s usual note of satire. He would not do it.
Henry smiled. “You have good odds, with five sons, that at least one of us will meet your expectations. Perhaps William as the last will be the best of us all.”
