Chapter 20
Twenty
Sebastian returned home and handed his rain-damped greatcoat and hat into Joshua’s care, the man informing him that Lady Pemberthy and Mrs Ardingly awaited him in the sitting room.
How domestic; he could set his watch by them. Two o’clock in the afternoon was Tom’s reading lesson. Smiling, he went forwards with eager steps but checked on the threshold.
Mrs Ardingly sat at a small, square table by the window, where the watery light fell clear and bright. Across from her was her aunt. Tom sat with his back to the room, his feet barely touching the ground. And with them, the window behind him…was his father.
They were playing cards.
“Well. This is…charming.” He crossed the room towards them, cautious, slow, as though he feared to wake a lightly sleeping cat.
All four looked over. Mrs Ardingly smiled. So did his father.
“Join us, join us!” He was clean-shaven, and he was dressed, his coat several years out of date but neat enough. “Trying to teach the boy whist. Needs more than two to play, you see.”
He barely even sounded drunk, or no more than the thickening scars that drink had left in his voice.
But hope was a dangerous elixir. Sebastian had sipped it once or twice before, only to be poisoned to the marrow. Sometimes there were months when his father seemed reformed, but it never lasted. Never. And there hadn’t been any such months for a long time.
“I won’t interrupt your game.” He smiled lightly. He spoke lightly. Light, light as confectioner’s froth, as though none of this meant anything. It didn’t. By tonight, his father would be raving.
Lady Pemberthy let out a bemused puff of air.
“Take my cards, Lord Cotereigh! I’ve never had any head for these games of cleverness.
And that young rascal there has nearly taken my every penny.
” She put her cards on the table, face down, and stood.
“Take over my hand. See if you can win them back for me. I’ve better luck counting stitches than counting cards. ”
“Both are equally baffling to me,” he claimed politely. “But I will try my best.”
He took the vacated seat. Lady Pemberthy went to sit on the sofa nearby, rifling through her ever-present sewing bag. He lifted the cards with the edge of his thumb and fanned them in his hand. He’d always liked that sound—the rustle and snap of the cards.
He looked briefly at his father, who was frowning placidly at his own hand of cards. He looked at Mrs Ardingly and saw soft sympathy in her eyes. It stabbed a vulnerable spot. She saw. She knew the hope that would not die.
Her small smile was a reassuring hand laid on his wrist. He could almost feel it, warm through the layers of coat and shirt cuff.
He knew a man who claimed his mistress was the greatest friend he had on earth. She knew all his failings, he said, in the way a wife could never be allowed to.
The head of a family had to be a great many things. Weak wasn’t one of them.
What must that be like, to share everything with a woman? Not just your purse and your body, but your whole heart and mind too? All those shoddy, unfit, patched up parts you kept from the world, the way a poor man keeps his holed stockings hidden behind the carefully polished leather of his shoes.
Mrs Ardingly would be a redoubtable friend.
“Well?”
That was Tom, prompting him to play. The boy held his cards with greater avidity than Sebastian had seen in Watier’s when men’s entire fortunes were at stake.
“Don’t worry, sprat, I’ll win all those coins back.”
“It’s a penny a trick.”
“I believe I’m good for it.”
His father chuckled. A startling sound. Sebastian’s head jerked towards it, but he mustn’t stare…
He kept his attention on his cards, and they started to play.
An hour later, when his father started to get fractious and distracted, Sebastian helped him up the stairs.
To distract the boy and stop him begging the earl to stay for another game, he told him there was a present waiting for him in the hall.
The boy ran off, and Sebastian took his father’s arm on his.
“I’m all right, I’m all right,” the man protested.
“I know you are.”
Mrs Ardingly had tactfully quit the table and gone to admire her aunt’s handiwork. Sebastian escorted his father to his bedroom, talking of nothing much—the book he’d bought, who he’d dined with last night, the works at Woodhaven.
He was conscious of the letter tucked inside his coat, the folded paper thick against his chest. Was this the right time? Would there ever be a right time?
He supposed he was a coward. Or maybe he didn’t want to break the spell of this last hour. There was that stupid hope again, whispering in his brain. But his father’s hands were already shaking. Cards and company couldn’t fix this.
He handed his father over to his valet’s care. One last squeeze of the man’s arm, and then he went back down the stairs, packing away sentiment and the tightness in his throat with every step. The letter crinkled. He would put it in his study and then return to the ladies.
His mood shifted at that, eager to latch onto pleasanter thoughts. He went down the last stair, turned the corner towards his study, but there was a figure in the hallway, coming towards him.
He smiled wide. “Mrs Ardingly.”
Finally. Alone. The two of them.
Euphoria caught him in its grinning eddy. He took her elbow and pulled her into the nearest room, closing the door behind them with his other hand.
Her lips were parted in surprise, her eyes darted past him to the door, to the floor, to the space beyond his shoulder. Her focus settled on his hand where it still held her arm. Her lips flattened in disapproval.
Fake. Feigned. Not the whole truth of what she felt. The flush on her cheeks wasn’t anger. Neither was the rise and fall of her chest.
“This is my punishment, I suppose,” she said, “for seeking you out. I only wanted to know how your father was.”
“I know.” His thumb shifted on her arm. The smallest stroke. “But it has been a very long time since we were alone.”
Her eyes flashed to his, anger a transparent glass below which he saw much.
“We have no need to be alone.”
“Don’t we?”
No answer. She fixed her attention on the floor by his feet, standing very, very still. But he could feel the thump of her heart through the hold he had on her.
“My father sometimes has good days.” He would speak of this. It would keep her here longer. “In the past, there have been weeks where he has promised me he is entirely better. He never is. It never lasts.”
She gave a small nod, her stance softening now she was on safer ground.
Yes, she could talk of other people’s needs all day. But never her own.
Her shoulders relaxed a little, and she drew her arm free of his fingers, turning away.
The room they were in was very small. He only now properly realised where they were—his cloak room. Barely two yards across.
“I do know men, and women, who have managed to free themselves of this curse of drink,” she said.
“It isn’t easy. It seems to require complete abstinence.
” Her expression was gentle, but eager, coaxing.
“If he… If he was somewhere quiet, not in town, but a quiet house in the countryside, somewhere small enough that a couple of trusted servants could keep a close eye on him… He would need visitors of course, company. But dinners and parties would be best avoided. The first few months would be very hard. But it would get easier.”
“He has tried to stop. He cannot.” He wouldn’t let hope wriggle free. It was a flimsy butterfly. He held it pinned.
“I know it isn’t easy, but—”
“He doesn’t want to stop. Not really.”
The room seemed suddenly too small. Damnation. He should have just kissed her instead of starting on this. She might even have let him.
Crossing his arms, he leant back against the door.
The smile he found to fix to his face was small and hard.
“What he really wants, Mrs Ardingly, is to die. But it’s a sin to take your own life and he can’t risk not reaching heaven—my mother is waiting there, you see.
He has told me all this himself, many times. I was Tom’s age the first time.”
Ah. That was more than he’d meant to say. Little was more disgusting than self-pity.
Her gaze moved over his face, searching, as though he hadn’t already revealed more than enough.
“He has things to live for.”
You. That was what she meant.
He let out a breath, some bastard cousin to a laugh, and shook his head.
“I bought this house, you know, when I reached my majority. I’d been managing his finances for years by then.
I had our old London house sold and bought this one.
No memories here. A fresh start, where he could live with me, away from those ghost-ridden catacombs in Shropshire.
It didn’t work.” He tugged his shirt sleeves straight.
There were emeralds in his cuff buttons, dark as yew.
“So I bought a country house, down in Kent, thinking exactly like you did, that a small, quiet place might be the thing…close enough to London that I could keep an eye on things—my life, you understand, is in London. I need to be here.”
She said nothing, listening far too intently, as though his every word was falling into some deep, deep place; somewhere he could never get them back.
So why did he keep talking?
He dragged a hand along his jaw, looking hard at the dark folds of his greatcoat hanging on the hook opposite but seeing something entirely different.
“He almost burnt the place down that first month. Knocked the lamp over in his room, drunk. Fell asleep, drunk. Thank God his valet smelt the smoke—saved him, saved the house. Nothing works.”
She didn’t deserve his anger, but she met his hard voice unflinching.
“Nothing works, Mrs Ardingly. I have tried it all.”
He sank two fingers under the collar of his coat and pulled out the letter.
“This is from a solicitor. Advice to my father on how to divorce his wife. I’m prepared to taint our family with the scandal of divorce if it gets him free of that woman…
if it gets us free of the Taits. His guilt and his shame eat him alive.
He hates himself for marrying again when he loved my mother…
so…so if I can free him of that, perhaps… ”
He looked at the letter in his hand. Perhaps what? Nothing would change. If there had been a fire in this room, he would have cast the letter straight on it.
Then her voice came, quiet, but firm. “Getting yourself free of the Taits would be a very good move.”
He lifted his eyes from the letter, exposing himself to all the sympathy of her steady regard. She was merciless with it; her compassion a surgeon’s knife, cutting deep.
She took a step forward, and he watched her come, close enough that he could smell her, could feel the feather touch of her breath on his jaw.
She took the letter and tucked it back inside his coat, her fingers skating for a moment between the lining of coat and shirt.
Then she pressed her palm over where it lay hidden. Over his heart.
“Do it. Give him the letter and get him to do it. That guilt you speak of… When you have loved so deeply, promised yourself, and—” She broke off, a catch in her voice. His hand closed over hers.
She took a breath. “It will help him. To be free.”
She reached past him for the door, hand slipping out from under his.
“It’s torture,” she whispered as she left him, “feeling torn.”