One Illicit Night. Sophia James
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 Bassingstoke! 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 almost 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