A Secret Consequence For The Viscount

Nicholas Henry Stewart Bartlett.

Viscount Bromley.

A crest with a dragon on the dexter side and a horse on the sinister. Both in argent.

An estate in Essex.

Oliver. Frederick. Jacob.

The club of secrets.

Vitium et Virtus.

‘Hell.’ It all came tumbling back without any barriers. Flashes of honour, shame, disorder and excess after so very many years of nothing.

Tears welled, mixed with blood as the loss of who he now was melded against the sorrow of everything forgotten.

The young and dissolute London Lord with the world at his feet and a thousand hours of leisure and ease before him had been replaced by this person he had become, a life formed by years of endurance and hardship.

‘Nicholas Bartlett.’

He turned the name on his tongue and said it quietly into the night so he might hear it truly. The tinge of the Americas stretched long over the vowels in a cadence at odds with his English roots, though when he repeated it again he heard only the sorrow.

He searched back to the last memories held of that time, but could just think of being at Bromworth Manor in Essex with his uncle. Arguing yet again. After that there was nothing. He could not remember returning to London or getting on a ship to the Americas. He recalled pain somewhere and the vague sense of water. Perhaps he had been picked up by a boat, a stranger without memory and shanghaied aboard?

He knew he would not have disappeared willingly though his gambling debts had been rising as he had been drawn into the seedy halls of London where cheating was rife. There had been threats to pay up or else, but he had by and large managed to do so. His friends had been there to help him through the worst of the demands and he also had the club in Mayfair. A home. A family. A place that felt like his. He loved Jacob Huntingdon, Frederick Challenger and Oliver Gregory like the brothers he’d never had.

Shaking fingers touched the ache on his cheek near his right eye and came away with the sticky redness of oozing blood.

The eye felt strange and unfocused. The night was so dark he wondered if he had gone blind in that eye, a last gift from his pursuer. He shut the other one and tried to find an image, holding his fingers up against what little light there was on the water, and was relieved to see a blurry outline.

He did not feel up to walking back yet through the reeds and the river path to the shade of the cottonwoods. He didn’t want others to see him like this and he needed to make certain there were not more who would be trying to hurt him. A tiredness swept over everything, a grief at the loss of a life at his own hands. He had not killed before and the quickness of fear was now replaced by an ennui of guilt.

How could he ever fit in again? How could he be the lord he was supposed to be after this? Had his assailant held a family close? Had he been only doing a job he was sent to complete? The grey shadows in which he’d lived the last six years were things familiar. The sludgy silhouette of them, the blacks and whites of shining morality left as other men’s choices but not available to him. Twice before in America others had tried to kill him; different men in the pay of a shadowy enemy and the mastermind at pulling the strings.

* * *

He had used so many different names as he moved on for ever, away from discovery, fleeing relationships. In the end he only brought people harm and danger. If they got to know him they were always at risk and so he had not allowed such closeness. Twice before he had felt his stalkers near.

Emily. The young daughter of the kindly reverend and his wife who had taken him in had been pushed off a cliff top. The girl had survived by clinging to the undergrowth, but he had understood that after that for him there could never be intimacy with anyone.

New towns, different jobs and a series of women with favours for sale had followed. He did not seek out decent company again, but dwelt in the underworld of secrets, squalor and shallow rapport. He understood the people who were as brutalised and damaged as himself and there was safety in the shifting unsettled disconnection of outsiders.

Peter Kingston. His name now here in the river town of Richmond, the capital of the Colony and Dominion of Virginia. He could disappear tomorrow and nobody would miss him, the man employed at the tavern of Shockoe Bottom who seldom spoke and hardly ever smiled. Stranger. Foreigner. Outsider. Murderer now. Another name added to all the ones he had gathered. A further disengagement. A shadow who had walked through the Americas with barely a footprint. Until tonight. Until now. Until his hands had fastened around the throat of his pursuer and broken the life from him.

He leant over and was neatly sick into the green heart of some poison ivy.

Leaves of three, let them be.

The ditty came of its own accord as he wiped his mouth with the frayed edge of his jacket. Had he been truly regretful he might have laid his hand across the plant and allowed its penance. As it was he merely frowned at such an idea and stood.

He would gather his few possessions and find a ship to England. Frederick, Oliver and Jacob would help him to make sense of things and then he would leave London to retire to the country in Essex. Alone. It was the only way he could see before him.

As he looked back a fog bank slid by on the flat black current of the James.

Chapter One (#uc6f3cb2f-6692-534e-ae95-b650301180d6)

London—December 26th, 1818

It was one day past Christmas.

That thought made Nicolas smile. He had forgotten the celebration for so long in the Americas that the presence of it here in London was somehow comforting. A continued and familiar tradition, a belief that transcended all difficulty and promised hope for the likes of himself? Or would it tender despair? He could not imagine any church exonerating his sins should he be foolish enough to confess them.

The age-old music of carols could be heard as he left the narrow service alley behind the club of Vitium et Virtus in Mayfair and came around to the front door. Here the only sound was that of laughter and frivolity, a card game underway, he guessed, in the downstairs salon. High stakes and well funded. The few coins he had left in his own pocket felt paltry and he wondered for the millionth time whether he should have come at all.

The late afternoon lengthened the shadows. He could slip away still, undetected, and make his way north. Boxing Day kept most people at home enjoying the company of family. There would be few around to note his progress.

He swallowed as he looked up and saw the sky was stained in red. Blood red. Guilt red. A celestial nod to his culpability or a pardon written in colour?

Digging into his pocket, he found a silver shilling.

‘Heads I stay and tails I go.’ It was all he could think of at this moment, a choice that was arbitrary and random. The coin turned and as it came down into his opened palm the face of George the Third was easily visible. The thought crossed his mind that had it been tails he would have tried for the best of three.

His knuckles were against the main door before he knew it, the polished black lacquer of the portal attesting to great care and attention and a certain understated wealth.

When it opened a big man he did not know stood there, dressed in the clothes of a footman, but with the visage of one who knew his intrinsic worth.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

Nicholas could feel the condescension. His clothes from the long voyage were dirty and they had not been well looked after. His beard was full and his hair uncut. He was glad there was no looking glass inside the door to reflect his image over and over again.

‘Are any of the lords who own this place present inside this evening?’

He tried to round his vowels and sound at least halfway convincing. It would not take much for the man to bid those who guarded the front door to throw him out. He knew there was desperation in his eyes.

‘They are, sir.’

‘Could you show me through to them?’

‘Indeed, sir. But may I take your hat and coat first and could you give me your name?’

‘Bromley. They will know me.’

‘If you would just wait here, sir.’ The footman snagged Nick’s attire across a series of wooden pegs carved into the shape of a man’s sexual parts inside the front door. The sheer overtness of the furnishings shocked him now, where once it had not.

A further confusion. Another way in which he had changed. He swallowed and as dryness filled his mouth he wished he’d thought to bring his brandy flask.

Then there was the sound of chairs scraping against the floor and the rush of feet, a door flung back against its hinges and three faces he knew like his own before him. Astonished. Disbelieving.